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Losing It - A lifetime in pursuit of sporting excellence (Paperback)
Loot Price: R259
Discovery Miles 2 590
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(8%)
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Losing It - A lifetime in pursuit of sporting excellence (Paperback)
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List price R281
Loot Price R259
Discovery Miles 2 590
You Save R22 (8%)
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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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.
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