"As a youngster, I enjoyed sport and my ambition was to be a great sportsman"
About this Quote
There’s a disarming plainness to Lynn Davies’ line: no mythmaking, no tortured backstory, just the clean origin story of a life organized around motion and desire. “As a youngster” puts the emphasis on instinct rather than strategy. Sport arrives first as pleasure, not branding, and the ambition that follows feels almost inevitable - the private thrill hardening into a public aim.
The phrase “enjoyed sport” matters because it refuses the modern script where greatness is supposedly engineered from day one by parents, programs, and hyper-specialization. Davies frames aspiration as something that grows out of play. That’s also the subtext: elite performance, at least in his telling, starts as joy before it becomes work. The sentence is modest, but it quietly argues against the culture that treats youth athletics as a pipeline and childhood as a training camp.
“Ambition was to be a great sportsman” is old-fashioned in the best way. Not “a champion,” not “the best,” but “a great sportsman” - a word that carries a moral charge: character, composure, respect for the event and the opponent. Coming from an athlete whose era prized amateur ideals even as global sport professionalized, it reads like a self-portrait and a value statement. He’s not just recalling what he wanted; he’s signaling what kind of greatness he believes still counts.
The phrase “enjoyed sport” matters because it refuses the modern script where greatness is supposedly engineered from day one by parents, programs, and hyper-specialization. Davies frames aspiration as something that grows out of play. That’s also the subtext: elite performance, at least in his telling, starts as joy before it becomes work. The sentence is modest, but it quietly argues against the culture that treats youth athletics as a pipeline and childhood as a training camp.
“Ambition was to be a great sportsman” is old-fashioned in the best way. Not “a champion,” not “the best,” but “a great sportsman” - a word that carries a moral charge: character, composure, respect for the event and the opponent. Coming from an athlete whose era prized amateur ideals even as global sport professionalized, it reads like a self-portrait and a value statement. He’s not just recalling what he wanted; he’s signaling what kind of greatness he believes still counts.
Quote Details
| Topic | Sports |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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