Is Bullfighting a Sport?

Ernest Hemingway didn’t think so. The author and aficionado of the activity thought it more a drama where the bull and the bullfighter play their respective roles: death and danger. “In the novelist’s hands what had been a provincial curiosity became not merely art but, in a continent slowly edging towards a decade of savagery, a reminder of the primitive fragility of European life, and the human attributes needed to transmit violence into grace. Artists and filmmakers have followed Hemingway’s metaphor for nearly a century. ‘The truly great killer must have a sense of honor and a sense of glory far beyond that of the ordinary bullfighter,’ Hemingway observed. ‘In other words he must be a simpler man.'”