Anyone who has played sport at the highest level knows that sinking nervous, almost fearful feeling before a big event. It is made up of all manner of emotions – the pure nerves associated with any competitive endeavour, the fear of letting your team or country down, the fear of not doing yourself justice in the eyes of others – and the knowledge of the distress, which is extreme in the hardest confrontations, that you know can result as the mind and body are pushed to the limit. Which sportsman – even when he is earning his living by it – has not asked himself the question before the match: Why am I doing this? I could be cosily among the spectators, taking a drink with the boys. Why on earth am I here at all, about to go again under the gun of competition?
Indeed if a sportsman does not have this feeling you can be fairly sure that he is not a really good competitor. The Champion with ice-cold nerves and unshakable super-confidence is a myth. A great champion may look ice-cold and supremely confident but, inside, the tension and the nerves and the fear are shaking him up too. Tendulkar is no different. Federer suffers the torture too. Usain Bolt looks super cool but within he hides a racing heart.
As sportsmen grow older, this nervous feeling, the self-doubt, the fear before the match, does not diminish – in fact, it tends to get stronger. “Why on earth am I here?” is a question the older sportsman asks himself more and more insistently. This is partly because he generally has a reputation from younger days to protect and cannot help but feel, however irrationally, that that reputation is somehow still at stake. And, more importantly, he asks himself the question “Why am I still doing this?” because he knows that his body is gradually letting him down, weakening, can less and less do justice to what he once was able to achieve. He knows, increasingly, that the freshness and fitness that flows from youth alone is no longer there to give a lift to the wilting spirit. I even feel for Ponting, who has never been a favourite of mine, as I watch him fight fiercely against decline.
Why do old veterans still compete when it isn’t for money? The answer is not easy to find. It isn’t for exercise – that can be obtained outside competition. It isn’t for fame – the days for that are over. It should not be with the hope of making the nation’s team – he should realize when those days are past. It isn’t to impress – one is much more likely to make a fool of oneself.
What, then, is it? It may, I think, have something to do with the answer the English climber, George Mallory, gave when he was asked why he was going to climb Mount Everest: “Because it is there, “ he said. “Because it is there.” It may have something to do with the need to know not merely what you can do, more importantly, what you are. And discovering what you are – the inward explanation necessary – comes only when you are competing to the utmost.
However, I have come to the conclusion that the urge to go on competing mainly has to do with what is known to sportsmen as “hitting the wall”, and the high – a much more potent high than you get from alcohol – that comes from surviving and triumphing when you do “hit the wall.”
The “wall” is well known to all champions. It is a threshold which the sportsman has to force himself to cross, a low point of pain and weariness and sometimes despair which the sportsman has to get accustomed to fighting through if he is ever to become a champion. This low point of exhaustion, this threshold of distress, is a memory which comes back to a sportsman and makes him ask himself why is he risking again what hurts so much. But the interesting thing is that while the memory of “the wall” is strong and powerful, the memory of what it was like to conquer it is stronger still. And that is the answer to why an old sportsman still competes. The memory of hitting the wall makes him pause, the hope of conquering it perhaps once more urges him on. He remembers it as a kind of exultation and he wants to feel that thrill again.
And here is a fascinating thought. Medical studies suggest that in situations of great stress, great danger, in a battle for instance, with death a fraction away, the body is able to generate something akin to heroin. This subdues all pain, takes away all fear, and allows absolute concentration and crystal-clear awareness of the self and its potential. I believe it may be that the climaxes of competition are something like such life-and-death struggles. At those times, when losing is just a fraction away, it is like dying to the champion sportsman. And who knows then what drug his body manufactures? The fact seems to be that if a sportsman has felt such a drug thrill through him often enough he will always want to get it again. He is like a man addicted and that is why, for no good rational reason, he ventures again and again into the battle of competition – its agony, but its exultation also.
