A brunette playing some sport

I hate watching sport. It’s kinda boring — let’s be honest — to watch other people performing tasks of no practical value, like running after a ball of different sizes and colors.

I have always looked with some concern and little curiosity to sport fanatics: they remind me of religious ones. In both cases, they are ready to die and eventually to kill for the sake of their silly beliefs. They both spend hours attending lengthy and repetitive events or rituals. They both have empathy only for those wearing garments of specific colors. And they both have no reasonable way to explain you why a team, a player, a deity is to be preferred to any other one.

Who cares if your team wins, who cares if your god is greater, your prophet smarter, your virgin Mary purer. Sport and religion are possibly ways to give a meaning to scarce intelligence and lazy ineptitude.

She was a brunette

She was a brunette. And I was looking at her exercising in the school gym. This has been my only exception to the general rule of not-to-watch someone practicing any kind of sport. Actually, you may well imagine, I was not at all interested in any specific activity that the brunette girl was doing, but rather I liked just to sit there and look at her jumping and running around. I was fourteen, she was one year older: we never spoke.

In some way, that girl from my memories of almost a quarter-of-a-century ago, looked like the Serbian tennis player Ana Ivanovic: the same hair style, the same jaw, and those sad eyes.