The Retiring Type
by Ben Darwin | 28 December 2009 (13:43)
I retired from the game of rugby around 6 years ago and battled with the process quite badly. Many players have struggled with the idea of retirement and I know sometimes for those outside of the game, it can be easy to look at players going through this process and simply not comprehend why someone should have such issues after being so unbelievably fortunate to play a game they love. How could you ever find yourself unlucky at the end? The press is littered with stories of retired athletes from all walks of life and sporting pursuits, failing to adapt to life after their respective career ends
I can only speak from my own experience. For me, life inside sport has something that has a lot of difficulty being replicated on the outside. With rugby, every week there is an opposition and a goal to achieve that you either do or don’t measure up to. Life very rarely gives you the ability to pit you to a comparison so regularly and then give you an outcome. The business world has scoreboards so far behind the input where it is difficult to place direct responsibility upon success with your own performance. It is an up and down, whereas life outside the stadium is a constant hum.
The ability to set a goal with a group such as a championship title and then go about it gives an incredible sense of camaraderie that I have never had anywhere else. The adrenaline of the game itself is something that cannot be described, it is as close to an addiction as anything else I have seen, the feeling of doing something that you love in front of tens of thousands cannot be underestimated. You can’t wean yourself off it - yet once its over, it cannot be replaced.
One of the real dangers is the response of the general public to sports people. Some athletes, depending on their sporting profile, become accustomed to being shown the front of the queue, the free drinks, the free clothes, and it when it ends they wonder why no one wants to treat them same way any more. It is silly and pathetic but doesn't mean its wrong for the newly retired to think this way. My feeling is that the worst sentence in the English language is "Don’t you know who I am?” but comes out of the mouths of both current and retired athletes all too often in order to obtain the special treatment to which they have become accustomed to.
So what is the answer? I think that keeping players as grounded as is humanly possible can have a good long term result for the person. Here in Japan, many players continue to work in a business capacity for the company they play for, going to the office on a daily basis and performing the same tasks as any other office worker. These players will often keep these jobs long after their rugby career have ended, most of them staying on until they are of a business retirement age.
But keeping players grounded can be hard, particularly when it comes to public reaction, which is often one of the major hurdles to get through upon retirement. This is one of the most surreal aspects of the game. For the majority of us, the human brain is unable to differentiate between seeing someone on TV or on a sporting field and meeting them in the flesh. People, upon first meeting, will simply greet you by name as though old friends, and are a bit thrown when you don't remember their name, even if you have not previously met them before. It is very easy to feel terrible that you don't remember names and it becomes second nature after a while to expect that you are not going to know names and details people expect you to, and so often can come off (unintentionally) pretty rude.
The further that the normal life of an athlete differs from that of the general public, the harder it will be for them in retirement to move back into that realm. My theory has always been that as an athlete, in order to enjoy the limelight that can come your way as a result of your career, you must remember that you probably took it away from someone else. So in time, you must also be prepared to let that star go, and if you are, it will make for a somewhat easier retirement and transition. Otherwise, we never really go on to enjoy the things that are really important.
