The painful struggle of the sporting twilight

The sun sets and twilight begins. You can see clearly still, but darkness is coming. It’s called the Civil Dusk in meteorological terms, but in sport this time is more an uncivil, cranky struggle. The end is inevitable, but it’s always fought. Think of it as a messy, magnificent attempt to try and reclaim the unreclaimable, to ward off the smirking creep of age and to search for the last remains of the great player they once knew.

Rohit Sharma, 37, is there, so is Virat Kohli, 36. These aren’t slumps, these are slides of varying speeds. But if twilight only ends one way, we’re uncertain how long it lasts. Lionel Messi, 37, is stretching his in a slower US league. LeBron James, 40, is still rising against all tides. Novak Djokovic, nearing 38, is a lean guerilla made of soldered wires. But everything frays.

“Go out on top” is sports’ silliest phrase, for athletes are built to tussle with limits, not to admit theirs. They believe in redemptions, comebacks, fourth winds. Muhammad Ali won the heavyweight title for the third time at 36 years and seven months.

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Anyway, who goes gently? Not even writers whose ideas leak away, nor musicians who can’t retrieve an old sound. I once saw Meat Loaf live in 2004, in his 50s, and he was majestic but there were notes he could not reach. In sport, no one wins 22 Grand Slam titles and says enough, goodbye. They go on, as Rafael Nadal did, till he resembled a steam engine whose bolts and bearings had begun to fall away.

The athlete striving to find a workable version of himself isn’t always pretty, but it’s conditioning. We admire athletes precisely because they don’t surrender, not when they’re wiping vomit, or two sets behind, so how do you imagine they’ll yield now? Kohli’s greatness partly arrived from an obstinate spiritedness—he could pick a scrap with his shadow—and so of course he persists. To battle is his reflex.

The athletic twilight is the last struggle, the concluding act of resistance. There is, says Greg Chappell on the phone from Adelaide, “a grief” to it. “It’s like losing something you love dearly.”

The fading player once built his machinery, but now can’t fix its malfunctioning part. Is it the grip, stance, feet, brain? Chappell once got Dennis Lillee to bowl to him at the nets for an hour to see if he noticed anything awry. Nothing, said Lillee. But this was practice, when the play began is when anxiety interfered.

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Chappell remembers what greatness felt like. “I knew what was coming next. The ball felt like it was travelling in slow motion. I could often dictate to bowlers what they would bowl next.” But it’s always the little things which start to fall away. Cracks in a grand edifice. “Your faculties are diminishing,” says Geet Sethi, master once of the billiards baize, “either slowly or rapidly, your eyesight, timing, body, muscle, reflexes. Even nerves age.”

Confidence sometimes resembles a tree trunk worked on by woodpeckers. “In your prime,” says Chappell, “you’re only thinking runs, now you’re looking to not get out first. You don’t move, you’re never in the right position, you’re mis-hitting balls which you would score from.” The margins which decide greatness are tiny. Losing one per cent is fine, says Chappell, but five is too much.

The twilight is full of tough debate and unsympathetic snickering, for people want heroes not has-beens. Athletes become risk averse, circumspect, self-indulgent, and can feel the cut of criticism. “I was coming up,” wrote Pete Sampras, as his form unravelled in 2002, “against one of the most spirit-killing problems any player has to face: the growing, inescapable chorus of critics who seem obsessed with putting you out to pasture.”

In Sampras’s book, A Champion’s Mind, he writes about becoming what he’d trained to avoid: unpredictable. “You bet on good players, you go to the bank with great ones”. He changes coaches, is so “mired in misery” that even his wife’s letter can’t lift him at Wimbledon, he feels like crying, he wonders if he should retire, he wants to punch a reporter who laughs when he suggests he can win the US Open.

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In this twilight, defiance walks with delusion. Sethi, using a cricketing analogy, says, “With a great player there will always be sparks despite the deterioration. You have five ducks and then a 140 and you think, ‘I still have it’.” Maybe Djokovic, no Grand Slam title in 2024, feels that after out-thinking Carlos Alcaraz in Australia. Then something tore in his body.

Has the Serb got a Slam left in him? Has Kohli one great Test series? They’re smarter, but are they clearer? Does Kohli look at Steve Smith, 35, with four centuries from middle-December, and think, if he still has it, I can find it again? The selectors eventually have to retire players, for the athletes, understandably, won’t do it themselves. They’re programmed to try, dig, believe, clutch on to some faint, whispering hope. It’s this chase which is compelling.

Reporters are supposed to ask tough questions. Athletes are free to conceal how they feel. About how uneven form undermines trust, hesitation looms, will hardens, ego flares, doubt visits, stubbornness stiffens, bodies complain, anger swells, energy wilts, advice arrives, flow hiccups, prayer rises. The twilight drains.

Sampras won the US Open in 2002, a deviation from the normal script, but every great athlete thinks they’re unique, that there’s more, wait, watch, till one day they understand there is nothing left. Till then they delay.

Perhaps they fear entering the next world, the normal, dull one of no applause where we live. Perhaps, inside them are remnants of the kid who once fell for a game and can’t let go. But the numbers aren’t lying and the body isn’t responding and the crowds aren’t cheering like they once did. The twilight is a lonely place of lousy truths.

Rohit Brijnath is an assistant sports editor at The Straits Times, Singapore, and a co-author of Abhinav Bindra’s book A Shot At History: My Obsessive Journey To Olympic Gold. He posts @rohitdbrijnath.

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