I wrote an essay thirty-two years ago which at ninety still has not lost its meaning.
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The years, as they tend to do, have crept up secretly and suddenly I find I am 58. That means, of course, that as a sportsman, at least in the fast games – I don’t count bowls or croquet or snooker or even golf – one’s day in the sun are finished. No great harm or humiliation in that: after all, the voice of reason whispers soothingly in one’s ear, you once had your winning years – the time has long come when you must expect to lose. And it is true, of course. The suppleness has gone. The quickness is no longer there. That snap of the reflexes, the eagerness that comes with youth and fitness, they have gone now, fleeting as the dew that glistens on a spider’s web at morning. And so now the other men you play will always be too young, too strong, too fit, too fast, too good. Resignation to one’s fate must now be the only feeling. And yet, it is not quite like that. It is still not so. Losing is still hard, even if it is a minor inter-club tennis doubles match.
There was some strong and earnest character, upper lip stiffened and pleasant losing smile eternally on his face, who once decreed that it was not winning that mattered but taking part. He was a fool, of course. A revised version of his verse is much more accurate – it goes like this:
“And when the last Great Scorer comes
To count your life’s eternal cost
He marks not how you played the game
But if you won or lost.”
There used to be a tradition that losing isn’t really all that important. The poets of the old imperialism were particularly prone to voice this sentiment. It was, naturally, pure hypocrisy on their part since no men were more ruthless in their desire to win and dominate than those of the old imperial strain. Perhaps that is why so much of their fiction was about playing the game and fair play and the glory of taking part – in real life it was very different.
Written up over the entrance to the centre court at Wimbledon are two lines from Kipling, the great English poet of Empire. They read as follows:
“If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat these two imposters just the same….”
They are idiotic lines because the fact is, of course, that no one who is good
enough to play at Wimbledon is dumb enough to feel that losing doesn’t matter. It does matter.
Defeat should never be easily accepted. It is no excuse to say that one has tried one’s hardest, because the fact is that one could always have tried just that fraction harder still, which might have made all the difference.
If a man is to live fully it is necessary for him to feel hard about defeat and
failure. How often has one heard the easy words after a loss at games, or after
some minor failure. “Don’t worry. It isn’t the end of the world.” No, it isn’t
the end of the world, but could it be perhaps that it is a fleeting shadow of it?
Dylan Thomas wrote magnificent poems, none more magnificent than the
famous poem for his dying father: “Do not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”.
It is a poem about death, but it is also about defeat in life, about this need never to resign oneself to failure and loss. Here are a few lines from the poem, crying out against resignation and submission:
“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rage at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words have forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a Green Bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.”
Lines like these would be appropriate for any athlete about to do battle, even in a lost cause, or for any one striving to live a full and valuable life. None of us should try to diminish defeat, for it is only a smaller kind of death.
And so it seems to me that no one should welcome the day when losing comes easily. When that moment comes then you will know that the zest and sweetness and love of life are fast departing.
