A confrère faced a daunting task last week. As golfing correspondent of the Times, it fell to John Hopkins to do the honours with the speech of acclaim at the induction into the World Golf Hall of Fame in Florida of his fabled predecessor Bernard Darwin (1876–1961), whom many consider the father of sportswriting. In view of the prim pretensions of US sport when on its best starched-bib parade, the occasion was aeons away from the British Lions’ tours John and I covered in rugby’s relishable old amateur days.
In his address, Hoppy quoted the antique aphorism that the quality of writing about games improves as the size of the ball used becomes smaller. Thus those best served by Eng-Lit were cricket and golf, which leaves Darwin the first monarch. This grandson of Charles once described the origin of the sportswriter species: ‘A trade into which men drift, since no properly constituted parent would agree to his son starting a career in that way.’
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