GOOD SPORT: The very essence of life

Everything in this life has a beginning and an end — Rafael Nadal’s plain words, uttered when he announced his retirement recently, may appear far too trite, even banal, to mark the end of the greatest era in men’s tennis, but they contain the essence of life.

The greatest sportspersons do self-realisation the best; few people assess themselves with such brutal — yet clinical and forensic — honesty as, say, Rafael Nadal. “He was much better than me,” Nadal would say after a loss; after a particularly bad show, he’d just say: “I did a disaster.”

Press conferences with sportspersons are exercises in banalities, but players such as Nadal, combining sensibility and rationality and honesty, provided nuggets of wisdom that contain life lessons for us mortals. Sportspersons are possibly the only professionals who try to improve their skills every day of their life; for this, they must be brutally honest with themselves — they must confront their faults, their weaknesses. On the other hand, most of us mortals, mired in careerism and an inflated sense of the self, can’t even see our faults.

Eighteen and ebullient in 1989, Viswanathan Anand was the young tiger, ready to take on the world, for which he saw “thrilling possibilities” for himself. Fifty-five next month, Anand has run his race, he’s made his reputation.

Anand took on the world in an online chess game last week — and beat over 60,000 opponents. Chess — not even a sport, and certainly not a game that runs on adrenaline — appears to be ideal for the aged. But professional chess champions are young — Kasparov and Carlsen became world champions at 22, Karpov at 23; Ding Liren is something of an oddity, winning the crown at 31. His challenger, D Gukesh, is 18, and Arjun Erigaisi 21. Anand is ancient, but he’s still the world No. 10 — Gukesh and Erigaisi are the other Indians in the top 10. Anand became the champion of the world in his late 30s; Gukesh could well become a teenaged champion.

Chess great Viswanathan Anand was the India No. 1 for close to four decades; when this writer asked him about the prospect of being deposed by players young enough to be his sons, Anand just laughed philosophically and said everything must end. Indeed.

Nadal and Anand — and Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma and Ravichandran Ashwin — would succumb to the vagaries of time; the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, and even the spirit begins to waver with the passage of time.

Ashwin is 38, Rohit will turn 38 next year, Kohli will be 36 next week. The road ahead for them is much shorter than the road travelled — we’re seeing the end of a golden era, during which India achieved possibly their greatest feat in Test cricket: two consecutive series wins in Australia. It doesn’t get better than that.

Now they’ve lost a Test cricket series at home after 12 years, and for the first time ever to New Zealand — the end of the greats is nigh.

In football, there was an end of an era, too — neither Lionel Messi nor Cristiano Ronaldo was nominated for the prestigious Ballon d’Or, presented to the best footballer in the world; the two had won the award 13 times in the last 16 years — eight for Messi, five for Ronaldo. The award this time went to Rodrigo Hernandez, a man who had admitted to his own frailties as “the lame one who never did anything” during his days in university.

Rani Rampal, former India hockey captain, too, has life lessons for us — daughter of a cart-puller who earned Rs 80 a day, the girl who was rejected by a district-level coach for being malnourished, has gracefully walked away from the sport: “It’s time for me to step off the field as a player and begin a new chapter… Hockey has been my passion, my life, and the greatest honour I could ever have asked for.”

Humility, Nietzsche thought, was a form of self-protection for the weak and the mediocre — disguised as virtue, a defence mechanism against strong, industrious individuals in society. The greatest achievers in sports would disagree — men such as Anand and Nadal and Federer are certainly not weak and mediocre, and yet they are humble because they have seen themselves with supreme powers, and then they’ve seen their own powers decline in time. Anand and Federer remind one of what F Scott Fitzgerald wrote in the first chapter of ‘The Great Gatsby’: “A sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.”

If the mind of a baby is like a blank slate, as is posited by scientists and philosophers, then what Fitzgerald wrote can’t be true, and a sense of decencies can indeed be cultivated. Lessons from sportspersons must be learnt, so that we become better at what we do and are before we end.