There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering. All the rest are merely games. - ?This is hardly the most famous misattributed quote; a far better candidate would be “There’s a sucker born every minute,” which P.T. Barnum did not say.
This is among the most famous quotes about climbing mountains, and everyone thinks Ernest Hemingway said it. Or wrote it.
He did not.
Leaving Hemingway aside, this quote (or something close) has most often been attributed to bullfighter, writer, artist, and raconteur Barnaby Conrad, whose second book, Matador (1952) reportedly sold two (or three!) million copies. It’s also been attributed to Alfonso de Portago, a thrill-seeking Spanish dilettante, aristocrat, and race-car driver; in a 1976 book, the aphorism was actually called Marquis de Portago’s Dictum.
But it’s more substantively (if less often) attributed to a fourth man: Ken Purdy, an American automotive writer. In the summer of 1957, Sports Cars Illustrated magazine published Purdy’s long profile of de Portago, in which Purdy says to Portago, “I have a quotation in a story, a piece of fiction that won’t be published until this summer, something that I thought at the time I wrote it you might have said: that of all sports, only bullfighting and mountain-climbing and motor-racing really tried a man, that all the rest are mere creations. Would you have said that?”
To which de Portago replies, “I couldn’t agree with you more. You’re quite right. I’ve thought of bull-fighting, of course, but the trouble is that you must start when you’re a child, otherwise you’ll never really know the bulls. And the only trouble with mountain-climbing for me is the lack of an audience! Like most drivers, I’m something of an exhibitionist.”
Purdy’s piece of fiction was “Blood Sport,” which appeared in the July 27, 1957 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. In that story, which focuses largely on the wives of drivers during a dangerous race, the protagonist recalls having been in the car for a few of her husband’s practice laps, during which, “ ‘There are three sports that try a man,’ she remembered Helmut Ovden saying. ‘Bullfighting, motor racing, mountain climbing. All the rest are recreations.’ ”
Who’s Helmut Ovden? He’s another fictional driver, “a Swedish count … who had been a devotee of what he called ‘the blood sports’ since his fifteenth birthday” … and obviously a stand-in for the actual nobleman de Portago, who had been a steeplechase horseman and an Olympic bobsledder.
It’s not difficult to understand how motor-racing enthusiasts de Portago and (accurately) Purdy became linked with the quote. As for Hemingway and Conrad, the former wrote famously about bullfighting, and the latter was not just a bestselling author but an actual professional bullfighter. People like to attach quotes to famous people, and Purdy was actually the least famous among the aforementioned personalities. So he wound up getting the short end of the quote stick.
Which does still leave a couple of mysteries.
First, how did mountaineering make the cut?
I suspect it’s all about the timing.
The Marquess didn’t begin racing cars until 1953, so we might reasonably assume this adage was concocted – again, presumably by Purdy but perhaps with de Portago in mind – between 1953 and ‘57. Which was of course the golden age of Himalayan mountaineering. There are fourteen 8,000-meter peaks on earth – all in the Himalaya or Karakoram ranges – and the first of them wasn’t summited until 1950, when Herzog and Lachenal topped Annapurna. But just six years later, only four of the remaining thirteen had not been conquered. In much of Western Europe – de Portago, by the way, was heir to a Spanish title, born in London, educated in France – the men who scaled those peaks were national heroes, given medals and splashed on the covers of magazines. In the 1950s, mountains and mountaineers were on everyone’s mind. The list wouldn’t have resonated without a third “sport,” and considering the headlines of the day, mountaineering was the obvious choice.
Second, how did Hemingway initially get attached to all this?
I don’t know. The quote doesn’t seem to appear in any of his published works. Not in his 1932 book about bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon; not in his three articles about bullfighting published in Life magazine in 1960; and not in the book – The Dangerous Summer – published in 1985 and culled from the same writing that had been heavily condensed for the Life articles.
It might be as simple as this: Hemingway was many Americans’ popular connection to bullfighting specifically, and dangerous (blood) sports generally, and this quote just seems like something he’d have said. And so, in the popular mind, he did, with a seemingly infinite number of writers and journalists since 1960 happily assuming as much.
Finally, a morbid literary connection…
In 1961, when he was 61, Hemingway used his favorite shotgun to end his life. Eleven years later, Purdy also shot himself to death. He was 59.
And what of Alfonso de Portago? In a 1957 New York Times profile, he was quoted saying, “I won’t die in an accident. I’ll die of old age or be executed in some gross miscarriage of justice.”
Two months later, Portago, his co-driver, and ten spectators (including five children) were killed when a tire on his Ferrari 335 S blew out during a race. He was 28.
Oh, and Barnaby Conrad? A year after de Portago’s fatal crash, Conrad was badly gored while bullfighting in a charity event. It seems he then gave up the “sport” … and lived until 2013, just short of his 91st birthday. His Wikipedia entry says that Conrad, rather than Hemingway, deserves credit for the famous “sports” quote. On the other hand, his New York Times obituary does not mention the quote but does note that Conrad’s hero – who he reportedly never met – was, of course … Hemingway.
Quite interesting 🧐