Other Sports
Grace was an outstanding athlete as a young man and won the 440 yards hurdling title at the National Olympian Games at Crystal Palace in August 1866. In addition to running, he was an excellent thrower as evidenced when he threw a cricket ball 122 yards during an athletics event at Eastbourne.
Grace played football for the Wanderers on several occasions although he did not feature in any of their FA Cup-winning teams.
In later life, after his family moved to Mottingham, Kent, he became very interested in lawn bowls. He founded the English Bowling Association in 1903 and became its first president. He helped found an international competition with Scotland, Ireland and Wales, captaining England from the inaugural international at Crystal Palace in 1903 until 1908. He was also keen on curling. His interest in golf brought him into intimate contact with one of his biographers Bernard Darwin, who said that Grace played golf "with a mixture of keen seriousness and cheerful noisiness". He could drive straight and sometimes putt well but, for reasons that Darwin could not understand, "he never could play an iron shot well".
Read more about this topic: W. G. Grace
Famous quotes containing the word sports:
“Reading about ethics is about as likely to improve one’s behavior as reading about sports is to make one into an athlete.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“I looked so much like a guy you couldn’t tell if I was a boy or a girl. I had no hair, I wore guys’ clothes, I walked like a guy ... [ellipsis in source] I didn’t do anything right except sports. I was a social dropout, but sports was a way I could be acceptable to other kids and to my family.”
—Karen Logan (b. 1949)