Manchester, 2021. Rugby league final. My team’s first Super League Grand Final appearance ever.
We’re down by 2 points. I’m sat in the stands, completely locked in. Rosie’s next to me, trying to make conversation. I can’t even look at her. I’m too stressed, too focused, too far gone.
We lose by those exact 2 points.
I’m devastated. Angry and sad at the same time. I don’t want to talk to anyone, not even Rosie. She looks at me like I’ve lost my mind: “WTH is wrong with you, it’s just a game.”
Yes. But also, no. 🤣
In regular life, I’m pretty neutral. Measured. I don’t express much. Ask Rosie, ask anyone who’s known me a while - I’m the guy who keeps it together.
But put me in front of a sports game (or honestly, a board game, same energy) and I turn into a different person. I get loud. I trash talk. I shout, I jump, I get pumped, I get furious. I cry - happy tears, angry tears, doesn’t matter, they come out.
A week before that final, I was watching the semi-final alone on my laptop at Rosie’s parents’ place in England. We won. First Super League Grand Final in the club’s history. I was sobbing. Couldn’t stop it if I tried.
The intensity always matches how much I care - about the team, the player, the moment. But that level of intensity, every time, in a way nothing else in my life comes close to... that part used to confuse Rosie. Honestly, it used to confuse me too.
For a long time I just put it down to family. We always watched sports growing up - my grandad, my parents, me. TV, stadiums, didn’t matter. Two hours in the car for an F1 race, eight hours on a bus for a rugby tournament. I figured I just inherited the passion, simple as that.
Then last year, in couples therapy, this whole thing came up almost by accident.
Why do you love sports so much, I was asked. I gave my usual answers - the energy, the fact that it’s real and unscripted, how it connects total strangers (put on a jersey and suddenly people talk to you), how a World Cup makes entire countries forget their politics for a month and just cheer (Go France 🇫🇷). All true. All real reasons.
But then something else surfaced. Something I hadn’t connected before.
Sports was the one space where it was safe for me to feel things out loud.
I grew up in a loving home. I never doubted that. But it wasn’t a home that said it, or showed it much physically. And like a lot of guys, I got the classic lines growing up - don’t cry, don’t be a girl, all that BS I didn’t even know was BS at the time. So I did what kids do: I copied what I saw. I learned to keep things in.
Except with sports. Nobody ever told me to be quiet there. Nobody told me crying over a loss made me less of a man. Whatever I felt was just... allowed. So I felt it, all the way, every time.
That permission never went away. My body still remembers it.
I spent years building a wall around my emotions in everyday life, then a program in Miami in 2019 (Gratitude Training) cracked it open and started teaching me that showing emotion isn’t weakness - it’s just true. Rosie spent even longer chipping away at that wall, patiently, long before I had the words for any of this.
But sports never needed any of that work. It was already the exception. The one place the wall was never built in the first place.
And when I look at my life now, it’s still my best release valve. In front of the TV, at a stadium, racket in hand on a padel court - it’s where I let everything out, clean and uncomplicated, no filter required.
I think most people have a version of this. Maybe you don’t even realize it yet - but there’s probably somewhere in your life where the emotions just come out, where you stop managing yourself, where nobody ever told you to keep it together. A place that became your outlet before you even understood you needed one.
So... where is that for you? And what does it say about all the other places where you’ve been holding back?
J