Sport isn’t about putting a ball into a net or over a bar or into a hole. It’s about the people who are trying to do those things. Frank Keating, late of this and several other parishes and now just late, understood that truth, which is what made him such a great sports writer. Matthew Engel explains in the introduction to this anthology that his old colleague ‘liked sportsmen and made lasting friendships with them. This would be impossible nowadays.’ Most of the pieces report on those friendships rather than on matches: by portraying sportsmen as they were off the pitch Keating revealed what made them succeed on it.
So we get to see Bob Taylor rising early to visit Mother Teresa in Calcutta — the only member of the England cricket team to do so — and Geoff Boycott’s stint as a DJ in a Sydney nightclub (yes, you read that correctly).
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