But there’s something much more than melancholy – a crushing finality, rather – about a cricketer’s premature death, one who has been fêted in a career replete with accomplishment but is unable to come to terms with the hollowness of life in retirement’s wake. Sport can be unforgivingly cruel.
Sharad Kohli
…
Sport mirrors life. Success and failure on the field, court or track are but an echo of our everyday highs and lows. This was brought home recently, in the Olympics but more poignantly in cricket. Besides highlighting the fragility of our existence, the passing of Graham Thorpe shone a light on anxiety and depression, and on the disorienting uncertainty that follows the end of a sporting career. It also underscored the urgency of the need for sportspersons – and administrators – to look after their own and ensure that succour is at hand for the struggling.
There is a certain melancholy in the moment when stumps are drawn to mark the end of a game of cricket, as the umpires and players make their way back to the pavilion. There’s a melancholy, too, about the time when a season ends, when the shadows of the setting sun lengthen across the ground, as the balminess of a late-summer day gives way to the chill of an autumn evening.
But there’s something much more than melancholy – a crushing finality, rather – about a cricketer’s premature death, one who has been fêted in a career replete with accomplishment but is unable to come to terms with the hollowness of life in retirement’s wake. Once the promise of youth segues into the fulfillment of high noon, and then the late burst of Indian summer, thoughts turn to ‘life after’. But sometimes, there is no life after, only the memory of a time when you were at the top of your powers, a picture of vigour and confidence. Sport can be unforgivingly cruel.
While the world’s attention was on the Paris Olympiad, news came in of the death of former England cricketer Graham Thorpe, prompting an outpouring of grief from former team-mates and opponents, as well as lovers of the game who saw the left-handed batter as an everyman, as one of them. A week later, Thorpe’s family revealed that he had taken his own life, unable to conquer the demons that had been troubling him of late.
It was agonising to hear that one of the finest cricketers ever to put on an England blazer felt the need to take the most extreme of steps because he had lost the will to live, suffocated by disquiet and despair. Who knows how many mental scars remained from the time when Thorpe’s personal life was pried into and viciously scrutinised, back in the early 2000s? That he came back and enjoyed a rewarding autumn in his career was a testament to his resilience. Yet, even the most resilient among us strain to dodge the arrows of fate.
“Graham was renowned as someone who was very mentally strong on the field and he was in good physical health. But mental illness is a real disease and can affect anyone,” Thorpe’s partner, Amanda, told Michael Atherton, a former colleague, in The Times. “Despite having a wife and two daughters whom he loved and who loved him, he did not get better. He was so unwell in recent times and he really did believe that we would be better off without him, and we are devastated that he acted on that and took his own life.”
Thorpe’s eldest daughter Kitty, spoke of the heartbreak of seeing her father become withdrawn, unable to see a way out. However, she added, there was no shame in speaking about the gravity of what he had been enduring. “We are not ashamed of talking about it. There is nothing to hide and it is not a stigma. We were trying to help him get better before and trying to protect him, which is why we said nothing,” she revealed. “This is the time now to share the news, however horrible it is. We’ve wanted to be able to talk and share and we’d now like to raise awareness, too.”
Another popular Englishman of yesteryear, David Bairstow (father of Jonny), also died by his own hand, the Yorkshireman’s hopes vanquished by his wife’s cancer diagnosis and a precarious monetary situation. Such cries for help are being heard more than they were before. Still, it can’t be easy for an athlete, used to the adrenaline of competition and accustomed to the comforts of professional sport, to transition to the quotidian life.
When you have given your all to the pursuit of a dream, the remainder of your days can feel disillusioning, as the great Olympians Michael Phelps and Ian Thorpe will affirm.
Olympics: The good, the bad and the ugly
The Olympics is as noble a sporting endeavour as sportspersons want it to be. But gamesmanship is as old as the sport itself, the itch to hoodwink the system (or the referee/umpire) and stretch the rules as far as possible, part of the thrill of the chase to number one.
For an endeavour that has given us the most uplifting of stories, in defeat as much as in victory, the sport has reflected the worst of humanity. In the recently concluded Paris Games, the world saw how mean-spirited we could be, athletes, fans, administrators and commentators alike.
Imane Khelif, they said disparagingly, looked and boxed like a man because she didn’t fit the straitjacketed mould that arbiters in the West believe women must conform to. She must be cheating, right? Such, in the aftermath of her bout with Angela Carini – over in 46 seconds after the Italian retired – was implied in a torrent of nasty and hostile comments aimed at the Algerian, across media but especially online. For all that the world might have felt like a dark place, Imane would have found solace in the ring.
Chinese Taipei’s Lin Yu-ting was another boxer who found herself unwittingly drawn into the controversy, for similar reasons – that she had elevated levels of testosterone and XY chromosomes. This is despite each having been cleared to participate by the International Olympic Committee. But there was a happy, and fittingly just, ending for both. Lin and Imane shut out the external noise and the bullying to return home with a gold medal in their respective weight categories, a result that was a triumph for diversity and a blow to homogeneity.
Before the Olympics got underway, the French National Olympic and Sports Committee turned trolls by threatening to disqualify anyone who wore a headscarf in competition, a move that was clearly aimed at the host nation’s Muslim athletes. Such an Islamophobic diktat stung sportswomen representing Muslim countries into doing exactly the opposite, supporting their sisters by cocking a snook at France and its obsession with sanitised secularism.
Stripped down to its essentials, there’s little that’s more riveting than a contest between two teams or individuals, played in the right spirit, played hard but fair (as the Australians would have it). But sport loses a little of its appeal when politics, race, gender or nationalism enter the mix when talent and temperament cede ground to gladiatorial posturing. And when sport is reduced to a zero-sum game – when the obsession with winning consumes the protagonist – the joy, the thrill and the suspense are squeezed out of it.
Yet, the Olympics wasn’t without gestures of gallantry, as embodied by Arshad Nadeem and Neeraj Chopra sharing a beautiful moment in the afterglow of their javelin heroics, and especially by the American duo of Simone Biles and Jordan Chiles, who bowed in respect to Brazil’s Rebeca Andrade (the first time three black gymnasts had finished on the podium). Further, Biles proved that the struggles with mental health that had forced her to miss the Tokyo Games were firmly behind her. This athlete for the ages showed there is no low from which you can’t climb back.
Not all of us, however, are so fortunate. The darkness can be all-enveloping.
Postscript: The pangs of loneliness
On a day when the heavens opened and left Gurgaon waterlogged, Magic Creations, a city-based theatre troupe, staged a play, Neend Kyon Raatbhar Nahin Aati. Written by Surendra Verma, with design and direction by Sameer Anthwal, this production trained its eyes on a topic we know of but demur to discuss openly: loneliness.
Anita finds it difficult to sleep at night and looks for ways to defy her sleeplessness. The telephone, as much a part of the plot as the cast, becomes an escape for her, to speak to strangers who she randomly calls up. As the 45-minute play progresses, we find that Anita has lost her daughter and no longer lives with her husband. She still has the empathy, though, to persuade an elderly lady – clutching a bottle of pills, ready to end an existence of anguish – to give life another chance.
But Anita is suffering too from loneliness. It all comes out in a conversation with a special-needs youngster, whose questions – innocent and innocently asked – Anita somehow finds the courage to answer. Yet, she doesn’t have the answers to life and believes that only suicide can bring release. She doesn’t articulate what she’s feeling, but through fine emotional acting, we understand that isolation is eating away at her soul.
So powerful were the performances, especially by Anita (played by Geetika Goyal, who founded Magic Creations 15 years ago), that many in the audience were moved to tears. It was a reaction that told of how prevalent loneliness is, and how we all desperately want to share our stories, in an effort to feel less lonely. If anything, Neend Kyon Raatbhar Nahin Aati proved that art, just like sport, can be a medium through which psychological, emotional and even physiological challenges can be conquered, and the lonely assured that they are not alone.