The notion of sports writing being a form of what the philosopher Nelson Goodman called ′worldmaking′ is articulated. Through the crafting of words about the realm of sport and the associated striving for human excellence, new worlds are themselves crafted: sports writers have a canvas to reframe and reconsider what it is to be human, and in so doing to create new insights, new meanings and a fresh universe for the reader to inhabit. In the context of this, the sportswriter Hugh McIlvanney′s characterisation of sport as a ″magnificent triviality″ is interrogated, and while the activities of sport may well per se be trivial, the words that accrete around them—that mediate the spectacle and the personalities—can serve to build a magnificent profundity. The questions of whether sport itself is beautiful, and what it means to write beautiful words about beautiful spectacles, is interrogated from the standpoint of philosophical aesthetics. The Nietzschean distinction between the Apollonian and the Dionysian is developed and applied to sports writing. The works of the celebrated Trinidadian sportswriter C.L.R. James, who viewed sport, specifically cricket, as a primarily aesthetic activity, infuse this discussion, as do those of the British critic Neville Cardus.