Reveals that the gentlemen's game isn't really a game, and may not be all that gentlemanly.
Worse, for those who have always regarded baseball as a vulgar derivative of the "gentlemen's game," as cricket has long held itself to be, the source of the game's new woes is an American, indeed a Texan, Robert Allen Stanford, who helicoptered himself — literally — into the heart of the English game last year.
Mr. Kay was widely regarded as a gentleman in a gentleman's game, never criticizing his partner or his opponents.
But I forgot the N.B.A. is a gentlemen's game.
But in 1923, tennis had become more than a "gentlemen's game" even in England.
For the English, cricket has always been the gentlemen's game — played in whites, with decorum prized as highly as the grace of a batsman's "strokes," and committees to codify "the spirit of the game," above all the principle that playing honorably is more important than winning.
When Pat Cash climbed into the stands after downing Ivan Lendl, the perennial SW19 runner-up, in straight sets in the final in 1987, it was a gesture of wonderfully ocker brashness and irreverence at a tournament still bound to the upper crust traditions of a vanishing gentlemen's game of long pants and Pimm's.
Cricket was turned into the archetypal gentlemen's game.
"It's a gentlemen's game," says Doug "Moonlight" Otlewski, adding that it is typical to see poems read on the field and songs sung in honour of the visiting team.
Long before the jolly romp in the park, one white agent, trying in his own brute way to make small talk, repeats the old chestnut, "Soccer is a gentleman's game played by hooligans; rugby is a hooligan's game play by gentlemen".
