SPORTSMEN DIDN’T USED TO GET for their sweaty efforts. Unless you count Sir Francis Drake, the noted sixteenthcentury bowls player. Even W.G. Grace, the greatest Victorian athlete, never got the tap, though there were often calls for it. H.H. Asquith threatened to impose Grace on the House of Lords in 1911 if the Tories didn’t pass his Parliament Act, but Neville Cardus was right to remark that no honour could have burnished Grace’s stature. “He was an institution,” Cardus wrote. “As well might we think of Sir Albert Memorial or Sir National Debt.”
