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by 5 per cent! Many a time, while poker enthusiasts held forth, I had to endure in silent ignorance such poker commonplaces as a straight flush, three of a kind, baseball, and, may Mrs. Battle support me, spit in the ocean! One need not, and indeed should not, indulge in every sport, but for conversational purposes one ought to know about most of them. Two sports I do not recommend are horse and hound racing. To the latter I contributed only once. It was in Clonmel, Ireland, on a sad seventh of July, 1932. Since then, however, whenever I come upon Shakespeare's "I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips," I get a better meaning and keener thrill from those lines, so that I feel entitled to console myself with the inference that the Old Bard had no doubt been to the tracks, too, but probably with better luck! As for horse racing —it is too painful to relate what I learned from it! I will merely pause to remark that my old Dublin-born English professor used to say that one could not properly appreciate English literature if one hadn't ever "touched" a friend for a loan with which to make a last try for a comeback by putting "a few pounds on the nose." But I prefer to change the subject, not however before declaring that what Dr. Patrick J. Lennox said of steeplechases is certainly true of chess. Who doesn't know about rooks and pawns and checks has an Achilles' heel in his conversational equipage! And if he doesn't know any sports at all, I rise to maintain that he cannot qualify even for a sandlot, conversationally! |
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