A student inquired: "Is is true that Tolkien won the Football World Cup once?"
Unfortunately, no. The truth is, in 1930, J.R.R. Tolkien did play in the world cup for England. In the first game, he won 37:5 against the United States! The United States team consisted of 11 clones of Superman, while Tolkien played alone, drunk and with one leg tied to his back. Also, he was only on the field for 80 minutes, because he took a 10-minute break to scribble down a poem. (The Supermen scored 4 of their 5 goals in this period.) Such was his skill!
The defeat was so humiliating for the Americans that they renamed football to "soccer", which is a debased form of "sucker", and invented a completely new form of football to replace it, just to get it all out of the public memory.
Undoubtedly, Tolkien would have won the World Cup in this form. But sadly, after the quarter finals he decided that it wasn't worth his time. He quit and went to the pub.