Tags
American perspective, Baby Smith, Dallas Cowboys, St. Louis Cardinals, Texas Rangers, USA Expats
Hello Chroniclers!
It’s officially fall, one of our favorite times of year! Not for Halloween or for the return of the Pumpkin Spice Latte. No! It’s baseball time! It’s time when the baseball playoffs begin, and both our teams made the playoffs this year.
Unfortunately, both of our teams lost in the first round, and we’re just now getting over the shock of it. We thought we would take this opportunity to share about what watching sports is like over here in the UK.
Libby and I both love baseball, but baseball is not the only sport we love. Back in the states, we would watch football (American football, that is…), baseball… heck, I’d even make Libby watch basketball every once in a while. The thing is, we grew up watching sports. Libby can tell you who played second base for the St. Louis Cardinals during the 2006 World Series (the 2011 World Series is not something we discuss in this household). Within minutes of meeting her father, you would always know: a) he was a baseball fan, and b) that the National League was the better league. I can remember going to our church for the Super Bowl, moving the altar aside, and setting up a big screen TV so we can watch the Dallas Cowboys win. Libby played sports in high school. I played varsity in several sports, even playing in university. The point is, sports and watching sports has always been a huge part of our day to day lives.
It wasn’t intuitive to us when we moved here, but moving to England and the six hour time difference associated with it brings some unique challenges to being a sports fan. The first thing you should know is that we can never watch a night game live… ever. If a game starts at 7:00 in the evening, that means it’s starting a 1:00am for us. That means we‘re constantly watching the game the next day. I pray for an afternoon game.
A game is nowhere near as exciting if you know the score ahead of time. It takes the anticipation of the swing of the bat or the breath before the ball caroms off the rim or finds the bottom of the net. To preserve these moments, we go to some lengths to make sure that the surprise isn’t ruined. We avoid Facebook. In fact, we avoid all internet, because you never know what might spoil the game. You have no idea how hard it is to avoid all internet. For example, I was in the midst of starting up the recording of the Rugby World Cup finals I had taped a few hours earlier when I received the news alert from my CNN app showing the final score. All joy… gone. Not only do you have to avoid technology, but we find we have to preface all of our conversations with “Before you start talking, I don’t know the score of the game.” In an increasingly connected world, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to impose an artificial delay in information.
In addition to the time difference, the next set of problems we face are technological. Sometimes you have easy problems, like one of the local cable providers is showing the game and the game is blacked out for 24 hours. Once again, you’re having to wait the next day, sometimes two days. Sometimes, games are only shown in the US, and you have to find a way around. We have experience with remote TV streaming. Libby has learned a lot about VPNs and ghosting of IP addresses. We have learned all about wireless extenders and routers. We can give lessons on casting, be it with AppleTV or Chromecast or even Roku. We have cursed slow internet speeds and the dreaded buffering it brings. When they began to roll out fibre internet to the villages around us and they announced it was coming to ours, it was like Christmas. We were constantly asking each other, “Is it here yet? Is it here yet?” With as much fun as we have had, in addition to her schooling in Interior Design, Libby has set herself up for a career in IT.
The thing is, we love sports. It’s a huge part of our lives, and despite the challenges presented with living half a world away, we’re still able to hold on to that little part of home, even if it means staying up to 1:00 in the morning to watch your team play.
Derek, Libby, and Duke