Championship

And here I am in Nizhny - sigh - Veliky Novgorod - my brother-floorball player is playing (perverted sound notation). I’m a so-so sports commentator, I’ll just say that, apparently, Leo Tolstoy wrote about this - it’s hard to imagine that clubs click and sneakers creak according to some coaching requirement, Kutuzov’s decree. Parents, for their part, believe that the guttural instructions (“Why?”, “Okay!”, “Hold,” “Lead,” the universal “Come on” and, especially loudly, “Kirill!”) and already hoarse support (“Lee-der-task! Lee-der-task!” and “Forward, Okkh-kher-vil!”) are heeded by their poor children, who in fact have long been deaf from tension and play. After all, even the judges have only a whistle and a shortened sign language, the tip of it, as a means of communication. In general, as you might have guessed, sports competitions do not interest me; I indulge in my dreams. I will only describe the exquisite pose in which three floorball players stand when a player from the opposing team takes a corner kick - it looks like an old staged photograph or a silent scene in a Japanese theater. I was especially touched by how the boy, who knelt down and extended his hockey stick, covered the child’s face with a child’s hand with a learned movement. Imagine also how deftly the black knee socks fit the curves of the calves and how the young judge, with light pinches, adjusts the purple shorts on his protruding butt. It is also worth noting that all these rolling the ball from corner to corner reminded me of a pleasant truth: philology is far from the most meaningless thing on earth. Meanwhile, I thought that sports and ostentatious patriotism have something in common - all these flags, shouts, all these numbered uniforms. And it’s true that if the state supports any kind of culture, it is physical culture. The only good thing is that five (out of a dozen or so) boys sitting in front of me on the podium had pink sneakers. Some of them cry into their T-shirts when they lose. Finally, I will say that in the Novgorod arena they demanded to wear masks, but in the sports center they did not. But I’m tired of writing, and there’s a penalty shootout, so we’ll end it with this.

May 12, 2022