To understand Anna Karenina, Mellors, Molly Bloom, Dante, Romeo, Juliet
and Bridget Jones you must also have loved and lost and won. To
understand sport in the greatest arenas of them all you too must have
played and lost and won, known shame, hope, joy, horror and glory.
Simon Barnes has taken part in seven summer Olympic Games, five World
Cups and ten Ashes series. Well, not exactly taken part, but certainly
he was there and writing hard. And always, behind every victory and
every defeat he ever recorded, there was the reference of his own
sporting career, in which the bitter beauties of failure were
occasionally varied with the intoxication of success.
At school he was - at least at first - the opposite of a rebel without a
cause: he was a sporting fool in search of a game he could excel at,
alas finding none. When he was nine he thought he would somehow be
miraculously good at sport. Sadly he never was. But the sporting fool
within him never died and in his late 20s he tried again - a second
sporting career, in which the triumph of hope over experience was more
or less a rout. The dream had only slightly modified: he now thought he
would be somehow miraculously competent.
So he co-founded a football team and at last found himself the
first-choice goalkeeper. Then he co-founded a cricket team, on the
grounds that by doing so he would always be sure of a game. And at the
same time, he got horsiness and discovered he was actually quite good at
riding in competition.
All these adventures taught him about sport: why we do it, what is
required to be very good at it. He learned about the relationship of
physical and mental skills, about fear and courage and physical pain. He
learned about funk, about Zen-like calm, about the team thing, about the
"me" thing. His sporting failure has been a joyous and profoundly
informative part of his life, and here he tells the story of it.
