The sportsman as a lonely figure has almost been elevated (or reduced) to a cliche. Alan Sillitoe’s short story The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner wasn’t so much about loneliness in sport as about alienation in society, but the concept is applied to most sports.
Boxing is widely recognised as the loneliest sport. The boxer is alone in the ring, and survival depends as much on instinct as on training and luck. Things could go so wrong as to cripple a boxer for life or even kill him. “Boxing is a lonely sport,” declared Mike Tyson, and found few to disagree.
Andre Agassi agreed in a roundabout way in his autobiography Open: “Only boxers can understand the loneliness of tennis players,” he wrote, “and yet boxers have their corner men and managers… In tennis you’re on an island. Of all the games men and women play, tennis is the closest to solitary confinement....”
Tiger Woods thinks golf is the loneliest sport: “When you’re on, no one is going to slow you down. When you’re off, no one is going to pick you up, either. This is a lonely sport,” he said.
Where does that leave the athlete, the goalkeeper in any sport, and fencers and gymnasts? Individual sports can all be seen as being ‘lonely’. Team sports too, where you are often competing against a bunch of rivals as well as your own mates.
As a Polish footballer once said, “Being a goalkeeper is like being the guy in the military who makes the bombs. One mistake, and everyone gets blown up.”
India’s hockey goalkeeper Sreejesh wrote: “Being a goalkeeper is a lonely job. Not only are you completely alone during the match, your training sessions too are quite far removed from the rest of the team.”
U.K.’s Performance psychologist Katie Mobed who has worked with elite sports people, calls tennis “the loneliest sport in the world”. The individual has too much time to think. As she explains, “They’re actually only playing tennis for about 15 per cent of the time that they’re on the court, which equates to about 10 minutes of the hour. The rest is changing ends, towelling down. In that thinking time, you are alone with your thoughts.
And so given that the natural preference of the brain is to be wired for negativity, and to worry about things that we can’t control, that makes it a hugely challenging feature.”
All of this makes sense. But how is it that cricket tends to have the highest number of suicides, as explained by David Frith in his book on the subject, Silence of the Heart. The explanation, says Frith, is “elusive”.
Perhaps this insight from the late Peter Roebuck, cricketer and writer who took his own life might partly explain this: “It’s strange that cricket attracts so many insecure men. It is surely the worst game for an intense character, yet it continues to find many obtuse sensitivities among its players. Men of imagination, men of ideals risk its harsh exposures.”
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