Yesterday some friends of ours had to cancel a planned get-together due to illness, and so with our suddenly and unexpectedly open schedule we went to see a nearby roller derby game, our first one ever. We had serendipitously learned that it was happening earlier in the week and had been disappointed to realise that it clashed with our pre-existing plans, so when the opportunity presented itself to go after all, we seized it. We went in not really knowing what to expect, only roughly familiarising ourselves with the rules the night before, and ended up having a really good time. The sport is not huge here, the league is small and games in our home town seem to happen pretty infrequently, but we'll definitely try to attend future ones.
Pretty much every aspect of the event had a very strong grass-roots, low-budget, DIY, punky volunteer community kind of aesthetic. It took place a school gymnasium, entry to the game was donation-based, and there was a pay-what-you-can/want bake sale kind of event on site as well to provide snacks. Unsurprisingly, I really enjoyed this aspect of things. What was however surprising to me, though, was that I actually genuinely got caught up in the game, and found myself invested in the outcome and excited to watch things unfold. It would be difficult to overstate just how far out of my previous experience this was. I am pretty darn confident that I could count the total number of live sports events I have witnessed in my adult life on my fingers and probably have an entire hand spare. The only reason I'm qualifying that statement with "pretty darn confident" and "probably" rather than making an absolutely certain claim is that I'm well aware that organised/team sports of any kind have always been just so entirely uninteresting to me that it's extremely plausible I have completely and utterly forgotten about some events that happenstance may have taken me to.
What I've written so far I guess might leave some of you wondering why on Earth we went in the first place, generally not being sporty types and also not even knowing the rules of the game before hand. It wasn't a completely arbitrary decision; my wife can and does enjoy both roller- and ice-skating, although she hasn't done a lot of either in a very long time, but recently went to a local roller-disco event with some friends. She is squarely alone in this. I tried ice-skating as a teenager, was completely and utterly miserable at it, have never tried it since and would presumably be even more likely to hurt myself if I tried it again today. We do also enjoy watching figure skating sometimes (I don't really personally think of this as "watching sport" - okay, it's an athletic undertaking and there's a scoring system, but somehow it doesn't really feel like the same kind of thing as team sports, maybe because of the heavy artistic component?). So there was some kind of prior grounds to expect this might appeal.
The very minimal expectations I brought to the game were informed by what little I'd absorbed via cultural osmosis from the American incarnation of the sport. Apparently in Europe there is much less of an emphasis on the costume side of things. Nobody was in tutus or fishnets here, all the players were dressed quite practically for sports. They did all have carefully chosen punny "derby names", though, which I'm glad for because I do enjoy a good pun. They rarely seemed to skew anywhere near as far into obscene territory as seems to be in the norm in the US though, but then maybe those kind of names are just over-reported and not ubiquitous even there?
Anyway, not much more to say. Lots of fun, will definitely do it again. Continuing to enjoy experimenting with new ways to spend time offline.