Losing It

To understand Anna Karenina, Mellors, Molly Bloom, Dante, Romeo, Juliet and Bridget Jones you must also have loved and lost and won. To understand sport in the greatest arenas of them all you too must have played and lost and won, known shame, hope, joy, horror and glory.
Simon Barnes has taken part in seven summer Olympic Games, five World Cups and ten Ashes series. Well, not exactly taken part, but certainly he was there and writing hard. And always, behind every victory and every defeat he ever recorded, there was the reference of his own sporting career, in which the bitter beauties of failure were occasionally varied with the intoxication of success.
At school he was - at least at first - the opposite of a rebel without a cause: he was a sporting fool in search of a game he could excel at, alas finding none. When he was nine he thought he would somehow be miraculously good at sport. Sadly he never was. But the sporting fool within him never died and in his late 20s he tried again - a second sporting career, in which the triumph of hope over experience was more or less a rout. The dream had only slightly modified: he now thought he would be somehow miraculously competent.
So he co-founded a football team and at last found himself the first-choice goalkeeper. Then he co-founded a cricket team, on the grounds that by doing so he would always be sure of a game. And at the same time, he got horsiness and discovered he was actually quite good at riding in competition.
All these adventures taught him about sport: why we do it, what is required to be very good at it. He learned about the relationship of physical and mental skills, about fear and courage and physical pain. He learned about funk, about Zen-like calm, about the team thing, about the "me" thing. His sporting failure has been a joyous and profoundly informative part of his life, and here he tells the story of it.

Simon Barnes is the multi-award-winning author of 20-odd books, including three novels and the best-selling How To Be A Bad Birdwatcher. Formerly the chief sportswriter at The Times, for whom he also wrote two columns on wildlife, he lives in Norfolk with his family and four horses, beside a marsh.
@simonbarneswild

PART ONE: PROTOSTAR - A STAR IS BORN
1 The Great Cricketer
2 Bloody Cricket
3 A Leaping Wolf
4 God on Our Side
5 Top of the Tree
6 The Honours Book
7 Semi-naked semi-courage
8 For the Love of Violence
9 Hell is Other Rugby Players
10 Death of an Athlete
11 One of the Elite
12 Head of the River
13 Oedipal Ping-pong
14 Faster Than You'll Ever Live to Be
15 The Graveyard of Sport
16 Sport is Bourgeois
PART TWO: SUPERNOVA - PERIOD OF MAXIMUM BRIGHTNESS
17 Elimination
18 A Good Start
19 A Madman's Joy
20 Enter the Dragons
21 Emergency Exit
22 Well Hard
23 The Monsoon Match
24 Clever Trevor
25 Promotion
26 Notes from Everest
27 Zen in the Art of Goalkeeping
28 Dodgy Keeper
29 Three Times a Champion
30 All in the Golden Afternoon
31 The Gate Closes
32 Ghost of a Cricketer
33 Foundation Myth
34 The Real Thing
35 Sport's Dreamtime
36 Perfect Dolores
37 Eddy Pratt
38 Death of a Wicketkeeper
39 Match Drawn
40 Sporting Perfection
PART THREE: RED DWARF - A STAR IN DECAY
41 The Fall of Oedipus
42 The Big Fish Cup
43 The Very Essence of Sport
Acknowledgements