The Love of the Game

Product Description

In THE LOVE OF THE GAME, BBC sports presenter Mark Chapman explores the relationship between parents and children through the amateur sporting world. Like so many people, sport has played such a huge part in his life from a very early age, thanks to both his mum and dad. Now as a father to three children he is hoping to pass on this same love.

As he discovered, the difficult part is facing the fact that, now in his forties, he is no longer in his physical prime. As his sporting ability hurtles towards a cliff before plunging headfirst into a sea of beer bellies and knee replacements, his children are thriving.

For Chapman, as for many of us, the pride he feels in passing on the sporting baton to his children is commingled with pricks of jealousy - as on the day he crushingly realised his son was better than him at sport. This is a story about sport, but beyond that it paints sport as a touchstone for everything important: growing up, getting old, becoming a parent, learning how to win (and how to lose gracefully), the legacy we all hope to leave our children; in short, life and all that goes into it.