ON TOP OF THE GAME: AGE & INJURIES NO BAR
Autobiographies of sportspersons tend to be anodyne. Just as official interactions with them are mediated, and full of platitudes, autobiographies, too, have become another form of a mediated encounter, a whirring of the PR wheels, an output of the spin factory. The 2015 documentary on Cristiano Ronaldo is a classic example. It not so much revealed a glimpse of who Ronaldo really is, but showed us who Ronaldo thinks we should believe he is.
There are exceptions. John McEnroe’s autobiography, Serious; Andre Agassi’s Open; and Tony Adams’s Addicted are intimate and forthright and offer readers and fans insights they did not have. Shane Warne’s just published autobiography, No Spin, despite its many flaws (too long, too digressive), is an addition to that sub genre.
No Spin is good in several respects (the art of leg spin, the challenges of captaincy), but it is particularly astute about one thing: how injuries affect a top player, how they play havoc as much with his body as his mind. We, as fans, may understand and appreciate the game. We may be obsessively preoccupied with it. But, reading Warne, we realise that it is impossible to be intuitive about how things really work in the mind of an elite player.
Warne, having undergone surgeries to his finger and shoulder (the two most important things physically to a leg spinner) was no stranger to injuries. He talks about how difficult it is to rediscover one’s rhythm on coming back from injury, how hard the most basic things seem, how remote all the guile and trickery that once came so easily appear.
With this, comes a crippling lack of confidence. This is a vicious cycle. Warne says that on return from injury, he felt he was no longer the bowler he used to be. He worried that his opponent had figured this out as well, and no longer feared him as he once did. That, in turn, gnawed further away at his confidence, and diminished him still more. It is harrowing.
How do sportspersons who have been hit by grievous injuries ever recover their top game?
Think about Diego Maradona. In September 1983, already the most talented and expensive young footballer in the world, Maradona, playing for Barcelona against Athletic Bilbao, was scythed down on the pitch by Antoni Goikoetxea, the defender who came to be known as the Butcher of Bilbao. “I just felt the impact, heard the sound, like a piece of wood cracking, and realised immediately what had happened,” Maradona writes in his autobiography, El Diego. “…I said, weeping, ‘I’m broken, I’m broken.’”
But Maradona did not allow this devastating injury to break him. He put himself back together again. Less than three years later, in arguably the greatest exhibition of solo virtuosity in football on a world stage, he led Argentina to victory in the World Cup in Mexico.
Think, most of all, about three men who, between them, have dominated their sport for more than a decade now. Between them, they have held off the charge of the I think of the Penguin Modern Classics series as a kind of ‘quarantine period’ for more recent works of literature that have great literary quality but which are not yet old enough to have demonstrated that they can endure through time. They are our best guess at what will be the classics of the future: we know they speak to the present, but time will tell if they speak for all ages.
A book that has had many different Penguin cover designs is Sons and Lovers by DH Lawrence. next generation, proving that ageing need not be synonymous with dwindling. Three men whose careers have been ravaged by injuries. And who have coped with them, battled them as well as their inner demons, rediscovered their magic, and risen again to rule their sport.
Think about Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal, and Roger Federer. This past Tuesday, the trio ended the year ranked Numbers 1, 2, and 3, the first time the three have occupied the top spots since 2014. (They did that, every year, between 2007 and 2011.) This year, they shared the year’s four majors between them (Djokovic won Wimbledon and the US Open; Nadal the French Open; and Federer the Australian Open).