Australian rules football - footy - is the national obsession here. AFL, the Australian Football League, is analogous to the NFL in the US with it's own monopoly on franchises, royalties, and random drug testing. The AFL is also very glamorous, grabbing the headlines weekly with doings like "Mad Monday binge ends with man's skull crushed." Ah, those crazy kids.
It's arch rival is rugby, the key organization being the National Rugby League, or NRL. Rugby players can be distinguised by a) no neck from running into each other flat out using their heads as primary protection for the rest of their bodies; and 2) "Duh?" being their wittiest response when they have the unfortunate luck of being put in front of a TV camera. Observe:
But it's been almost a year since I arrived here in Australia for the first time and wrote about sports in Australia. Now I'm even in a footy tipping competition, which is sorta like a football pool in the US only way more organized. So there I am in a field of 3 dozen participants where I've twice won for picking the most winners in any week, much to the chagrin of the Aussies here.Sure, Rupert Murdoch may have gotten the Dow Jones empire but I've got footy locked up. So there!
- Farmer Ted
1 comment:
Hi,
you can recover from AFL - I played it for years as a child/teenager, and followed it almost religiously - but then I recovered - now I blog instead :)
Cheers, Andrew
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