Every sport pretends to a literature, but people don't believe it of any other sport but their own.

Cooke’s line wryly observes the way sports communities build their own canons: histories, statistics, legends, jargon, and a body of writing that devotees treat as serious “literature.” Yet outsiders often dismiss that seriousness as parochial enthusiasm. The punch is that this skepticism is universal—fans of each sport tend to grant depth and artistry only to the game they already love, while regarding other sports’ narratives as trivial. The quote thus comments on tribal identity in fandom and on how cultural prestige is conferred: not by inherent merit alone, but by belonging, familiarity, and the willingness to read a pastime as a world of meaning.