I never intended to suggest that "fields" or "field" has to refer to football fields (or to any sort of sports field) and I have no idea how what I wrote gave y

I never intended to suggest that "fields" or "field" has to refer to football fields (or to any sort of sports field) and I have no idea how what I wrote gave you the impression that I meant something so absurdly specific. But canoeing doesn't, and couldn't, take place on any sort of field, and that (rather than anything to do with football fields specifically) is why I think "diversion of the field" an excessively inexact way to describe it, nice though it sounds. Looking at the other comment you mention, I suppose perhaps you infer from Webster's inclusion of fishing as a "diversion of the field" that "of the field" for him means something very, very broad like "outdoors". I suppose it's possible that it does; but if so I can only say that whatever it may have meant for Webster, it certainly doesn't mean that for me, and I doubt it could mean it for any reader of McPhee who was actually paying attention to the meaning of his words rather than their sound. You may well be right about what McPhee is getting at with the word "simply". I don't find myself able to read it that way. Especially if I assume for the sake of argument that Somers's interpretation of what McPhee says about "sport" is right -- i.e., that McPhee wanted something that means more or less the same as "sport" but sounds better. For me, though perhaps not for everyone, sport goes in an entirely different category from quasi-religious experience-distilled-down-to-its-essence.