“ I was the worst player on a really good team.” So you were a really good player by absolute standards. That’s the problem with sports: people always compare reality with possibility. Even the best player compares themselves with what they might be.
Thinking of football without the ball, in the film Timbuktu, based on the real events when Timbuktu was occupied by muslim fanatics, there’s a scene — again reality-inspired — where a football match takes place with an imaginary ball, because playing football has been banned.
Yet all of us — athletes or not, willing or not — must abandon the contest:
To an Athlete Dying Young
-A. E. Housman
The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.
Today, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.
Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears.
Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.
So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.
And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl’s.