Originally posted by Ken Bondy
Quote: | Originally posted by Oso
What is Hemingway's "there are only three sports" quote?
Answer "There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games."
This is one in a long list of quotations mysteriously attributed to Ernest Hemingway. While the general public seem to agree that this is in fact a
Hemingway quotation, scholars have some reservations and for good reason. The early Hemingway did not believe that bullfighting was a sport. For him
it was a tragedy. See his October 20, 1923 article titled "Bullfighting A Tragedy" reprinted in By-Line: Ernest Hemingway Selected Articles and
Dispatches of Four Decades edited by William White. Hemingway reiterates his beliefs regarding the tragedy of bullfighting in his 1932 book, Death in
the Afternoon.
In July of 2006, Gerald Roush, a visitor to Timeless Hemingway, provided a possible source for the "three sports" quotation. He cited a story titled
"Blood Sport" by Ken Purdy, which originally appeared in the July 27, 1957 edition of the Saturday Evening Post. The story is reprinted in Ken Purdy's
Book of Automobiles (1972). Gerald provided a scan of where the quotation appeared and it reads as follows: " 'There are three sports,' she remembered
Helmut Ovden saying. 'Bullfighting, motor racing, mountain climbing. All the rest are recreations.' " Gerald noted that the character of Helmut Ovden
is modelled after Ernest Hemingway. This could explain why the quote has been so widely attributed to Hemingway over the years.
In May of 2007, Rocky Entriken wrote to Timeless Hemingway with another possible author of the "three sports" quotation:
"As I am told, the quote belongs to Barnaby Conrad, a writer of the same era as Hemingway and a San Francisco raconteur of some note. Mostly he
did magazine articles but his books include The Death of Manolete. My source is Dan Gerber, yet another writer of the era." |
Oso, in "Death in the Afternoon" Hemingway devoted a huge amount of space to argue that bullfighting is a spectacle and not a
sport.
++Ken++ |