我上周收到一個至今對我教學的最高讚賞：一個學生家長告訴我，在他的14歲兒子眼中，我的課跟足球堂是並列的，只有這兩個活動，他才會自動自覺地現身。

我當然知道大部分teenage boys比較好動和喜歡體育，要他們靜下來寫作是不容易的。作為對體育完全不感冒的我，跟他們也難以有共同語言。下面這篇文章，講述一個我進入他們內心的嘗試。

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How Often Do You Read, Watch or Listen to Things Outside of Your Comfort Zone?

Perhaps the best indication of my ignorance of anything sports-related is this: when word got out that Lionel Messi, upon hearing that the Chinese rights activist Liu Xiaobo was a fan, had been thoughtful enough to send Liu a signed photo, my first reaction was “OK, I know all about Liu Xiaobo, but who’s this Messi guy?” Only when I noticed the astonishment of others when they, too, learned of Messi’s deed, did it occur to me that Messi must have been a sports superstar.

Over time, I came to see the value of paying attention to sports. As a writing coach who teaches a good number of sports-loving teenage boys, I can get through to them better by seeing the craft of writing through the medium of athletics. This I was made aware when the mother of a pair of football-crazy brothers I tutor asked “Can you interest our sons in reading? Both seem allergic to books.” Her request set off an epiphany in me. Normally, because I’m naturally book-obsessed, I’m incapable of conceiving why others don’t love books the way I do. But if I think of the way football appears to me – nothing but a bunch of people running across a field without rhyme or reason – then I can see how, when the brothers are forced to read, they can be blind to a text’s beauty the way I’m blind to the subtleties of dribbling and ball-passing. It follows that to make them fall in love with reading, I must make visible to them the behind-the-scenes tricks a good writer employs to make his or her copy sing

Even though to date, I have yet to go as far as watching sports, I have ventured into reading about it. My favourite piece of sports writing so far is David Foster Wallace’s profile on Roger Federer (just as it was with Messi, so it was with Federer – I’d never heard of the tennis champion until I encountered his name in Foster’s article). In the passage below, Foster describes the awe that overcame him when he sat in his living room watching Federer execute a particularly magic move on TV:

“My spouse says she hurried in and there was popcorn all over the couch and I was down on one knee and my eyeballs looked like novelty-shop eyeballs. Anyway, that’s one example of a Federer Moment, and that was merely on TV — and the truth is that TV tennis is to live tennis pretty much as video porn is to the felt reality of human love.”

I had my own popcorn-all-over-the-couch moment when I came across Wallace’s cheeky analogy for live sports spectatorship!