The Man Who Hated Football

He's a sports writer. It seems like he loved football very much and in many small ways it began to let him down, so now he can only see all the imperfections.

It is currently fashionable to write pretentious pieces - God knows I've done it myself - about the excellence of modern sports-writing. In such pieces it is obligatory to provide some historical and literary heft by alluding to the fact that both Ring Lardner and Damon Runyon started as sports-writers. That's true, but the crucial word is "started". Both did write about sport, but both grew up and moved on to other things. Lardner, according to his biographer Johnathan Yardley, turned away from baseball aged 34 because "he wearied of the stupidity of so many of the game's fans". And he never had to listen to a phone-in on TalkSport.

Odd. I titled this post before reading the whole article and got to the bottom where it seems the subject has written a book about his dissatisfaction with football with exactly the same title.