Jon Hotten meets his cricketing hero and finds himself saying exactly the one thing he had been determined not to say... When he went to the ring, he was often smiling. He knew that when the heavyweight champion of the world defended his title, it was a solemn moment, but he ... Read More...
Sport
Jon Hotten is struck by an old English sitcom's "quiet, unacknowledged and deep-running despair", which features, naturally enough, a game of cricket... You might remember Ever Decreasing Circles, a British - make that English, because it could only be English - sitcom of the early 1980s, the fading final years of ... Read More...
'The Pitcher' - Arthur Binstead This week Mr Slang recalls a weekly sporting rag with a strong sideline in the music-halls and tittle-tattle... ‘For Galahad in his day had been a notable lad about town. A beau sabreur of Romano’s, A Pink ‘Un. A Pelican. A crony of Hughie Drummond and Fatty ... Read More...
Jon Hotten on the small but long-lasting humiliations of playing sport... It's funny how a small and insignificant incident in a game can send you off into a reverie, a time-trip back into the long-lost, half-forgotten past to a moment when something similar happened, a distant event that somehow triggers another ... Read More...
On the eve of the 2012 Six Nations tournament, Gaw brings together his two loves: rugby and poetry... We cannot look, however imperfectly, upon a great man, without gaining something by him. He is the living light-fountain, which it is good and pleasant to be near. The light which enlightens, which ... Read More...
This time of the year is hell for regular gym-goers like me. In the New Year rush to achieve bodily perfection, classes are full to bursting point with uncoordinated newbies, whose lack of spatial awareness makes even the most basic of aerobic moves positively hazardous. Nevertheless, as the debate rages ... Read More...
Jon Hotten looks back at one of cricket's most unusual, and possibly slightly grotesque, games... There are several candidates for the match of the year 2011 - mad collapses, last-ball draws, you know, the usual - but there can be only one winner of the award for the year of 1848, ... Read More...
Nige looks at the historical but by no means dead sport of 'pedestrianism'... Back in 1773, at about this time of year, one Foster Powell (below) had just completed an epic walk, from London to York and back (396 miles) in less than six days, that won him a hefty bet and made ... Read More...
This week Jonathon Green goes hunting with a Victorian writer who attacks head-on "a reality of contemporary life that Dickens almost wholly sidesteps"... Slang is urban and so am I and horses have never entered the picture. Maybe it's some residual memory of Cossacks. At the Lincolnshire Handicap of 1953, I ... Read More...
Steve Bruce, the former Manchester United player, was sacked as manager of Sunderland last week. Fortunately, Bruce has an alternative career to fall back on. Few people realise that a decade ago Bruce self-published two short football-based thrillers - sort of soccer-based versions of Dick Francis - entitled Striker! and Sweeper! (A proposed third instalment, Defender! ... Read More...
