The wide, varied, wonderful world of sport

In the frozen Alaskan wilderness of sharp winds and cutting cold, racing sometimes had a cruel, incredulous cost.

- ROHIT BRIJNATH

In 1985, the year before she won her first Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, a 1,150-mile grind from Anchorage to Nome, a moose ran into Susan Butcher's team and started killing dogs. In eight seconds, she later told the Los Angeles Times, two dogs were dead and eight injured and Butcher had to hold off the moose with an axe for 20 minutes before help came.

I don’t know where I first read about Butcher, probably in Sports Illustrated in the late 1980s, when the magazine, full of long-form wanderings, opened my world to writing and sports I was unfamiliar with. Like this guy they called The Great One, whose nickname was compelling, so off you'd go, reading 2,000 words on an unobtrusive genius in a foreign sport called ice hockey named Wayne Gretzky.

Most of usare somewhat hostage to the hemispheres we're born in and the cultures that surround us. I grew up toa blur in Indian blue called Mohammed Shahid and to the sound of “out yaar” ricocheting down the lane. Kabaddi was ourearthy inheritance, but once ina while, even in those days before 24/7 TV sport, I'd stumble on something new. Like those zigzagging Zorros called the All Blacks who I discovered in the 1980s ina house in Beck Baganin Kolkata where my ex-wife's brothers worshipped this tribe and its hypnotic haka.

In football, players have hysterical fits in the face of referees but, in rugby, men the size of earthmovers stand quiet as the referee dresses them down. In this game, where humans bruise each other and then line up to shake hands, there's still a powerful honouring ofa game's unwritten codes.