No money or medals can save you from sporting end
And when that end comes, the sporting world will spin on, regardless of who or what has been lost.
And for all the montage of memories, the story of sport will shift on so quickly that even the immediate past will seem more like ancient history. Or even mythology.
It is with horses, rather than with humans, that the poet Philip Larkin beautifully revealed this truth.
In his poem, ‘At Grass’, Larkin wrote of two horses in a meadow, sheltering in the shade, one wandering about eating grass while the other looks on. The ageing horses were anonymous by then, but that had not always been the case. Some 15 years previously, some two dozen races had brought them fame:
They mattered so much in their day, in the pomp of their greatness, that thousands and thousands of people came to see them run — and win. Their successes were such that their names would live on forever in almanacs.
The imagery of those days — the rows of empty cars surrounding a racetrack, the litter lying on the grass, the silk of the jockeys, the dash of the horses — extends across the history of modern horse racing.
And Larkin’s two horses are part of that history, champions who were once celebrated, once had their names etched onto trophies, once were truly relevant in the unfolding of the endlessly busy, endlessly rejuvenating, world of sport.
In the poem, however, time has pushed on and the horses race no longer. They are the stuff of anecdote and remembrance — but they do not matter anymore to the sporting contest, at least not really. Their (sporting) day is done.
There is a question in the middle of the poem that sits right at the heart of the life of those who finish up in sport.
It reads:
That notion of the plague of memories filling a head, crowding out the present with an insistent press of noiseless imagery, is what does the most damage to a post-play life.
How do you live forwards when your life pulls you backwards into its past, time and again? It is one thing if everybody else pulls you back into it with questions and stories, but another when you do it to yourself, unable to let go of faded glories.
For Larkin, he notes how, for the horses, there were years of all of which pulled them away from the meadows. The upshot of this was
And this is a question for everyone who dedicates so much of their lives — more accurately, so many of those years when they are in their prime — to the pursuit of sporting excellence.
Do you think, looking back, that it was really worth it? Were all the sacrifices worthwhile? Was what was given up merited? Was stealing away summer after summer from yourself really something that makes sense, a decision that stands the test of time? And, crucially, was enough fun taken out of the journey, or was the obsession with the result overpowering of all else?
As the poem ends, Larkin sees that the horses are standing at ease in a meadow.
They gallop now for what must be joy, without anybody straining to watch them in field-glasses or putting their galloping to a stopwatch. Nobody comes to look at them, except those who care for them.
And, best of all, out in this sheltered scene, away from everything, they have
It is one thing for two horses to slip their names, though, but altogether another for a human being.
The very human emotions of nostalgia and regret cannot be shaken off in the manner of Larkin’s horses who shake their heads in the contentment of a summer meadow filled with grass and stripped of obligation.
Perhaps, ultimately, the nub of the matter comes down to a matter of identity. It is unknowable the extent to which a horse may or may not be shaped by the prime of their sporting endeavours. But for many competitors, sport is such an obsession, so central to everything that they have sought and thought throughout their days, that it comes to colonise their identity.
How do you learn to live without the thing that has become so much a part of what you are, the thing that you most likely love doing more than anything else?
It is certainly the case that there are those who are able to simply move on immediately. They walk out of the dressing room door for a last time, knowing they are done, and there is scarcely a glimpse backwards. There is a wonderful word in Irish — riastradh — that relates to how Cú Chulainn, in the middle of a battle, managed to shape-shift, or to contort himself, to face new struggles.
For others, the adjustment to a life after sport proves relatively straightforward over time. They refocus on other aspects of their life, conscious of the hole that has been left, perhaps occasionally wistful of what has been lost never to be regained, but broadly comfortable in accepting the passage of the years and the diminution of their physical capabilities.
And then there are those who never really get over what they once were and are unable to cope properly with a new dawn whose arrival is unwelcome and whose inevitability was known but resisted. This is manifest in every sport and is played out in the mental and physical turmoil of the individuals who are caught up in its misery.
Either way, life after sport is something that ignores all boundaries — for example, it transcends gender and is oblivious to whether someone was an amateur or a professional. No amount of money or medals saves you from the end.
Philip Larkin got the idea for his poem when he slipped away to the cinema one afternoon in the first week of January, 1950. Before the main feature started, a short film depicting the life on an old racehorse ‘Brown Jack’ stuck with him.
‘Brown Jack’ had been famous before the war, but now — in a sort of ‘Where is Brown Jack now?’ piece — he was portrayed in a field without jockey or harness, cropping the grass and galloping freely. It is claimed that the vista created by Larkin was one of contentment at the end of a well-lived life.
And it may be that the poem can indeed be read as a sort of admiration such a life, but its deep melancholy is difficult to escape from. Because, like Philip Larkin’s horses, for every sportsperson there is no happy alternative to living out years (even decades) however contented they may be. Nothing beats playing — and nothing can replace it. As Larkin concluded:
- Paul Rouse is Associate Professor of History at UCD.
