KRUGER NATIONAL PARK—Hemingway, furious, would have shot me in the head. Orwell would have offered dignified applause, acknowledging my restraint and humanity.

Here we were, nine of us—including two of us brandishing powerful .458 calibre hunting rifles—tracking a herd of elephants on the southern edge of South Africa’s immense Kruger National Park. One of our guides, Lourens Botha, had spotted the herd in a nearby valley. Marching quickly across the African forest, we scaled a hill next to the valley and descended onto a rocky ledge. Beneath us, a mere twenty metres away, were elephants—lots of elephants. They were enjoying a substantial breakfast, ripping large branches off the trees with their powerful trunks. And they were standing right out in the open.

Lourens and his partner, Obakeng, both young guides from the park’s Berg-en-Dal lodge, confirmed the elephants hadn’t noticed us. They put down their rifles, rather than passing them along to one of us to line up a shot. They unpacked some juiceboxes and cheese and crackers, and we enjoyed a light breakfast alongside eighteen pachyderms doing the same.

No, we didn’t shoot the elephants. The .458s that Lourens and Obi carried were for protection only—a required precaution for a walking tour in the park. And watching these creatures tear up the forest floor in impressive fashion, and trample large swaths of bush in their wake, I never once felt the impulse to fix them in the cross-hairs of the rifle and pull the trigger. Nothing about that hypothetical encounter struck me as sporting. (more…)

PRETORIA—There’s a drink here in South Africa that they call “creme soda.” It’s probably like the cream soda you’re familiar with, only it’s a bright, shocking, emerald green.

Mostly, creme soda is used as a mixer for a drink they like to call a John Deere, usually taken as a double (especially if you want to, you know, act like a man) with two shots of 86-proof cane sugar alcohol. The resulting highball cocktail — whose name comes from the obvious colour association as well as the fact that it runs you over like a lawnmower — is delicious, refreshing, and quite deadly. Ordering a first round of John Deeres is commonly called “hopping aboard the cane train,” so stated because once you climb aboard the train, you generally ride it to the very last stop, occasionally waking up in the back seat of a strange car in an equally unfamiliar underground parking lot. True story. (more…)

JOHANNESBURG—I get a lot of fantastic fanmail here at camp Sportstrotter. Devoted readers wondering how I get to file dispatches from Vancouver Island, Toronto, Montreal, Paris, and now, Johannesburg. “I can’t believe The Walrus sends you to all those amazing places!” they write. “How do they afford it?”

Well, I can tell you that the Sportstrotter is one of The Walrus’s greatest editorial priorities, and in addition to my embarrassingly opulent salary, I also have a practically unlimited travel budget. It’s clear that The Walrus understands that the future of Canadian journalism lies in semi-serious ramblings on the world of sport, posted weekly to a web site under a name that includes the word “trotter.” All hail the dauphin of the Great White North’s media sphere!

So here I am in Johannesburg, South Africa, the richest city on the continent and also one of its most dangerous. Jo’burg has seen the most substantial post-Apartheid integration in South Africa, but this mixing of the former oppressor and oppressed classes—the wildly wealthy and the desperately poor—has bred great resentment and violence. So, with the Sportstrotter fiancée working on a project here and logging long hours, and the streets not exactly safe to wander, I’ve been spending my daytime hours in the highly secure gated community (yes, barb-wire fences and all) across the street from our apartment, using their amazing gym and eating the fantastic food that Jo’burgers are lucky to enjoy on a daily basis (Springbok carpaccio is one of the most delicious things I’ve ever tasted). (more…)

PARIS—In sports, as in many other important aspects of life, there are good days and bad days. There are also really good days and really bad days. But it’s not just the level of goodness or level of badness that’s variable—you can have good seconds, bad minutes, good hours, bad weeks, good months and lousy centuries. (Sorry Cubs fans, I’m a sucker for Tom Petty.) Nobody knows why things go good or bad for extended periods of time, nor why they stop being good or bad. Hippies might tell you it has to do with karma, but they are hippies so forget what they said—I’m sure they’ve already forgotten what you just said. Wait, what was I talking about? (more…)

PARIS—Whoever proclaimed this a city of cool, hip, even-tempered sophisticates (um, that was probably me) obviously had yet to attend a football match alongside the inflamed ultras of Paris Saint-Germain. Well, I’m a PSG virgin no longer, and will wholeheartedly concede that the rowdy fans of the local sports team can lose their minds with the best of them.

Normally, a late-season game between two of a league’s bottomfeeders, in this case Paris and Racing Club de Strasbourg of France’s Ligue 1, holds little significance. Or at least, this was my impression, having been brought up in the world of antitrust-exempt North American sports (really, what’s more sporting than a competition-free business model? Freedom, baby—whoo!). (more…)

PARIS—Is that old saying that “the more things change, the more they stay the same” still current? Because if you ask me, it’s as true in sports today as it’s been in years.

In my younger days—back when men were men and the Stegosaurus was the true king of the jungle—I used to lose my mind over the reprehensibly predictable predictions that sportswriters would unleash on the eve of a new season. “Really, you’re going out on a limb and predicting the Braves to win the NL East again? Booooooring!”

But then I got to thinking: we know that nobody knows anything, that’s why they play the games, etc. etc. So maybe the writer who goes out on a limb before the season and chooses the sexy underdog (“I think the Arizona Cardinals could really surprise football fans this year”) is actually the lame one, going for the glory of being the only one to anticipate the unlikely. (more…)

PARIS—Has the sportswriter’s trope of “I don’t want to bore you with the details of my fantasy team, but…” jumped the shark?

(And if you don’t know what “fantasy sports” are, it will probably take me too long to explain it to you, other than it’s when grown men get together and choose players based on which ones they think will amass the best game statistics, and then spend an inordinate amount of time hoping their players don’t disappoint them. The wife of ESPN columnist Bill Simmons offers the perfect four-word summary of the concept: The League of Dorks.)

True, fantasy leagues have been a booster for sports—especially fantasy football, which has driven a huge surge in viewership among “casual fans,” those people who don’t normally follow one team. These are folks that league head offices are always looking to attract as fans, often courting them at the expense of alienating their hardcore devotees (not that these tried-and-trues would ever stop watching, no matter what manner of travesties you dump on them). But fantasy has had a lousy effect on sports media, nowhere more apparent than the cutesy trope of columnists and pundits: “Let me tell you about how this affects my fantasy team.” (more…)

PARIS—Besides my father’s lifelong habit of driving like a maniac every time we leave the house for the airport, it’s been many years since I paid much attention to fast cars. I followed Indy Car racing in the early ’90s when Canucks Jacques Villeneuve and Paul Tracy, a.k.a. The Thrill from West Hill, were tearing up the circuit, but nothing much has interested me since then. NASCAR always seemed a little too insidery for me, even as it was rising to become the next great American sport—I figured you had to follow the soap opera-ish driver feuds to get much out of it, since those big balloon-shaped cars never look to me like they’re traveling that quickly.

Formula One was another beast altogether. The international scope of the circuit, and the big foreign following, led me to believe that this was someone else’s circuit, too cosmopolitan for a little Canadian lad to even begin to understand. Races in places like Bahrain, Monaco, Hungary and Japan? Whoa, far out! In short, the elite nature of the sport (or what I perceived as its elite nature) turned me off. (more…)

PARIS—Beware the doldrums of March. We haven’t quite yet emerged from North America’s sporting dead zone, that period after the Super Bowl, where hockey and basketball teams are involved in meaningless midseason games, baseball’s spring training is revving up, and golf’s first major is more than a month away.

In fact, the lead story Friday morning on ESPN.com concerned NCAA college basketball. Granted, the start of March Madness officially marks the end of the late-winter sporting doldrums, but I don’t have time to worry over which mediocre teams will qualify for the tournament as indifferent #9 seeds. Call me next week when it’s time for me to fill out my bracket. (more…)

PARIS—Lucky for the Sportstrotter, my new compatriots, the French, like their sports. What’s more, they really like their sports. And nowhere is this widely held love of competition more apparent than in the identity of the country’s highest-circulation national daily newspaper: nope, it’s not Le Monde or Le Figaro, but rather l’Équipe, a broadsheet dedicated entirely to the coverage of sport.

I learned this remarkable (and, admittedly, somewhat unverifiable—the art of circulation auditing being what it is) fact only today. It’s been a weird day so far. It began with a trip to a French immigration office, where the official Sportstrotter fiancée and I had to wade through a fifty-strong pack of agitated foreigners (mostly North Africans, it seemed) crowded at the front door, thrusting passports in the face of the less-than-impressed woman manning the entrance, just to make our way inside for an appointment. (more…)

PARIS—See, now this is football. No 53-man rosters. No helmets or shoulder pads or radios in the offensive captain’s ear. No touching the ball with your hands on the field of play, period (unless you wear a silly shirt and gloves). No timeouts. Certainly no video crews covertly taping other teams’ practices. Sure, Europe’s top football clubs can’t exactly take the moral high ground on that last point; they have been known to fix a match or two. But the most important fact stands alone: this game of football, the one they play east of the Atlantic (and southwest of it, and southeast of it, and pretty much everywhere else in the world except North America) is played with the feet. (more…)

Toronto–My tiny midtown apartment currently resembles nothing more than a Boston sports fan’s post-Super-Bowl abode: in short, it looks like a bomb went off in here. In my case, the damage is self-administered: I’m six days away from a trans-Atlantic move, and I’ve reached the point where everything I own is out in the open, waiting to be packed away in a Markham storage unit or a Paris-bound suitcase. It’s chaos.

In Donnie-from-Southie’s case, the blast and wreckage were set off by one man, Eli Fracking Manning, who blew up the New England Patriots’ run at an undefeated, 19-0 NFL season for the ages with one miraculous scramble-and-completion with 1:15 remaining in Super Bowl 42, and the Giants needing a touchdown to win, which they got two plays later via Plaxico Burress. A much needed kick in the teeth to Boston sports fans, if you ask me. (more…)

Toronto–Two days till the Game of the Century — or, as anyone not from Boston or New York is calling it, Super Bowl 42. “What?! No Roman numerals?!�? you say, somehow transcribing your words directly onto my screen. Look, I know the use of Roman numerals to mark Super Bowls is a cute tradition, but I’m a man of science. As such, I’m going with the numeral system that includes a rather important digit: zero. Let’s hear it for Hindu-Arabic numbers!

So, yeah, Super Bowl is in two days. And, as it’s done for as far back as I can remember, my favourite Las Vegas sports book has released a whopping list of proposition bets to mark the occasion. (more…)

Toronto–There are just twenty days until my relocation to Paris, so I better get used to watching live sports at screwed-up times. And since I’m gaining interest in the Australian Open tennis championship, one of tennis’s four grand slam tournaments, I figured I’d test my early mettle with a 3:30am semifinal match between the sport’s dominant star and a rising gun.

Now, the match wasn’t really played at 3:30am, not in Melbourne anyways. World number one Roger Federer and up-and-coming Serb Novak Djokovic squared off in the second of two semifinal matches at 7:30 pm local time. That’s 7:30 on Friday night. In other words: this match was taking place in the future! In fact, if you’re reading this on Friday afternoon, it still hasn’t happened. But I watched it, and I can tell you who wins. Call your bookie right away. On second thought, don’t.

(more…)

TORONTO—It’s fast, it’s violent, it’s administered by guys in striped shirts working with a pre-determined set of rules, the competitors are in amazing physical shape, and every contest produces a definite winner. But is it sport? I’m talking, of course, about NBC’s reincarnation of American Gladiators, an updated version of what was the single greatest television show on the planet if you surveyed fifty twelve-year-olds sometime around 1992.

I remember watching the original Gladiators with bug-eyed attention every week. In first-run syndication from 1989 to 1996, the show was an amazing spectacle: extremely fit but otherwise ordinary Joes and Jodies competing in ingeniously conceived contests of physical strength and agility against the hulking Gladiators: Laser, Zap, Ice, Turbo, Sabre, the deaf hottie Siren, and my all-time favourite, Nitro. (more…)