Fred Titmus goes to the opera

In his latest book Turning Over the Pebbles: A Life in Cricket and the Mind, Mike Brearley writes of being an intellectual among professional sportsmen and turns it into a reflection on the accident of our birth:

Similar cynicism came my way when I was doing philosophy in my early days playing cricket for Middlesex Fred Titmus, the senior player (whose first game for Middlesex in 1949 coincided with the first of my father's two games, so that after Fred played in my last game at Lords In 1982 he was able to say he 'saw the father in and the son out'), would prod me with questions like: "This philosophy that we're all paying for, what's it all about?" He was being sarcastic, goading, but he was genuinely curious. 

I took his curiosity seriously, and tried to give some sort of answer. In other lives, with different backgrounds, Fred might have been doing philosophy and I might have been born and brought up in King's Cross and had left school at fourteen, and learned cricket, football and boxing at a local boys' club. (I once had a spare ticket for Benjamin Britain's Peter Grimes, and asked him if he'd like to go. We sat in the gods, and Fred was taken with it.)

Brearley talked to the Australian cricket journalist Gideon Haigh about this book and his life for the podcast Cricket, Et Cetera. It's well worth a listen.