Found in my drafts.

I was going through my iPhone this morning, deleting a bunch of dead, unused apps and downloads, getting ready to switch to a 16Pro after Christmas, and I came across a 2011 document in my Notes app that feels like it must have been a draft for either an old Blunt Instrument column or maybe the sports column that I was writing for The Bulletin back then.

I have no memory of writing it and it does seem to end abruptly. At a guess, I’d wager I probably thumb-typed it out on a plane going somewhere. I was curious what ChatGPT’s image generator would make of it:

What is it about golfers and tennis players that makes them so special? You know. In their own minds. Their vast, echoing, utterly silent minds.

Because that's what it must be like inside these guys' noggins given the hysterics we the punters have to put with from them when somebody so much as clears their throat, or murmurs to a neighbor asking to pass the pre-opened fizzy drink, or the packet of jaffas, because, of course we couldn't have their precious backswing put off by the ppffft of a ring pull or the hearty crunch of an honest potato chip in the stands or the gallery. In fact, better make sure you suck those Jaffas. That thin, brittle shell of colored sugar could put a top seeded player right off his game if you bit into it too noisily.

I mean, come on, you ever walked within a couple of miles of a cricket ground during a big game? Even a test match, the more somnolent form of the sport, can produce a roaring vortex of sound not a little like sticking your head into one of Qantas's jet engine just before it explosively re-engineers itself at twenty-thousand feet. Do you imagine that a batsman facing up to a top flight spinner on a crumbling last day pitch, with two runs to win and nine wickets down, do you really imagine he needs to concentrate any less than some hacker on the back nine at a second rate golf tournament? And yet one does his job in a furious maelstrom of crowd noise, while the other becomes a quivering and tangled ganglion of neuroses if the Cone of Silence isn't deployed on his behalf.

It raises an interesting prospect, don't you think? Of making some of the more library-like 'quiet' sports play under the conditions obtaining at an AFL grand final, while maybe making some the gruntier, crunchier sports compulsory Shoosh Zones.

There's just something really eerie about the idea of watching a brutal, bone cracking nine round heavy weight bout fought out in front of a huge audience but in total silence, with only the fighters blows, and breathing and cries of pain and rage amplified and broadcast over the arena. Same deal with a game of international rugby. While the roar the crowd-beast is an integral part of, say, a Bledisloe match, there's an uncomfortable and even perverse pleasure to be had contemplating the unalloyed sound of two forward packs smashing together like tectonic plates of muscles and bone in silence.

I guess that's probably not going to happen any time soon, but it does put into perspective the whiny, suck-tooth attitude of certain sports when it comes to controlling the environment in which they're played.

Perhaps modern training aids could be employed. With all the major video game consoles now offering motion capture and some popular titles like Tiger Woods golfing franchise coming with options for online multiplayer, we have the option easing these overly sensitive professionals into this brave new world. I can totally see the benefits of Tiger, for instance, playing his own computer game on XBox Live while a small gallery of foul mouthed trolls and spotty teenaged boys withouts girlfriends pays out on him via chat. It could harden him up. Really toughen his game for when he steps out onto the fairway to tee off in front a transplanted rugby league crowd. Or even better, a couple of thousand rioting soccer fans. If he can keep his head and make a twenty metro putt when flaming plastic chairs are rainin down all around him he should have no problemo keeping his mind on the game and out of the pants of the cocktail waitress delivering his Mai tai at the 19th Hole