Paul Rouse: Early retirement should be applauded not questioned
The front pages of papers in Melbourne carries the news of the shock retirement of world number one ranked tennis player, Australia's Ashleigh Barty. Photo by William West/AFP via Getty Images)
Should someone retire once they reach the top of their sport?
This is a question asked in the aftermath of the decision of the best female tennis player in the world, Ashleigh Barty, to retire at 25.
As well as being world number on, Barty was the reigning Wimbledon and Australian champion and seemed set fair to dominate women’s tennis for the next few years.
Winning Wimbledon, said Barty, was her “one true dream” and now she about to go away and “chase other dreams.” This is not Barty’s first time to “retire”. Back in 2014, she left tennis for more than a season and went off and played cricket.
Barty said that her life in tennis as she was moving to elite status, becoming an elite player and challenging for Grand Slams, was just too all-consuming. She later explained: “I wanted to experience life as a normal teenage girl and have some normal experiences. I needed some time to refresh mentally more than anything. It became a bit of a slog for me and I wasn’t enjoying my tennis as much as I would have liked to.”
She was good at that, too, but came back to tennis. And despite being one of the smallest players at the elite end of the professional game, she developed an all-court game that was celebrated for its skill and nous.
And now she has stopped at the very top of her game. She was asked about the possibility of coming back out of retirement in the future and gave a “never say never” answer, but she seemed to be saying it in a way that suggests that she was intelligent enough to know that the future can old anything, but wise enough to know she felt it hugely unlikely.
There is always a little shock when someone walks out of a dream, walks away from precisely the position they have sought to achieve.
There is a broader expectation of sports people to act in the way that we believe we would act ourselves if given the chance. To that end, winning the ultimate prize is most often seen not just as an end, but also a beginning.
How quickly are winners usually asked, 'What's next? How will you retain your title? Can you do back-to-back? How many more will you win?' And on and on out into the future, even as the sweat of victory sits in beads.
But maybe a different way to look at victory at the highest level is to ask the question: Why don’t you stop now? Why do you need to go on? Why should winning two or five or ten be better than winning one, than winning for the first time?
What is absolutely revealed time and again, across sport after sport, is just how hard it is to reach the top. It demands so much of a person, usually consuming their teenage and early adult years.
It requires a scale of sacrifice that spreads like bindweed out across the rest of a life in which all – or almost all – is choked in the pursuit of the prize.
It is right to point out that a sports person invariably played a sport because they loved. And it is fair to ask if such love should not trump all pain that has been endured to allow for the pursuit of excellence. If you love playing and you’re winning ,why would you stop, runs the question?
But that is, of course, far too simple an equation. The first thing to acknowledge is that love and brilliance are not necessarily fitted as hand in glove. Indeed, the sheer effort required to become brilliant at a sport can obliterate the pleasure that a player once got from sport.
And with the pursuit of excellence comes pressure. If you doubt that, read the autobiography of another tennis star, Andre Agassi. That book revealed in page after page, how Agassi became one of the most successful players in the world and how, also, he grew to hate the game very early on. Perhaps that is related to the fact that he was set up to hit with the great Jimmy Connors when he was just four years of age.
That is not normal and nor does it seem sensible.
But it is pressure of a sort. And the modern context for this pressure and for the pursuit of brilliance which also matters. Over the past decade the scale of the abuse of people who play sport is changing – and not for the better. It is true that players have always been the subject of media criticism and bar-stool experts whose judgments are never less than absolute, but there is something different about what is now happening around us.
It is not just a matter of abuse, it is also one of scrutiny. How can you live a life when you are the subject of an unending film where people with cameras video and photograph you and then post you on their social media account? Who owns your life if you are a prisoner to people – even if well-meaning – who just want a selfie or a video? Or who don’t even ask, but just fire away and then upload?
When you look now at the (unintended) prescience of the 1998 film The Truman Show, what once seemed preposterous now feels all too real. But as the screen writer Andrew Nichol has noted: “When you know there is a camera, there is no reality.” In the film, Truman – played brilliantly by Jim Carrey – gradually realises that his whole life is being captured by 5,000 hidden cameras and is being broadcast to the world as reality TV. His artificial world has been manipulated by others, he has no control. The film reaches its endgame as Truman decides whether to accept the artificial life and live on, or walk out into the unknown with all the risk that is involved.
It's all very well to say that the loss of privacy and the sense of being public goods, is the price of fame and success. But it is a serious price and the relentlessness of the internet means only very particular personalities can escape harm from its impact.
The desire to move away from all of that, to step out of the perma-glare, must be immense.
Of course, just stopping is no recipe for happiness either. 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. For some, this is a moment you never quite get over. Something you have done for as far back as your memory extends has ended and filling that hole can be no straightforward matter.
It is this, too, that pulls people back into what they have left. The list of stars of sport who have retired only to return is long and filled with some of the very greatest. From Michael Jordan to Tom Brady, and from DJ Carey to Paul Scholes , the desire to return has proven irresistible. Perhaps the key to a successful return is for it to be on your own terms. And maybe that, too, is the key to the timing of retirement in the first place.
Ashleigh Barty stopped once, came back, stopped a second time.
All on her own terms. And now a whole new world opens out in front of her. How good is that.
