Rohit Brijnath: The endless search to understand athletes

He has a bouncer’s heavy walk and a pause when he speaks which is striking. His answers aren’t rehearsed or impatient or from some well-worn drawer of cliches. Ask him a question and he waits a beat. Golfer Jon Rahm, Masters champion in 2023, makes you feel he’s actually thinking about what you asked. In Singapore in March, the Spaniard stands and chats, never looking at his watch as he speaks about Navy Seals, Rafael Nadal, Michael Phelps and how the taste of winning is fleeting.

“You think this (feeling of euphoria) will last forever. If you were a kid and you were playing at recess and you won a game of football, how long did that last? An hour later you want to win again. So it essentially is the same thing.” I’m grateful for the 23 minutes with a great athlete who’s willing to stray beyond glibness and excavate a little of himself. Isn’t that what we miss? The long conversation, the insight, the unmasking, the untangling. What we might call substance before there was “content”. Athletes as humans, flawed and intriguing, not well-positioned brands trying to sell a manufactured identity to influencers.

For 40 years, like so many folks who enjoy sport, I’ve been trying to piece together athletes. There are always more bits than you think. Parts you hadn’t thought of or weren’t revealed to you. Layers you hadn’t quite got to yet. Ways they saw the game which not everyone can articulate. More than 10 years ago Rahul Dravid was hailing Ken Dryden’s book, The Game—the world of a Canadian ice-hockey goalkeeper— and when I finally read it last year, I understood the Indian’s fascination because it had paragraphs like this.

“I feel nothing, I hear nothing, my eyes watch the puck, my body moves— like a goalie moves, like I move; I don’t tell it to move or how to move or where, I don’t know it’s moving, I don’t feel it move—yet it moves. And when my eyes watch the puck, I see things I don’t know I’m seeing… I see something in the way a shooter holds his stick, in the way his body angles and turns... in what he’s done before that tells me what he’ll do—and my body moves. I let it move.”

Stories, that’s what we want, for even though we’ll never quite fully decode athletes, it’s the investigating of who they are which is rewarding—the places that made them, the suffering that drove them, the grit that binds them, the philosophies that sustain them. Stories from athletes of any age, even if they’re 14, because they’ve been where we’ll never go, which is into the arena under the lights. Stories patiently mined, as the brilliant Sharda Ugra does, once listening as hockey star Rani Rampal cooked for her.

Stories from fathers, and from books, and sometimes both together. The writer Prem Panicker once typed a lovely tale about his boyhood in the 1970s, his dad walking through Moore Market in Chennai on every second Saturday, past the endless secondhand book stalls, and one day bringing home to his son A. J. Liebling’s The Sweet Science. This is a deep dive into boxing, just as Philippe Petit’s 1985 book, On The High Wire , is a wander through another dangerous art.

Petit is the brilliant Frenchman who flies to New York in 1974, smuggles cables into the World Trade Centre, shoots an arrow across to the next tower and steps onto a wire 1,350 feet above the ground. We know art arrives from practice, but his struggle is unique. “I have kicked off snow with every step as I walked along a frozen cable... I have run bare foot over a cable burning with sunlight... I have even asked people to shake the installation with ropes, to strike the wire with long bars...I have put on unmatched pairs of shoes.”

These days athletes speak via 20-second clips on Instagram and in hastily assembled Netflix documentaries. Sport tends to get stuck on triviality while retreating from complexity. Athletes remain fascinating yet have made them selves opaque. An irony is stalking us: There are more cameras than before, from more angles than we ever imagined, and yet while we’ve never been closer to the action, we’ve never been so distant from the athlete. Sometimes they insist we don’t understand them, but rarely, like they once did, do they offer themselves up for examination. When the runner Jakob Ingebrigtsen did, allowing The Guardian’s Sean Ingle into his home, the result this January was a terrific portrait of a compulsive talent. Did he have off days, Ingle asked. “No, because if you have a day off, you lose 20-25km of running.”

Sometimes I wish I had been around in Muhammad Ali’s time, a talent both wide and voluble. Journalists flocked to him because he was generous with his words. In 1974 in Zaire, after Ali had just upset George Foreman, he gave Hugh McIllvanney of the Observer two hours of his time. “An experienced pilot,” Ali said that day, “flies a plane through a storm with out gettin’ in a panic. If new things happen he is cool. I have been boxin’ 20 years and I’m a pretty good fighter. I can walk into the firin’ line with a man like Foreman and I got no fear. Nothin’ can happen that I don’t understand. I been to school.”

Sport alters its personality and its physique, but we’ll always need athletes to help us unravel their excellence and reveal to us the savage itch to win which lurks behind civilised demeanours. Like Viswanathan Anand, hair combed and tidy, having a wonderful conversation this year with the writer Rahul Bhattacharya. The chess guru, now 56, was asked about playing chess for joy and pleasure and without the chains of expectation and his answer was exquisite.

“People say, ‘oh, you can play chess for fun’ and you can’t.”

Rohit Brijnath (@rohitdbrijnath) 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.