Athletes are Well-versed in poetry and odes to effort

Bowling a very good ball in cricket, sending it rising and darting, is like writing a fine line of poetry.

- Rohit Brijnath

So is a football goal. Or a running tennis forehand. It's an original, inventive piece of work. But on Dec 15 in Brisbane, Indian bowler Akash Deep is being unrewarded for his skill. Luck evidently is busy elsewhere.

So Deep keeps going. His father died in tragic circumstances, a school teacher who might have taught his son that problems take a while to be solved. Toiling might not feel sublime yet there is a poetry to tenacity.

Poetry and sport was on my mind this past weekend. As I sorted through my library of sports books, I found none which included poems. Even though from the time of the great Greek poet Pindar (born, circa 518BC), athletes have been hailed in verse.

Next week in the US the Bob Dylan film, A Complete Unknown, is being released and the singer, who was also the Nobel Prize winner for Literature in 2016, once wrote searing lyrics about the wrongly imprisoned middleweight boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter (played by Denzel Washington in a film).

"Here comes the story of the Hurricane The man the authorities came to blame For somethin' that he never done Put in a prison cell, but one time he could-a been The champion of the world."

On the matter of boxing and poetry there's always Muhammad Ali, an artist in the ring and a bragging bard out of it. Before he fought George Foreman in Zaire, he recited an amusing poem which in part went as follows: