Showing posts with label Sport. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sport. Show all posts

Saturday, 19 October 2024

Women say this sort of thing carelessly, with no wish to wound; but that makes it none the less hard to bear

'Oh, I am glad you have begun to take an interest in cricket. It is simply a social necessity in England. Why you ever made such a fuss about taking it up I can't think. You used to be so fond of watching baseball, and cricket is just the same thing.'

A close observer would have marked a deepening of the look of pain on Mr Crocker's face. Women say this sort of thing carelessly, with no wish to wound; but that makes it none the less hard to bear. 

P.G Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim (1918), 39-40

Thursday, 30 March 2023

Sport? What a load of fascist rubbish it is

Reading Heydrich's speech, I have three comments:

  1. In the Czech state, as elsewhere, the feeblest defender of the values of the national education is the responsible minister . Having been a virulent anti-Nazi, Emmanuel Moravec became, after Munich, the most active collaborator in Hedrich's Czech government an the Germans' preferred Czech representative - much more so than senile old President Hácha. Local history books tend to call him 'the Czech Quisling'.
  2. The staunchest defenders of the values of national education are teachers because, whatever we might otherwise think of them, they have the authority and the will be subversive. And they deserve praise for that.
  3. Sport? What a load of fascist rubbish it is.

L. Binet, HhhH (2009), tr. S. Taylor (2012), 168

This is a terrible analysis. Sport and Education are potent, that's why they come under pressure. It's particularly weird though to look at sport in a Nazi context that way when the most famous sporting incident in Nazi Germany is the failure of ideological outcomes in the 1936 Olympics. One presumes that Binet, like me, was very bad at sport at school.

Tuesday, 17 May 2022

I can think of no entertainment that fills me with greater detestation than a display of competitive athletics

'Frankly,' said the Doctor, 'I am at a loss to understand my own emotions. I can think of no entertainment that fills me with greater detestation than a display of competitive athletics, none—except possibly folk dancing.

E. Waugh, Decline and fall (1928), 60