[slideshow]

No Sports ist die legendäre und vielfach zitierte Antwort, die Winston Churchill einem Reporter auf dessen Frage gegeben haben soll, wie er, passionierter Zigarrenraucher und Whiskey ebenso zugetan wie Champagner, sein hohes Alter erreicht habe. Obwohl das Zitat gerne von Sportgegnern verwendet wird, war Churchill in jungen Jahren durchaus sportlich als Fechter, Schütze, Reiter und Polospieler aktiv. Noch als über 70-Jähriger nahm er an Fuchsjagden teil. In seiner Autobiographie von 1930 My Early Life (deutsch: Meine frühen Jahre: Weltabenteuer im Dienst) hatte er über seine Kadettenzeit an der Royal Military Academy Sandhurst geschrieben, Pferde seien dort sein größtes Vergnügen gewesen und wie seine Freunde habe er sein ganzes Geld dafür ausgegeben, welche zu mieten. “Keine Stunde, die man im Sattel verbringt, ist verloren.”

Horses were the greatest of my pleasures at Sandhurst. I and the group in which I moved spent all our money on hiring horses from the very excellent local livery stables. We ran up bills on the strength of our future commissions. We organized point-to-points and even a steeplechase in the park of a friendly grandee, and bucketted gaily about the countryside. And here I say to parents, especially to wealthy parents, ‘Don’t give your son money. As far as you can afford it, give him horses.’ No one ever came to grief – except honourable grief – through riding horses. No hour of life is lost that is spent in the saddle. Young men have often been ruined through owning horses, or through backing horses, but never through riding them unless of course they break their necks, which, taken at a gallop, is a very good death to die. (p. 45)

Tatsächlich gibt es keinerlei seriösen Beleg dafür, dass das “No Sports”-Zitat von Churchill stammt. Nach Christoph Drösser (in DIE ZEIT vom 16. Juni 2005) ist der Spruch “offenbar nur im deutschsprachigen Raum bekannt, zumindest findet man ihn auf keiner einzigen englischen Internet-Seite, aber auf Hunderten deutschen – ohne Beleg natürlich. Im renommierten Oxford Dictionary of Quotations sucht man das Zitat ebenfalls vergebens.”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJm4zQJVbrY]

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, (30 November 1874 – 24 January 1965) was a British politician and statesman known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War (WWII). He is widely regarded as one of the great wartime leaders. He served as Prime Minister twice (1940–45 and 1951–55). A noted statesman and orator, Churchill was also an officer in the British Army, a historian, a writer, and an artist. To date, he is the only British prime minister to have received the Nobel Prize in Literature, and he was the first person created an honorary citizen of the United States.

Eisenhower and Churchill (54min)

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6460299349602166526]

At the nadir of Western Civilization, two men were working together to save the world. They were Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. In this installment of the Massachusetts School of Law’s “Books of Our Time” Dean Lawrence R. Velvel interviews author James Humes. Humes, a former White House staffer during Ike’s administration, has written a lively and engaging portrait of the relationship between Ike and Churchill during the Second World War. Churchill was a professional politician and an amateur strategist while Eisenhower was a professional strategist and a professional politican. Humes explores Eisenhower’s tremendous ability to work with different personalities, forge common ground and get the job down. Churchill, initially viewed IKE as under qualified, came to posses an extraordinary faith in the General. The work tracks the genesis of their relationship from Operation Torch in North Africa, to Sicily and Italy and to D-Day and the Northern European land campaign of 1944-45. The Massachusetts School of Law, located in Andover, Massachusetts, makes high quality, affordable legal education available to less privileged persons who are traditionally excluded from the legal profession. As part of its mission of providing high quality education and information for both law students and the general public, the Massachusetts School of Law also presents information on important current affairs to the general public via television and radio broadcasts, an intellectual journal, conferences, author appearances, blogs and books. For more information visit www.mslaw.edu. MSLAW podcasts are available from http://mslaw.libsyn.com/rss. MSLAW videos are available from Google Video.

Benny Hill liked to go jogging as well: