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The great essayist and author of “The Fight” was an obsessive and violently competitive sportsman, according to James Fenton (subscription protected). In “On Great and Little Things“, he writes [about rackets, a precursor of squash]:

I have sometimes lain awake a whole night, trying to serve out the last ball of an interesting game in a particular corner of the court, which I had missed from a nervous feeling.

Rackets … is, like any other athletic game, very much a thing of skill and practice: but it is also a thing of opinion, “subject to all the skyey influences”. If you think you can win, you can win. Faith is necessary to victory.

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