Man naturally is a lover of sports, every human being loves one sport or the other. Some people love one particular kind of sport and hate the other because people have their various preferences and choices.
Particular sports can become so loved to the point that you become addicted and also want to participate in it by all means possible, I experienced it as a child
As a guy, I'm sure everyone can easily guess my favorite sport...,
Yes, you're right! Football!
I love football so much and the love didn't start today; I grew up seeing that every male around me loved football, I had no choice than to join the love train. Hahaha
As a kid then, whenever Nigeria national team had a football match I would leave my house and go to one of our neighbor's house to watch the match, not because I couldn't watch the match in my house but it seemed as though watching the match with other people would help my favorite team to win, in my neighbor's house where everyone is a coach, everyone is a commentator and spectators all at the same time. Hahaha
The atmosphere was always supercharged whenever there's a football match involving the super eagles of Nigeria. The room where we watched the match was always filled to the brim with people, so stuffy due to the crowd of people who also left their boring houses to watch the match together with other people, sometimes the room would ooze with different body odors but we didn't care, football is more important than comfort. Hahaha
After watching the football match on television we always go out on the streets to practice what we learned, any rounded object can serve as a ball; orange fruit, cricket ball, sometimes even milk tins were not spared
As I grew older, I began to graduate from playing any rounded object to playing real football. There was a particular type of ball made of plastic called kpokirikpo, it was always so hard and painful to play because we played on bare feet but we didn't mind, we must play football!
I also played feléèlè or flying carpet, another type of football made of rubber. Feléèlè was not the best but it was much better than kpokirikpo. Feléèlè is soft unlike kpokirikpo but the only problem with feléèlè was that it can't be enjoyed when the weather is windy.
Whenever we're playing "monkey post" or "nkwatankwa" on the streets with the rubber football, it was always frustrating when you play the ball in one direction and the wind would blow it in another direction, that never stopped us from playing our favorite sport, football is life
Oh! I forgot to mention another advantage of feléèlè football, you could deflate a bit to increase the weight against the wind, you could also "patch" it when it gets punctured using a hot knife and a piece of rubber material or slippers.
For durability, sometimes we put feléèlè inside a health size 4 bladder and inflate it. I continued to play street football and matches until secondary school, I still played in secondary school, especially during our school inter-house sports. Football was a lot of fun to me as a child and I dedicated a lot to it
As I grew older, my parents were not allowing me to go out freely to play football with my friends so I started losing interest in it until I became an adult. I still love football now but I only watch others play
Football has always been my favorite sport and will remain so forever. Long live football
This is a contest about my favorite childhood sport by @Adelan O for 1,500 1up in uptrennd You can join the contest here