poems about sport?

[margoandjerry]

I'm putting together an anthology (long story) and I'm looking for poems about sport or athletics. I'd love something comic or arch - maybe a Benjamin Zephaniah or Ogden Nash or Adrian Mitchell. Perhaps something about school sports?

I've come across plenty of slightly dreary poems about cricket and there's that Play Up Play Up and Play the Game one but I'd love to find some others. Any ideas?

I thought of Roger McGough as I was sure some of his school poetry would cover sport. I googled and found he's got this book:
Sporting Relations - Eyre Methuen, 1974

here's a site with a list of books but no actual poems
www.uktouring.org.uk/rogermcgough/index.html

There was a young lady called Hardwick
By a cricket ball she was struck
And on her tombstone you can read
Hardwick, Hard Ball, Hard Luck!

sorry couldn't resist

Something by Roger McGough would be great but I can't find a list of his poems by topic. I know Benjamin Zephaniah is into running but I can't find a poem of his about running either. Maybe sport and poetry don't meet very often.

Maybe Wendy Cope:

There isn?t much cricket in Hamlet either,
There isn?t much cricket in Lear.
I don?t think there?s any in Paradise Lost -
I haven?t a copy right here.

But I like to imagine the cricketing versions -
Laertes goes out to bat
And instead of claiming a palpable hit,
The prince gives a cry of ?Howzat!?

While elsewhere the nastier daughters of Lear
(Both women cricketers) scheme
To keep their talented younger sister
Out of the England team,

And up in the happy realms of light
When Satan is out (great catch!)
His team and the winners sit down together
For sandwiches after the match.

Although there are some English writers
Who feature the red leather ball,
You could make a long list of the players and the books
In which there?s no cricket at all.

To be perfectly honest, I like them that way -
The absence of cricket is fine.
But if you prefer work that includes it, please note
That now there?s some cricket in mine.

Also Cecil Day-Lewis (though it's not funny, and not entirely about sport either):

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day ?
A sunny day with leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled ? since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away

Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.

That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature?s give-and-take ? the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one?s irresolute clay.

I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show ?
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.

Oh I like that one. Wendy Cope is on my shortlist for Tich Miller which is about being picked last for games. But it's actually a bit sad so maybe not quite right. Fun/arch is better.

Really like that CDL one. I knew the last line but not the whole poem. Lovely.

I was going to suggest Titch Miller, but agree not if you want something funny!

Its an excellent poem, though.

John Betjeman?

The Olympic Girl

The sort of girl I like to see
Smiles down from her great height at me.
She stands in strong, athletic pose
And wrinkles her retroussé nose.
Is it distaste that makes her frown,
So furious and freckled, down
On an unhealthy worm like me?
Or am I what she likes to see?
I do not know, though much I care,
ειθε γενοιμην .....would I were
(Forgive me, shade of Rupert Brooke)
An object fit to claim her look.
Oh! would I were her racket press'd
With hard excitement to her breast
And swished into the sunlit air
Arm-high above her tousled hair,
And banged against the bounding ball
"Oh! Plung!" my tauten'd strings would call,
"Oh! Plung! my darling, break my strings
For you I will do brilliant things."
And when the match is over, I
Would flop beside you, hear you sigh;
And then with what supreme caress,
You'd tuck me up into my press.
Fair tigress of the tennis courts,
So short in sleeve and strong in shorts,
Little, alas, to you I mean,
For I am bald and old and green.

(oops, it won't take the Greek characters!)

Plus there's more tennis in A Subaltern's Love Song (the one about Miss Joan Hunter-Dunn)

I didn't know the Olympic Girl but know and love the subaltern's love song. He obviously had a real thing for hearty sporty girls