This Sporting Life Paperback – 3 Feb. 2000

Since sport requires leisure time and a surplus of money to spend on it, we can thank the Industrial Revolution for our weekend off to watch football, motor racing, tennis or rugby; and for the money to buy the necessary ticket or TV subscription. The 1850s were the crucial decade, when mills in northern England started to close at 2pm on Saturdays. According to A.N. Wilson in The Victorians, Wordsells of Birmingham was one of the first factories to give its workers Saturday afternoon off. It is no coincidence that the 1850s were the time when large scale sport really began to develop. Horse racing grew hugely in popularity with sixty two new horse racing meetings added to the calendar. Meanwhile, rugby and football were evolving rapidly into the games we know today. And as sporting events became established, trains were available to take people to them, thanks to the boom in railway building.A century later we come to David Storey’s This Sporting Life, a novel about a factory worker who gets signed by a Rugby League team in a 1950s northern town. This Sporting Life might be set a hundred years after the Industrial Revolution kickstarted sport, but it is clear that sport and industry still go together. Rugby League is a kind of sporting heavy industry. This is a game played in vast stadiums by big men who have specialised jobs on the field, just as they follow specialised trades in their factories. Rugby, a sequence of systematic, repeated moments, is in effect a mill for producing sporting excitement, with sparks flying on the pitch as clouds of steam from nearby cooling towers drift overhead.Even so, there is still a sense in This Sporting Life that Rugby League strives for something beyond the daily grind. The players are seen as heroes by local sports fans, reminiscent of those Greek heroes who took part in running and chariot races in Homer’s Iliad. The town’s gods - wealthy industrialists rather than deities on a mountain - run the club. Just as in Homer, the gods support some heroes at the expense of others, using their influence to trip up or push forward individual athletes as they see fit.This Sporting Life is really a study of what it is to be one of these modern sporting heroes. Seemingly living lives beyond those of ordinary mortals, they are admired wherever they go, receiving free stuff and fan mail. Yet, a famous player also seems something less than human. The narrator and central character, Arthur Machin, often remarks on feeling like some sort of ape man who doesn’t belong in normal society. One of his lady admirers actually calls him Tarzan. The contradiction of popularity and a feeling of exclusion causes havoc with Arthur’s personal life. In his gruff way he loves his landlady, the widowed Mrs Hammond. This troubled young woman becomes interested in Arthur when he makes the metamorphosis from ordinary factory worker to sports star. At the same time she is unable to view him as a normal man she could be with. She always seems worried that Arthur will be off with one of his many female fans. Nothing Arthur can say will convince Mrs Hammond otherwise. Arthur’s fellow players Frank and Maurice are fortunate in having wives who treat them as normal men.This Sporting Life is a study of professional sport and the celebrity it brings. Published in 1960 it is an uncompromising tale, interesting in the context of sport history, and in its prescience about the kind of developments that would follow in sport and celebrity culture generally.

This 1960 novel was made into an acclaimed film only three years after it was published (directed by Lindsay Anderson, later of 'If....' / Malcolm MacDowell fame), and I came to the book having seen the film first. (And I came to the film as it had apparently landed actor William Hartnell the role of Doctor Who, if I'm honest!). The story is set in a post-war industrial town "oop North" and is told in the first person, following the exploits of a young working bloke, Arthur Machin, who gets a big break as a star player on the town's rugby team.The film might be described as a harrowing kitchen-sink drama, certainly no barrel of laughs, skewering the viewer on a great many tense emotional scenes between the male and female leads. Indeed I remember feeling something bordering on traumatised after sitting through it!In contrast, I found the book a lot gentler and more rounded than Anderson's big screen version. The film stuck remarkably closely to the novel's first half, but then it wound up the ending into an psychological showdown between the characters. In contrast, the book allows the story to dissipate and unwind over a timescale of about 10 years, and overall is much less fraught, if not exactly cheery, and is tempered with a little more dry Northern wit.When it was published it was very much a modern tale about the present day... half a century later, Britain is a very different place, and we're looking back on a time-capsule of life from before the coal mines and factories closed, when televisions and cars were new luxury items, and a bloke could get his teeth knocked out and go driving round the streets blind drunk without all this health and safety nonsense. Different times :) ... but nonetheless told with an emotional vividness that still seems very alive and contemporary today. The film left me feeling bruised, but the book left me with a far more sanguine taste in my mouth. Good stuff.

I tried to get to page 50 before giving up. But stopped at page 46. Depressing, with grey and or nasty characters and a very slow plot. It may have been a revolution in its day, but in 2018 its just grey and nasty.

Rugby League is only the backdrop, if you are a lover of the sport or someone with no experience of the game there is so much more to this book. It is a social portrayal of the time and the north. Looking at the male, female relationships, a long with self doubt and insecurity. It is a great book and the later film with Richard Harris is also excellent

Excellent reflection of this era in the industrial towns of the area.

I revised a more negative view of this novel, but still find areas unconvincing. It is a bleak book.

Thank you,very efficient.

One of those graet books which is set in the past but can be read and enjoyed at any time.