Live Sports

Welcome, athletic reader, as this week I give you a feverish account (thankfully not literally) of attending a live sports fixture here at Stanford University.

Now, university sport (or "college sports" as they seem to call it here) is a very different kettle of fish to how we'd see it in the UK. In the UK, there are only really two university sport competitions you'll see on the telly: the boat race, and if you're lucky, the varsity rugby match. The rest of university sport is some people who vaguely know one end of a racket/bat/ball from the other, played in windy, damp, threadbare muddy fields on a Wednesday afternoon. It's proudly amateur and faintly ridiculous; it's definitely not a leg up into professional sport of any kind.

Here in the US it's something completely different: there are entire national TV channels dedicated to college sport, and a lot of people pay attention to the exploits of either their local college team or those of their alma mater. Professional teams draft their new intake from the college teams, so it's a very obvious route into a sporting career. Stanford, here on our doorstep in Palo Alto, is famously not all that bothered about sport, but still had a stadium considered good enough to be the centrepiece of an Olympic bid this century. It's a different world.

Stanford's women's basketball team are pretty good, having won the national championship last year, so Helen booked us tickets for a game last weekend. Walking down to the arena, we passed the enormous football stadium, the pristine athletics track, the tennis courts ("This is about the same as Court no. 2 at Wimbledon," H remarked), and finally, the basketball arena.

As you can see, this is a) enormous, and b) pretty well kitted out.

The best part of the game was the band; somewhere between a brass band and a big band, just at centre left of the picture there you may be able to make them out. They were conducted by a very enthusiastic musical director in what appeared to be a sheepskin coat, and their playlist seemed to mimic what you might have heard a heavy rock covers band play in a British pub in the late '80s ("Radar Love", "All Right Now"). But there was lots of energy there, and they made me laugh quite a lot.

The game itself was fairly unremarkable but enjoyable; it was level at half-time, but Stanford showed their true class in the second half and ran out comfortable winners.

After that, we wandered home to enjoy the Super Bowl. American football is insane, as I've recorded before, and the Super Bowl is the pinnacle of that. Somewhere in here is a sporting contest, but it's groaning under the weight of celebrity commercials and a half-time show where some people that were famous 20 years ago become their own tribute acts for 15 minutes. Perhaps the only ad that sticks in the memory is the one for, er, Salesforce, where some bloke (apparently this is Matthew McConaughey, and I should know who he is) dressed as an astronaut wanders around in a hot air balloon, doling out sub-Murray Lachlan Young soundbites (anyone else remember the Murray Lachlan Young Virgin Atlantic advert? It ended with, "and just happens to rhyme with Premium Economy", in a self-referential poetic twist. Well it's like that. OK, I had a feeling you wouldn't remember). Just to add to the faint ridiculousness, the advert is for Salesforce, an Enterprise software company... not the kind of thing you see on a TV ad and pick up the phone to buy.

Now the thing which really blows you away about this ad is that the soundtrack is the Ray Conniff Singers' swingling take on 'Thus Spake Zarathustra', itself a huge throwback to the 90s loungecore throwback revival thingy. Despite repeated pleadings, this hasn't yet made it to the concert playlist of Helen's choir; maybe once we're back in the UK...