Sport has an infinity of delights to offer in this hard, unplayful world. There is the pure physical relief that comes with brisk, blood-stirring exertion. There is sport’s excitement which so often can lift the heart beating into the throat. And there is the beauty in sport – in its own way a beauty as imperishable as art or a lovely moonscape. These three attractions alone give sport a high place among the simple, enduring joys of living.
I think of Samuel Johnson (1709-84), most clumsy and unathletic of men, the greatest intellectual of his age, how he found a kind of exaltation in physical exercise. He swam in cold rivers and walked for miles and he ran races with pretty ladies and he even rolled himself down grassy hills, over and over in a whirl of limbs, to amuse children and to shake up the ageing blood. When he was very old he most wisely said to a friend who came to visit him: ‘I have found in life how much happiness is gained, or, to put it more carefully, how much misery escaped, by frequent and violent agitation of the body!’