It would be hard to imagine a worse title for a book, or one more likely to unite the sceptics of every camp. For those poor souls who think the Cheltenham Festival has something to do with books the idea will be ludicrous, and for the rest of us whose year begins with the Melbourne Test, and moves through the ‘Six Nations’, Champion Hurdle, Augusta, Aintree, Formula 1, the FA Cup Final, Epsom, Ascot, Wimbledon, and the Open back to the Charity Shield and another eight months’ dose of the Premiership, the notion that sport needs validation from ‘life’ or anywhere else is deeply offensive.
I remember many years ago, playing in a ‘Sixes’ Hockey tournament sponsored by, I think, the Midland Bank. At the end of the final in which we had been beaten, as everyone always was, by Kingston Grammar School, we had to queue up for our wretched Runners-Up pennants, and listen while some old buffer — looking back, he was probably a perfectly decent man in his mid-forties — told us that, as we got older, we would find that life was very like a game of hockey…
I didn’t believe him then, and I don’t believe Ed Smith now, but to be fair — a phrase exclusively used by sports pundits when they’re about to put the boot in — Smith is ready to trawl an awful lot of sport and ‘life’ in his quest to demonstrate their mutual relevance.
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