Stopping before your time: The greatest sadness in sport
There is an inevitable, understandable tendency to focus on the retirement of players who have graced the highest levels of the game. The questions always asked of such players include ones of how much they will miss playing in front of a big crowd on a big day.
The questions flow naturally on to discussions of great wins and shattering losses, as a career is neatly boxed, stacked, and ranked with those who have passed before.
There is, of course, something much more essential to discuss. It relates to the question of how you are going to live after you stop playing competitive matches?
This is a question that matters for club players as much as for county ones. Playing for a team gives structure to a life (for better or for worse). If you’re a club player, you know that you have no idea when you are going to play championship matches, you know that you are at the whim of all-powerful inter-county managers, but the great certainty is the routine of training.
Anybody who plays Gaelic football or hurling at any sort of decent club level is familiar with the need for moderation in drink and commonsense in eating. It is true the lower reaches of the junior ranks can still accommodate those who breakfast on pints and kebabs, but such exponents are relatively exceptional (at least in theory).
Stripped of a formal framework that shapes lifestyle, the tendency to drift into unhealthy habits is normal and widespread — and thoroughly understandable. Part of this drift is rooted in a sense that you minded yourself for long enough, and now it is time to loosen the buckle. This is a particular phenomenon among those who for years stay locked in hand-to-hand combat with themselves to ensure that a natural talent for gathering weight is suppressed. The most significant aspect of stopping playing is usually the mental one. Accepting that you are no longer able (for whatever reason) to play competitive games can be no simple thing. Of course, there are people who live in such a way as to bound ever forwards without a sideways glance — let alone a backwards one — but there are many more who struggle.
In its worst manifestations, this struggle reveals itself as depression. The mind and the body are unable to cope with the loss of a lifetime of play. Everybody’s experience of this is unique unto themselves, of course, but the most usual feeling is of a hollowness, a sense of loss, and an aching desire to be able still to play. Even many years after finishing up, this is a feeling that can grab hold of you at the most surprising of moments.
You may know that your body is no longer able and that you gave it a good rattle for as long as you could — and that offers solace of a sort — and yet the longing does not always leave.
But what about when you are not in a position to say that? What if you are a child and your ‘retirement’ comes in your teenage years? The greatest sadness in sport has nothing to do with defeat; it comes instead when children stop playing.
In looking at this, it should be said that there are children who absolutely should be allowed — even encouraged — to stop playing organised sport. These are children who are marched to clubs (GAA, soccer , rugby, and others) on weekend mornings and weekday nights, and absolutely do not want to be there. Almost always, parents who bring their children to clubs in the teeth of such resistance are trying to do the very best for their child, but it nearly always ends up achieving the complete opposite of what is intended.
The thing is that simple dislike of sport does not account for the extraordinary numbers who ‘retire’ between the ages of 12 and 21.
So what does? Between 2003 and 2013, a series of reports were commissioned by the Irish Sports Council and conducted by the Economic and Social Research Institute to take a long-term view of how sport in Ireland operated. The ambition of the reports was to track changes in participation and exercise, as well as tracking how individual engagement with sport varies over the course of a person’s life.
There were two key things that shaped both participation and early retirement. The first related to the difference in the way boys were treated, as against girls. By the age of 20, 66% of men were playing sport, compared with just 36% of women.
From that point on in people’s lives, men are no less likely to remain in sport than women; instead ‘the different treatment of young girls opens up a sporting gender gap that never closes’.
As well as a gender gap, there is also a gap which revolves around the issue of social disadvantage. The Fair Play? Sport and Social Disadvantage in Ireland report investigated the extent to which people with low incomes or with low educational attainment participate in sport and it concluded that people from poorer backgrounds are disadvantaged in terms of playing, officialdom, membership, and watching sport. The report also concluded that this disadvantage “needs to be recognised as a substantial contributor to poverty and social exclusion”.
Further research demonstrated that belonging to higher income and educational groups made it far less likely for an individual to drop out of sport as an adult and far more likely to take up new sports.
There is also a third factor that matters. And it relates to how sports organisations cater for all of their players. It is fascinating to watch the extraordinary success that the GAA has had in attracting players up to the age of 12 — and entirely dispiriting to watch too many of those disappear through their teenage years.
This disappearance is accounted for by teenagers who move on to other pursuits, but it also because within clubs, there is undue emphasis on winning and on preparing the very best players, and a basic neglect of those of lesser ability. This manifests itself most brutally in a lack of game time. Put crudely, why would you keep coming if you are treated like a waterboy/ watergirl?
When the basic statistics show the GAA is losing 58% of its players between the ages of 12 and 21, it is obvious its core structures are not fit to accommodate teenagers, still less young adults. And the GAA is no worse — and actually in some respects is better — than various other organisations across Ireland and beyond.
It is to the GAA’s credit that it is moving to address its retention problem with its ‘Play to Stay’ initiative, led by Pat Daly at Croke Park. This comes down to values.
At 65 Super Game Centres across Ireland in 2016, the values of inclusiveness, teamwork, and respect will be made real by genuine participation in playing games regardless of ability. For children who want to play — and who just want to play — the spread of this initiative is something to be celebrated.
