> Unfortunately, Robin, there is one piece of decisive evidence that
> proves you wrong: God is an American, but he follows American university
> football, and dictated the basic rule - which has been followed, as we
> know, with admirable rectitude by American governments as well as their
> sports teams - to his faithful recorder, Grantland Rice:
>
> For when the One Great Scorer comes
> To write against your name,
> He marks-not that you won or lost-
> But how you played the game.
> Grantland Rice
Are you winding me up, Martin? Even *I* know that that's Vita Lampadae --
"Play up, play up, and play the game."
Cricket, not baseball, and Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of
Eton.
The sand of the desert was rotten red,
Red with the blood of a square that broke ...
I once tried to read this over the phone to a friend and -- I know this says
something rather worrying about my sense of humour -- but I couldn't
articulate it without cracking-up laughing.
Woodsman, spare this tree,
Touch not a single bough --
In youth it sheltered me
And I'll defend it now.
Casey at the bat.
{Crossed with the Rubaiyat.}
> <http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Grantland_Rice/>, /"Alumunus
> Football," Only the Brave and Other Poems, p. 144 (1941)
Not so much god's on our side, but He sold the patent to the gatling gun to
Hellair Bellock.
The Man Who Used To Be Thursday.
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