This month's Esquire is much preoccupied with sport, as clearly it ought to be every now and then; and especially when we're on the cusp of summer and its own special set of games, foremost among them cricket, and all looking forward to watching England trounce the likes of the Netherlands in 20/20...Anyhow, July's Esquire. Cover star Amir Khan is interviewed by Bill Borrows, Man Citeh fan and biographer of Alex Higgins, who usually writes a regular sports column (in which had a gratuitous go at NUFC fans a while back, but then such is his right...) That nice young Theo Walcott talks to Sue Mott. There's even a piece about whether a man can not like sport one bit and yet still count himself manly; akin, perhaps, to Andrew O'Hagan's well-liked LRB essay of a few years back on the subject of hating football. Modestly tucked away elsewhere, The Rachel Cooke Interview is with Tony Blair, whom some of you might remember. Ms Cooke's conclusion is that the whole experience was like talking to a bar of soap.
I have chipped in something on a sporting theme too, albeit entirely by accident: a piece about a pair of very good and very different sports movies released this month, Rudo Y Cursi and Sugar. The first is a bitter black comedy about football's corruption by money. The latter is a quite wistful character study set in American minor league baseball. But, as I write:
...the real affinity between these two pictures is their shared sense of how pitiless is professional sport’s chewing up and spitting out of young talent. Jesus had the right idea when he declared that many are called but few are chosen...
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