Who Is Going To Win This Time?

Overstimulation: In common between movies and competitive sports

As a child, I spent substantial amount of time in the local library, but I also played sports; soccer, when I had anyone to play with, and ping-pong in the winter. Soccer, eventually won out, because it had nine months out of 12 open, and I hated the stench of sweat in gyms, anyway. I never aspired to become a pro, but I played whenever I could, for the simple joy of the game. As the years passed, I became better and better to the point that I couldn’t find anyone to beat me one-on-one after I reached 16 even when the adversaries included national-eleven players and two selects for the world’s best eleven.

At 19, I went to a second-division team for a tryout. Without much of an effort, I scored 16 goals, which made me accepted. The bad part was that nobody on the team ever talked to me again, which bears strict resemblance to my academic career where (after winning a national award and earning two doctoral degrees, although I never even used my titles), after exchanging only a few words with me, my colleagues were afraid of me in their “professional” fields (and I never wanted to be a boss or even “famous”) and envied me for my personal life that had nothing in it to be jealous about, but they didn’t know and probably would not have cared, even if they had known.

My courting with becoming a full-time soccer player took place around the time, when movies became unnecessarily violent and bloody (around 1980). I immediately realized that the entertainment industry had switched full-steam to over-stimulation, which I didn’t care for.

In sports, I never used a performance-enhancing drug. In fact, it took me several years to conclude that the tiny difference it would take to be the best at just about anything would require consuming chemicals that probably don’t do much good to the person in the long run. I was probably the only one not using, but my reaction time was 0.1 second and I was incredibly fast and deceptive, so even those who wanted to intentionally harm me, usually landed a few yards away from me on the grass.

After a couple of years, I was asked if I wanted to go full pro. I looked around, only to see “teammates,” who didn’t even talk to me and wouldn’t pass the ball to me, and when they talked to each other, it was all about showing off with their conquests the previous night. Talking about girls like that alone turned my stomach, and having no one to talk to added to the load.

Nonetheless, I had to decide: did I want to make a truckload of money, but take drugs and put up with the morons around me for another 20 years or live my own life.

I opted for the latter.

After that, I always warned young people about dopping and the necessity of taking unpredictable, if not immediately harmful chemicals, if they were hell-bent on success.

I still remember a European soccer championship match sometime in the past 20 years, where otherwise usually nice Dutch players went wild with their pupils fully dilated, trying to kick the living daylight out of their opponents, who reciprocated likewise. Both teams ended the game with eight players, probably only because if the ref had sent anyone else off the field, the match would have had been stopped, because by the rules, each team in soccer has to muster at least eight out of the standard eleven players.

Apparently, over-stimulation had become not only fashionable, but also necessary well beyond the range of the movie theater.

“Smart drugs,” anyone?

***

Fast forwarding to 2021, competitive sports became a scene, where hundreds of athletes started rolling over and even dying in the middle of a game.

769 athletes collapse between March, 2021 and March, 2022

Officially, they suffered heart attacks, because they couldn’t tolerate the sound of the referee’s whistle or some of them plainly died of SADS (“Sudden Adult Death Syndrome”), whatever that is supposed to mean. They all had one thing in common: they wanted to keep playing, so they accepted an injection with unannounced ingredients and with no manufacturer’s liability.

The objective of the game has changed.

Who is going to win?