Old Sport

A reader will know right from an epigraph that the stories in this collection of essays are likely to be personal: “For God’s sake, go outside and play!” Peter Unwin quotes his mother as saying. That widely understood imperative, perhaps recognized more by Generation X and older cohorts than by younger ones, sets the stage for Unwin’s writing about “games, sports, and play.” The reminiscences range peripatetically from baseball, soccer, and lacrosse to Snakes and Ladders and snooker. With them, Unwin shows how “play is our essence and the reason we are here.”

At the heart of Playing Hard, though, are ruminations about the author’s relationship with his father, a Second World War veteran who brought his young family to Canada from Sheffield, England, in the early 1950s. “When my father’s life was coming to an end in the hospital,” Unwin explains with his first sentence, “we talked mostly about sports.” Like most sons, he had heard his old man’s stories many...