'You like sport? YOU?!'

I've always felt slightly guilty about loving sport. I suppose this is strange, since sport could possibly be considered the Australian religion,but I think it's more to do with my personality than anything else. I'm an arty, humanities type. I like writing. I like reading. I'm into theatre. I enjoy Shakespeare. Plus, I'm a girl. Thus, the stereotype dictates, I should not like sport.

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But I do. And I'm not alone. My friend Erin, who inspired me to write this blog, is exactly the same: an arty type, with a penchant for sport. Actually, let me clarify. Neither of us is particularly good at (or especially enjoys playing) sport. But we love to watch, and we love the personalities - something we discovered at age twelve. We met doing theatre, but we stayed friends because we loved sport (cricket, in this case.) When she moved to the USA, I sent her articles about Michael Bevan, her favourite cricket player.

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Erin and I fell out of touch after a while, but we found each other again about six months ago, after ten years apart, and the parallels have never been more pronounced. We both love to write - we've both got unpublished books we're working on editing - and we both still love sport. In fact, she's made a career out of it, working as a sports journalist. Mine is merely a quiet obsession. It's the sort of thing that when I bring it up in conversation ('actually, I love sport,') makes people look at me and say, 'oh, I never would have picked that one.'

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My particular passion is tennis. This is not, let me state to begin with, because I am any good at it. I am quite possibly the worst tennis player in the whole world. But there is something about the game I find extremely compelling. I'm not exactly sure, but I think what I really like about tennis is the one on one struggle. This is not to denigrate team sport (or, indeed, doubles tennis) in any way. But one of the things I love most about sport is the personality, and tennis, for me, anyway, is a sport where the player's personality is expressed via the game. Tennis is as much in the mind as on the court. A tennis player must have mental strength to really excel.

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(Though I could be completely wrong in saying this. I am, after all, not a tennis player. I am merely a keen observer.)

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Erin, my arty, sport-loving friend, is currently writing her own blog -backtothecouve.blogspot.com - where she is blogging about her trip to Vancouver. However, when we talked about it, she told me she wanted to turn the notion of the travel blog on in its head. Her blog is as much about her own relationship with Vancouver as it is about this particular trip. Now, I've never read a sports blog - though I assume they exist -but it seemed to me that this idea could be applied in the same way. This is a blog about the Australian tennis summer, sure, but not exclusively. This is a blog about my love affair with tennis and tennis players. All I know about tennis I have learned by watching, which clearly does not make me a qualified technical observer, but this is not a blog for detailed match analysis. This is a writer's experimentation, playing round in a new medium, and it is a celebration - because tennis, even though I rarely pick up a racquet, is an important part of my life.

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The Australian tennis summer doesn't start till the weekend with the Hopman Cup in Perth, but it isn't unintentional that I began this blog on Boxing Day. Boxing Day is one of the most important days of the year in the Australian sporting calendar. I'd venture to say that a lot of Australian households have spent the day flicking between the Sydney to Hobart yacht race and the Boxing Day test match. (Mine certainly has.) It's probably the closest day to a sporting public holiday in the calendar year, so it seemed like an auspicious day to begin a record of my love affair with tennis, even though the season hasn't yet begun.

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Till next time...