My most memorable sporting experiences

Watching sport has played a huge role in my life. I was introduced to it as a boy, and it became one of my passions as a man. Over that period I've been lucky enough to have shared in many a great sporting experience and I enjoy reminiscing about them. I propose to write articles about my most memorable experiences and post them here. My sports viewing has been mainstream and most of my standout experiences are even more so. That's because, in the main,  they were shared experiences. My family and my friends will consistently have a high place in these remembrances.

I want to write down these memories to help keep them fresh as they recede further into the past. I'd like my daughter Cassie to be able to read them one day and to get a sense of the some of the passions that animated her father's leisure time. I hope they will cast some light for her about my family and friends as well, so that she knows them better. 

Some ground rules: The events had to stand out in some way in my memory, I have seen so many sporting events that I could write about hundreds of individual events. The primary focus is my experience of the event, how I followed the event, the people I followed it with, how it impacted me. There's no pretense at objectivity here. These are subjective experiences. While there are more wins than losses here, in many cases the losses stood out more and are thus recognised. I will conduct some research for the individual pieces. This may involve little more than a brief Google search, or it may involve finding video clips or newspaper articles and talking to some of the people that I experienced the event with. That will vary from time to time.

The experiences are organised chronologically in general, but in some cases multiple events spanning many years will be included in one or 2 pieces. It seems foolish to write a series of vignettes about every memory of Greg Norman losing a golf major. With some exceptions, they will be dealt with together. Ricky Ponting and David Boon will receive similar treatment.

As articles are written, I will add links to them here so that this introductory post will retain a summary of the whole. Having lacked the audience size to motivate me to keep blogging, it's with some trepidation that I have written this particular post, knowing that I may not choose to write all the posts that I have titles for. Still, there's always the delete button in that instance!

1. An obsession begins - the 1979 NSWRL grand final St George v Canterbury Bankstown