Word: crickets
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Devotees of cricket consider it to be less a game than a pinnacle-perhaps the last remaining one-of genteel civilization. In the past few weeks, most of them were reacting as if a hairy Visigoth had strolled onto one of the sport's immaculately manicured pitches. Reason: an upstart Australian entrepreneur had signed up 51 of the world's best players, and was threatening to turn the hallowed institution into-gad, Sir!-another vulgar spectator sport. Quipped London's Guardian: "The world as we know it is about...
...quite yet. The six-nation International Cricket Conference (ICC)* was still battling to ward off Communications Tycoon Kerry Packer, 39, who lured away the game's brightest lights with promises of filthy lucre. That is a rare commodity in cricket, where even playing for England, a superstar can aspire to no more than $35,000 a year and a run-of-the-mill professional only $6,600 a season. Packer offered far better salaries and planned a televised international all-star series matching "the rest of the world" against a formidable Australian side...
...international team: gangling (6 ft. 7 in.) South African-born Tony Greig, who justified his action by saying that he was fighting "for a principle." The tradition-minded barons of the game did not see it that way; they quickly stripped him of his title. One cricket commentator offered a huffy explanation for Greig's behavior: he was "an Englishman not by birth or upbringing, but only by adoption. It is not the same thing as being an Englishman through and through...
...Golf contains a rather moving essay entitle "Dickens in Time of War," written in 1915 before Darwin found himself running an Ordinance Depot in Mesopotamia. Darwin's stories are cluttered with chestnuts of wisdom from stories are cluttered with chestnuts of wisdom from Sam and Tony Weller while the cricket match between Dingley Dell and All Muggleton in the Pickwick Papers was for Darwin the penultimate tribute to the glories of English countrified society...
...retain their infectious appeal, it is best to relish Mostly Golf in the Pickwickian sense. One is transported into a long forgotten and a more idyllic world that belies reality. Mostly Golf conveys the indian summer tranquillity of Victorian England before the First otherwise sleepy hamlets turned out for cricket matches and the landed aristocracy played over the heath and whins of sedate seaside links...