It may be too much to expect sports journalism to wear a literary Guernsey at all. But here we have writing in book form. Not only that: the writing wears a ‘best ever’ badge, and includes the odd serious poem. It has switched codes and is playing for Literature. Some of the pieces are occasionals, sporting moments caught in words: the first Melbourne Cup in 1861; the Sydney Olympics 2000. Some are meditations on aesthetic features of sport: the civilised majesty of great cricket batsmen, for example. Others are profiles of the legends: Don Bradman, Don Bradman and more Don Bradman. They are stripped of any advantage they once may have had in holding the reader’s attention by being hot off the press. After reading these 700-plus pages, I reached the following conclusion: Australian sports writing is one big puff piece. On the one hand, it reports statistics, injury dramas, slumps in form, playing strategies, bitchy boardroom battles. On the other, it’s as if sport is journalism’s sacred cow. Journalists and columnists may have the ice of scepticism running through their veins when writing about business and businessman, politics and politicians, but, when it comes to writing about sports and sports people, their arteries clog with treacle. Here’s how you spot such a writer: if you’re reading his or her sports story and your mind starts wandering off into a fantasy of yourself as a hero, wearing club colours or your nation’s strip like Superman wears a cape, then that’s the treacleitis infecting you from the page.

That will happen a lot if you read all these stories. It’s as if there’s an unwritten law saying that sport is one permissible way for grown-up writers to adore comic-book heroes and write them up for public adoration, accepting wholeheartedly that these heroes have worth as role models, and sport itself currency as a moral codifier. The more confident writers attempt to express exactly how and why a sport or hero generates manna in a moral or cultural context. Johnson would have approved of that, I think.

Les Carlyon, one of Australia’s sagest sports scribes, is surprisingly underrepresented in this collection with only one piece, a reflection on Australian Rules Football legend Ted Whitten, who, Carlyon reminds us, was and still is a ‘folk hero’ in Victoria. Whitten, who died in 1995 after an obligatory post-playing-days coaching and media career, seemed nothing more than a loud-mouth redneck to me. But, it was always fascinating to witness his casting as a working-class hero from the western suburbs with a simple ‘Get off your arse and make a go of it’ attitude to life. Carylon stretches the Whitten legend out across the whole Victorian cultural landscape like a shroud over a lost era – that of the Aussie good bloke – which Carlyon mourns and yearns to see revived. ‘Sport is a passion and out of passion comes love. No point trying to work out why some become heroes and others don’t. The chosen ones just go into the pantheon and refuse to fade.’ You either connect with that sort of hyperbole or you don’t. I don’t. It reminds me, as Barry Humphries has done more intentionally through his satire, how limited and suffocating a society Victoria has been.

I recently watched a game of cricket in a park. Beside me stood a six-year-old girl. Cricket made her sad, she told me. When I asked why that was so, she replied that the players must be unemployed to have so much time on their hands. If you are a committed watcher of cricket, you too will have plenty of time on your hands. Which probably explains why so much has been written about the game: there’s nothing else to do. Cricket dominates this book to the tune of a couple of hundred pages. Indeed the collection might well have been called The Best Ever Australian Cricket Writing and Some Racing, Footy and Boxing Stories As Well. If sport really is a religion, then it would appear our local sports writers are Australian Orthodox. Tennis, golf, soccer, motor racing, basketball may indeed be the most popular sports in the world, but, in this collection, they barely rate a mention. What a waste. I would have thought that some of our most intriguing stories and characters are to be found in those sports: Greg Norman and his flawed genius, choking as he does in the last rounds of major tournaments; Sydney to Hobart yacht racing – vulgar wealth, ego-trips, Iron John adventure for the boys, topped off by death and scandal; soccer – the footy code played by most Australians, and a producer of world stars, but still just ‘Wog Ball’ in the national scheme of things. And as for the girls, we get profiles of the Freemans and the Cuthberts, but sport, like politics, business, you name it, has traditionally been male territory. Female sports writers have been few in number. It certainly shows in this book; you can count their contributions on one hand. Given Caroline Wilson’s rise to footy-writing prominence in Melbourne in recent years, I’d have thought she would have got a run. There are only two overseas writers represented, including Mark Twain musing on the Melbourne Cup. The editor says in his Introduction that there were so many good local pieces the collection didn’t need bolstering with foreigners. I wish he had left out a few locals – a gushing, Go-Cathy-Go bit of treacle from poet Mark O’Connor, for one – and at least fitted in American Rick Reilly’s Sports Illustrated masterpiece on golfer Ian Baker-Finch’s bizarre career collapse.

When unable to find any moral use for a poet’s work, Johnson was inclined to dismiss it and the poet outright. Or not so outright if he considered the work might give a little pleasure. He was also big on ‘the grace of wit and the vigour of nature’. Pleasure, vigour, nature. They are words that go together well when considering sport. Sport teaches us nothing of morality – pity the fool who thinks it does – but it does give us plenty of vigour, nature, and pleasant afternoons. The best of the ‘best ever’ in this book reminds us of that.