How ...achieve to be your unhappy... dreams
Several years after Will Carling’s rugby career had ended – a career in which he’d become England’s youngest captain, leading them to three Grand Slams and a World Cup final – his son asked if it was true that he used to play rugby. Being told that it was, the boy refused to believe the answer. ‘You’re too fat,’ he replied.
It’s no surprise Carling left his sporting exploits behind him. He may have been worshipped by many as ‘Darling Carling’, but from the inside, parts of his career had felt like hell. The media attention made him miserable, particularly after he divorced his first wife and developed a friendship with Princess Diana. He bought a flat in which to hide away. Over the course of a year he didn’t open the blinds once.
As this book by the BBC sports presenter Simon Mundie shows, it’s a common experience. The rest of us dream
of being good enough to play sport for a living, of winning world titles and Olympic golds, but those who actually get to do it often find it a disappointment. The pressure of expectation, both from yourself and from fans, can be crushing.
Helen Richardson-Walsh, the Great Britain hockey player, says that some of her team-mates were so scared of failing in the run-up to the 2012 London Olympics that they couldn’t even bring themselves to say the word ‘gold’ out loud. In the end they won bronze.
And even when you do win the greatest prizes, they can fail to bring joy. As the rugby league player Stevie Ward puts it, thinking that success will make you happy is ‘like chasing a horizon. No matter how fast you run, you never actually
get any closer to “arriving”.’ His rugby union counterpart Jonny Wilkinson experienced this in 2003, when victory in the World Cup left him dissatisfied. A theme in the lessons gathered together by Mundie seems to be that we should concentrate on the little things.
Tim Henman is usually seen as a failure – the guy who only reached the Wimbledon semi-finals. But you could say, as Mundie does, that he was ‘someone who got the absolute most out of his talent’. In the end, while getting the most out of your talent requires lots of hard work, it doesn’t have to consume you, to the point where you become miserable. There has to be a moment when, to quote a well-known sports firm, you just do it.