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Ann, John Whitworth's poem that you posted above is one I saw a few years back — I believe someone referenced it here on the Sphere — and it grabbed hold of my heart in the most gentle way. It made me like cricket, though I don't know much about it.
The revelation that good poets like John Whitworth can also be sports fans buoyed me as I mustered the rationale for posting the Immaculate Inning and the achievement it represents. It's also partly the reason why I thought I'd start this thread and hope for the best in terms of ferreting out poetry on sports.
Michael's "October Speaks" above and David's post of "When an Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease" along with the Robert Francis poems tap that well of childhood that we only hear faint echoes of after we leave that state of innocence and enter into adulthood, dry-mouthed and thirsting for our childhood sense of destiny and heroes and failures and all the other things sports make into metaphors. They are my own meager mythology, I guess. Just the name "Ted Williams" or Willie Mays" or "Babe Ruth" produce a sense of awe in me.
But not all sports produce the kind of poetic passion of cricket and baseball. Michael's American football poem is good, but I have mixed feelings about the game. It has robbed American of it's favorite pastime, Baseball, and it speaks volumes to where our country is headed, I think.
And there are no good tennis poems, that I'm aware of. Roger Federer, Serena Williams, Novak Djokovic, Rapheal Nadal are all pure poetry.
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