RANT: The Cult of the Ball Chaser - Bread and Circuses

 RANT: The Cult of the Ball-Chaser

You ever notice how this world worships ball-chasers? Not thinkers, not builders, not growers — but people who chase leather and fluff across a field or court. A man can plant a field, pull potatoes out of the ground, weld steel, or fix your power line in the rain and he’s invisible. But some shaved-chested poser kicks a ball between sticks and he gets a goddamn parade. What happened?

Let’s be real: sport is a game. A game. It’s not sacred, it’s not heroic, and it sure as hell isn’t productive. But we’ve built temples around it — mega-stadiums funded by taxpayers, broadcast deals worth billions, and paychecks that would make a neurosurgeon puke. All for playing tag with a ball.

And what do we get out of it? Junk food ads. Gambling addictions. Fake tribalism. Drunken brawls in the carpark because your team wore the wrong colour shorts. This isn’t culture. This is circus. Roman-style, bread-and-circuses — just with more endorsements and less accountability.

The footy stars, the tennis brats, the gridiron meatheads, the golf-club clowns — they’re just overpaid children playing games for men who never grew up. That’s it. We’re told they’re “disciplined,” “elite,” “pinnacles of human performance.” But for what? So they can sell us overpriced shoes and energy drinks? So they can model cologne on the side?

Meanwhile, the people who actually hold the world up — the farmer, the nurse, the carpenter, the truck driver, the machine operator — they get called “low-skilled” or “replaceable.” They’re treated like dirt. Yet if they stopped working for two days, society would fall over like a drunk on wet tiles.

Sport is the religion of the idle man. A lazy man’s myth. You watch it so you can feel something, because your real life’s been drained by a system that told you not to make, not to grow, not to build — just to consume. And so we sit on couches and scream at millionaires, living vicariously through a fantasy while our own lives rot in fluorescent-lit workplaces and unpaid overtime.

We’ve confused entertainment with excellence. Just because someone can hit a serve at 200kph or fake a foul better than an Italian opera singer doesn’t make them worthy of worship. It makes them a performer. And we’re the suckers in the seats, clapping like seals while billionaires siphon off the passion of working people and sell it back to them at $49.95 a jersey.

But the worst part? We let it happen. We choose to cheer for the ball instead of the builder. We buy into the dream that someday our kid might “make it,” while the school can’t afford textbooks and the trade school’s been shut down for years.

Sport could’ve stayed as what it was meant to be: play. Fun. A bit of sweat and spirit on a Saturday arvo. But now it’s a casino of egos, advertisers, and fake virtue signals. And in the end, it’s not even ours anymore. It belongs to the corporations, the betting syndicates, and the influencers who’ve never swung a hammer or milked a cow in their lives.

It’s time we stop kneeling before the ball and start standing up for the real ones — the ones who build, grow, fix, and feed.

Let the games end. Let the work begin.