Meet the author
As I was growing up in Neston on the Wirral, ten miles south of Liverpool, ‘football’ meant only one thing to me: the round-ball, kicking game that some people know as ‘soccer’.
Even in that small, quiet market town, with the nearest professional club (Tranmere Rovers) eight miles away, football was part of the fabric of everyday life. My father brought me up as a supporter of Everton, whose home ground was only a mile from his childhood home in Bootle.
Other sports, such as cricket, sometimes caught my attention, but I was well into adulthood before I took an interest in any other football-related sport. I flirted with rugby league (at least partly as a reaction to the middle-class and media preference for rugby union), and had a spell of regularly watching Gaelic football on TV, after being led to a pair of matches at Croke Park on a trip to Dublin.
By my early thirties, the Premier League era was well underway, and I was getting jaded by the hype around soccer (not that I would have even considered calling it ‘soccer’ back then) in England. A three-year spell in the US then broadened my mind about sport and got me mildly hooked on American football, specifically the NFL. (I could never quite grasp the idea of college football being watched by huge crowds and millions of TV viewers, although it began to make more sense when I learned about its history.)
A few years after returning to the UK, I began developing a sideline as a writer alongside my IT career. By this time, I had read an intriguing book on the evolution of American sport and its relationship to soccer (and, to some extent, rugby) –Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism by Andrei Markovits and Steven Hellerman. This gave me an idea for an article for a British magazine about the birth of American football.
The article never came to fruition, but the idea did become the germ for a bigger one: a book about the birth and evolution of all major sports. I soon came to my senses and realised that such a book would be either unfeasibly long or hopelessly light on detail. But my new awareness of American football’s rugby origins, along with rugby’s early evolution alongside soccer (not, as some would have us believe, as a spin-off from it), led me to the more focused, cohesive idea that would become A Devilish Pastime.
I refined the concept and began working on the manuscript, and was delighted when Randall Northam at SportsBooks decided to take it on. The resulting printed book was titled A Develyshe Pastime, true to the spelling used by the 16th-century Puritan Philip Stubbes, whose words the title is based on – as you can see here.
The book was published in 2009 and remained in print for two years. I then self-published a re-edited version as an ebook – with the title also updated to A Devilish Pastime – in 2012.
Meanwhile, my day job moved on from IT to copy-editing and proofreading, but I found the time to give A Devilish Pastime a makeover and update for a reissue in January 2017, and I still give it the occasional tweak. I hope you will read and enjoy it, and would be very interested to hear your thoughts – please get in touch.
Thanks for your interest in A Devilish Pastime.
Graham Hughes, Chester, UK
Even in that small, quiet market town, with the nearest professional club (Tranmere Rovers) eight miles away, football was part of the fabric of everyday life. My father brought me up as a supporter of Everton, whose home ground was only a mile from his childhood home in Bootle.
Other sports, such as cricket, sometimes caught my attention, but I was well into adulthood before I took an interest in any other football-related sport. I flirted with rugby league (at least partly as a reaction to the middle-class and media preference for rugby union), and had a spell of regularly watching Gaelic football on TV, after being led to a pair of matches at Croke Park on a trip to Dublin.
By my early thirties, the Premier League era was well underway, and I was getting jaded by the hype around soccer (not that I would have even considered calling it ‘soccer’ back then) in England. A three-year spell in the US then broadened my mind about sport and got me mildly hooked on American football, specifically the NFL. (I could never quite grasp the idea of college football being watched by huge crowds and millions of TV viewers, although it began to make more sense when I learned about its history.)
A few years after returning to the UK, I began developing a sideline as a writer alongside my IT career. By this time, I had read an intriguing book on the evolution of American sport and its relationship to soccer (and, to some extent, rugby) –Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism by Andrei Markovits and Steven Hellerman. This gave me an idea for an article for a British magazine about the birth of American football.
The article never came to fruition, but the idea did become the germ for a bigger one: a book about the birth and evolution of all major sports. I soon came to my senses and realised that such a book would be either unfeasibly long or hopelessly light on detail. But my new awareness of American football’s rugby origins, along with rugby’s early evolution alongside soccer (not, as some would have us believe, as a spin-off from it), led me to the more focused, cohesive idea that would become A Devilish Pastime.
I refined the concept and began working on the manuscript, and was delighted when Randall Northam at SportsBooks decided to take it on. The resulting printed book was titled A Develyshe Pastime, true to the spelling used by the 16th-century Puritan Philip Stubbes, whose words the title is based on – as you can see here.
The book was published in 2009 and remained in print for two years. I then self-published a re-edited version as an ebook – with the title also updated to A Devilish Pastime – in 2012.
Meanwhile, my day job moved on from IT to copy-editing and proofreading, but I found the time to give A Devilish Pastime a makeover and update for a reissue in January 2017, and I still give it the occasional tweak. I hope you will read and enjoy it, and would be very interested to hear your thoughts – please get in touch.
Thanks for your interest in A Devilish Pastime.
Graham Hughes, Chester, UK