In this week’s TLS – a note from the Editor on the TLS sports issue

This is the sports issue of the TLS and regular readers may be
reasonably disquieted at the prospect of descent into running, jumping,
kicking, throwing and other pursuits deemed in one way or another to be
sporting.

Never fear. We begin with mountaineering and the “multiple modernities” which
Peter H. Hansen sees in the acts of those claiming to see and climb
mountains for the first time. The first man to “discover” Mont Blanc was an
Englishman who visited Savoy’s glaciers in 1741 and published a pictorial
pamphlet. Next we turn to cricket, a peak of human endeavour which the
English can more easily claim to have discovered although, as Stephen Fay
notes, the Indians like to see it first within the most ancient paths of
their own Hindu culture. Indians certainly own the game now, he concludes,
reviewing two books on high-speed matches, gambling, corruption and the only
place where the passions of rich and poor ever meet.

Football will be back in Britain soon and the TV screens are already aflicker
with the prices of Croatians and Brazilians trafficked between London, Paris
and Rome. Toby Lichtig considers Red or Dead, a novel by the
“unflinching” David Peace about how Liverpool Football Club rose from lowly
“second division” origins to become “one of the greatest teams of the past
half century”. Its central character is a manager who once said that
football was “more important” than life or death. Lichtig finds little to be
said in support of Peace’s “cut-and-paste prose” and much that is
appropriately predictable.

Who was the first to have a Jockey Club? If Maryland had one in 1743, “why did
it take at least another seven years before the founding of a British one?”
Donald W. Nichol poses the sporting question and discovers the reassuring
answer that the institution which set the rules for horse racing has an
English history stretching further back than once was thought. In the 1720s,
and maybe as early as 1709, “the Jockey Club” was already doing what it does
best, providing a home for a man who has “gambled away his trousers”.

Peter Stothard