My Introduction to Sport Where do I start? My first introduction to sport was as a small child watching my mother play tennis. She was very competitive. I saw it in her reactions to a shot that put the ball into the net or when the ball landed outside the lines that defined the playing area. My mother also played field hockey and my father played rugby league. All my siblings played sport, as did many of my uncles, aunties and cousins on both sides of my family. My grandfather played lawn bowls and, as my family shared the house of my mother’s parents, I would experience him coming home most Sundays always affected by alcohol, and sometimes with a gift for his performance on the greens or a tray of meat from the raffle. At school we had swimming and athletic carnivals. I didn’t learn to swim until a little later, but I loved the athletics. It was a little different back then: as well as the running we had the three-legged race, where two people standing side by side would have their ankles tied together, meaning that they had one leg each free and the other two legs ...