Right, Said Fred by Andrew Flintoff

Author:Andrew Flintoff
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Blink Publishing

CHAPTER SEVEN

GUILT Y PLEASURES

Like most people, I watched an awful lot of nonsense during lockdown. What else was there to do? Of course, I watched Tiger King on Netflix. Poor old Joe Exotic, he finally got what he wanted and achieved global fame and he’s in prison for 20-odd years. He probably couldn’t even watch it. There’s a lesson in there somewhere, although Donald Trump will probably pardon him.

I actually thought Joe was all right, until it transpired that he drugged his lions and tigers and killed a load of them. Oh, and it didn’t look great when one of his staff had their arm bitten off and all he was bothered about was losing a few quid (the maddest part about that episode was the fact that she didn’t seem at all bothered). At the end of it, I came to the conclusion that Joe didn’t even like big cats that much. As for his arch-nemesis Carole Baskin, she got away with something. I’m not sure what it was, but she’s definitely a wrong ’un. But you know the really strange part about Tiger King? I thought it was going to be even more bonkers than it was, which may or may not be a reflection of where my head was at during the whole coronavirus madness.

One lockdown phenomenon that I didn’t watch was the Michael Jordan documentary The Last Dance, because while Michael Jordan is obviously a legend, basketball is rubbish. I saw a game once in New York and left at half-time, despite having courtside tickets. You know what really annoyed me about it? The sound of the ball bouncing. I have an irrational hatred of balls bouncing. That might sound a bit weird coming from a former cricketer, but the ball doesn’t really bounce in cricket. Well, it does, but you can’t hear it. But if someone is bouncing a ball, whether it’s the kids in the garden or a bunch of NBA players at Madison Square Garden, I can’t handle it. It’s up there with doors banging. Big things, fine. Small things can really set me off. I’ll be sitting there thinking to myself, ‘You really should let this go.’ A few seconds later, I’ll lose it.

Anyway, at this basketball game, it wasn’t just the sound of the ball bouncing that was annoying, it was also the sound of trainers squeaking. And I couldn’t understand why they didn’t just put the ball in the hoop, without all the showing off. For all those reasons, the thought of watching a documentary about basketball filled me with dread. It didn’t matter that everyone was banging on about it, I just couldn’t bring myself to put it on. I think I’ll watch and enjoy it once the hype has died down.

I’m told that a lot of the footage in The Last Dance was shot in the 1990s, long before reality TV took off. At least that meant that there was less playing up to the cameras than you see in fly-on-the-wall documentaries today.

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