Sport and grief don’t immediately sound like obvious bedfellows. One is a mostly harmless pastime that can be enjoyed or ignored as each of us chooses. The other is that hateful inevitability which confronts us all. But for me the two things are inextricably linked. And not just because I’m a Spurs fan and I’m coming to terms with life AH (After Harry). There are two bigger reasons.
The first is historical. Believe it or not, the explanation for why the ancient Greeks invented competitive sport in the first place was as something to do at. Practically free from any rules, participants in this all-out slugfest were encouraged to bite, gouge, twist scro-tums (NB each other’s) and pretty much anything else besides, and one contestant is even on record as having torn out his opponent’s intestines. As unlikely as it seems, disciplines like this are how sport on Earth began. Just as birds are descended from the dinosaurs, so it turns out snooker is descended from an ancient Greek wrestler ripping out another bloke’s duodenum. Death, glorious death, went hand in hand with sport from its inception.
