It was sporting to write columns opposing the war back in January, when the White House was conjuring enough Iraqi anthrax "to kill several million people," as well as hordes of cheering Iraqis casting flowers on our soldiers.
In the fallout, USA captain Davis Love III took to Sports Illustrated to write an extended mea culpa for what he, puzzlingly, still called one of the best experiences of career.
The Oregon-based writer George Dohrmann spent three years travelling the country interviewing sports diehards to write his book "Superfans: Into the Heart of Obsessive Sports Fandom," which will be published this month.
"We cover millions of games each year, so I would need an army of sports writers to write with the scale of the technology," says Sullivan, adding that 30,000 teams used the product last year.
In 1931 he became the Constitution's sports editor, continuing to write non-sports features from time to time.
All that began to change in the Eighties with the emergence of a new generation of writers - Pete Davies, Nick Hornby, Tim Parks, Geoff Dyer, Robert Winder - who were not ashamed to declare an interest in sport and wanted to write about it with the same care and intelligence as they would write about literature or politics.
Schaap's career segued from Newsweek to The New York Herald Tribune to editing Sport magazine to writing 34 books to television, and he was known to younger viewers as the host of ESPN's Sunday morning program "The Sports Reporters".
By nice coincidence, this modest commemorative hurrah to mark the half-century since the publication of the finest British novel about professional sport to be written by an actual professional sportsman coincides with yesterday's naming of Brian Moore as 2010's winner of the William Hill prize for sports book of the year.
It is a time when thousands of people in the sports media congregate to write about not that much.
One morning, about a month after I had started reading "À la Recherche du Temps Perdu," I sat down at my desk and, after the usual Talmudic fiddling with the sports pages, started to write.
