This Sporting Life is a 1960 novel by the English writer David Storey. [1] It is set in Northern England and follows a man who tries to make it as a professional rugby league footballer. It was the debut novel of Storey, himself a former player for Leeds.
The book was the basis for Lindsay Anderson's 1963 film This Sporting Life . [2]
Kirkus Reviews wrote that "the strength of Mr. Storey's novel is in its toneless air of truth which spares nothing or no one, a fact which may well rebuff his readers." [3]
Commemorating the book's fiftieth anniversary in 2010, Frank Keating of The Guardian wrote that "This Sporting Life has stood the test of 'classic' category ... The novel's uneasy love story of insecure anti-hero tough, Machin, and his world-weary landlady, Mrs Hammond, earthily provides harrowing off-field narrative, but it is in the raw sporting passages where the reader can wince at the resonance of uncomfortable truths[.]" [1]
Lindsay Gordon Anderson was a British feature-film, theatre and documentary director, film critic, and leading-light of the Free Cinema movement and of the British New Wave. He is most widely remembered for his 1968 film if...., which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes Film Festival in 1969 and marked Malcolm McDowell's cinematic debut. He is also notable, though not a professional actor, for playing a minor role in the Academy Award-winning 1981 film Chariots of Fire. McDowell produced a 2007 documentary about his experiences with Anderson, Never Apologize.
This Sporting Life is a 1963 British kitchen sink drama film directed by Lindsay Anderson. Based on the 1960 novel of the same name by David Storey, which won the 1960 Macmillan Fiction Award, it recounts the story of a rugby league footballer, Frank Machin, in Wakefield, a mining city in Yorkshire, whose romantic life is not as successful as his sporting life. Storey, a former professional rugby league footballer, also wrote the screenplay.
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