There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.

“I have a quotation in a story, a piece of fiction that won't be published until this summer,” I told Portago, “something that I thought at the time I wrote it you might have said: that of all sports, only bull fighting and mountain-climbing and motor-racing really tried a man, that all the rest are mere recreations. Would you have said that?” | “I couldn’t agree with you more,” Portago said. | Ken W. Purdy (August 1957) "Portago; The real story of the sizzling Spaniard" Sports Cars Illustrated (Ziff-Davis: New York) vol. 3 no. 2 p. 63 | “There are three sports that try a man,” she remembered Helmut Ovden saying, “bullfighting, motor racing, mountain climbing. All the rest are recreations.” | Ken W. Purdy (27 July 1957) "Blood Sport" The Saturday Evening Post (Curtis: Philadelphia) vol. 230 no. 4 p. 92 | An early attribution to Hemingway is the essay "Why" by Gene Hill, published in Guns & Ammo and reprinted in 1972 in A Hunter's Fireside Book: Tales of Dogs, Ducks, Birds and Guns (Winchester Press: New York) ISBN 0876910762 p. 96 | I tend to agree with Hemingway who said something to the effect that only mountain climbing, bull fighting and automobile racing were sports and that everything else was a game. | See Barry Popik (May 13, 2012) “Auto racing, bullfighting, and mountain climbing are the only real sports—all others are games” The Big Apple