Why I Choose Sport
I’ve been lucky enough to travel through 27 countries, and the biggest thing it taught me wasn’t about places. It was about people. Everywhere I went, no matter the language, the religion, or how much anyone had, people were more alike than different. They laugh at the same things. They want the same things. And almost everywhere, they play. Sport is where I love seeing that most. It’s the thing I’d cross the world to watch. Show me a game I’ve never heard of and I’ll want to know everything: how it works, who plays it, why it matters to them. That fascination is the entire reason Offcut Sports exists. I don’t limit that to one kind of sport. I care about the World Cup final watched by a billion people, and I care about a race down a volcano on Easter Island that most of the world has never seen. To me they’re the same thing at different scales. Someone cares about winning. A community cares about watching. There’s a story in it. Making videos about this is what I enjoy more than anything else. The research, the writing, the edit, all of it. I’m not documenting sport because I think I should. I’m doing it because I can’t help it. That’s the whole reason. Passion first. Everything else follows.
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So I made the video that explains it. Research first, from cultural histories to old event coverage, then a script, then piecing usable footage together from a dozen different uploads and grading it into something that finally looks like the sport deserves. It is now the only video in existence that actually explains Haka Pei.
That project changed what Offcut Sports is to me. It stopped being about making good videos and started being about building an archive.
Because here’s the thing about these sports: they’re fragile. They depend on a small number of people continuing to care. Some will still be played in a hundred years. Some won’t. And when one disappears, it takes a piece of a culture with it, quietly, with nobody outside that community noticing.
A video doesn’t save a sport. But it does mean that if the day comes when nobody plays it anymore, there’s still something to show the next generation. Proof it existed. Proof it mattered to someone.
Later this year I’m travelling through South America to keep doing this on the ground, from cholita wrestling rings in Bolivia to paleta frontón courts in Peru. Filming the people who play these games where they play them, and asking them what it means.
Every culture on earth plays. Some fill stadiums. Some race down volcanoes. I want the record to include both.
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