A drug to replace that winning feeling
Posted on 31/03/2010"I very much regret my occasional use of cocaine in what have sometimes been the long days since my retirement from the ring,” said Joe Calzaghe after he admitted to taking the drug. But he is just another retired sportsman looking to fill the void that sport leaves, writes Matthew Syed in The Times.
Could it be that, after a few months out of the ring, Calzaghe is searching for a substitute for the euphoria of pugilistic conquest? Could it be that he needs a new kind of high to compensate for the absence of the elation of sporting victory?The idea of sport as narcotic has a long history. “Winning is like a drug,” Ayrton Senna said, a view that has been echoed by everyone from George Best to Joe Louis. “You can’t get the same buzz anywhere else from scoring a goal in front of thousands of people,” Tony Cottee, the former West Ham United and Everton striker, said. “I could talk all day, but I still wouldn’t be able to explain what it feels like.”
So many athletes have struggled with the cold turkey of retirement that the booze-addled ex-pro has become a cliché. It is often only when we see a professional sportsman making a seamless transition into a new and meaningful life — Sebastian Coe, Alan Pascoe and Gary Lineker spring to mind — that the story becomes newsworthy. “Hasn’t so-and-so done well,” we exclaim, as if it is a minor miracle that they have eluded the front page of the News of the World.
But is snorting a line really like scoring a goal? Is the euphoria comparable? Is the high as vertiginous? Is the craving for victory the reason why sportsmen keep coming back to the ring (or the track or wherever) even when they are way past their best, rather as a wizened addict returns to his dealer for a new hit?
The link between toil and triumph is not unique to professional sport, but it is difficult to think of any area of modern life in which it is evoked so vividly. And it invites the idea that what sportsmen crave is not so much the thrill of victory as something deeper; something that cannot be mimicked by any synthetic powder.It is the idea that victory is not a high but a culmination; an ecstasy predicated on the sacrifice that made it possible. Without that essential struggle, without the intimate knowledge of how it was constructed, victory would be as futile as heroin.
Sport, it might be argued then, meets a need rarely catered for in a world divided ever more minutely into economic subtasks.
It is a throwback not merely to the days of the arena, but to a world in which the utility of what we did could be seen with our own eyes. Perhaps, to paraphrase Calzaghe, all days seem “long” when there is no yardstick with which to measure their value.
Meanwhile, The Mirror's columnist Oliver Holt considers the fate of Stockport County.
County have been in administration since April last year and Football League rules state that no club can begin consecutive seasons in that state.That might mean a year out of existence. And who knows what will happen then to a club that was founded in 1883 as Heaton Norris Rovers and has played as Stockport County since 1890. This probably sounds maudlin, self-pitying, even. But not if you’re a fan of Chester City or Portsmouth. You know what it feels like already.
You know what it feels like to have been screwed at every turn.
Screwed by the greed of the Premier League, which refused to share its television income with the other three divisions when it formed in 1992 and broke away from the rest of the league.
Which thought only of lining its own pockets rather than the wider football community and the smaller clubs woven into the fabric of their towns. Since 1992, lower league clubs have fallen into insolvency 53 times.
So here we are at the New Den, losing 5-0 and knowing that County haven’t scored for 587 minutes.
Here we are hopelessly adrift at the bottom of League One and accepting that relegation is the least of our worries.
Here we are knowing that unless some investors recognise County’s potential, the loyalty of its fan base and the fact that it represents a small but valuable piece of our national heritage, the club has eight games left. Maybe the last eight they’ll ever play in 105 unbroken years in the Football League.
The final one is Tranmere on May 8. On a pitch that the Sharks have turned into a mudbath. At a home that isn’t even County’s any more.
No wonder Stockport fans feel angry and betrayed. The club is being denied its dignity, even as it is dying.