puts the athletes in the drama centre stage. He does it again with this wonderful commentary
about the about the realities of life like winning and losing and how it is mirrored in sports.
SPORTING LIFE
Not the best shot but it will teach a thousand lessons
Published on Oct 19, 2013
Straits Times
By Rohit Brijnath
THE photograph will win no sporting prize, it is not elegantly lighted, it captures none of football's quality of dance. Yet it should hang in schools and be nailed to the walls of football arenas. It is a static picture yet it is immediately and profoundly moving.
The photograph was taken in a stadium in Panama named after a dead player at the end of a grim night. Panama were a win away from a play-off against New Zealand for a place in the 2014 World Cup. A nation of the grand baseballer Mariano Rivera and the iron boxer Roberto Duran has never been to the Finals.
They were leading the United States 2-1 till the 91st minute. Then they lost 2-3 with two goals in two minutes. Sport does this all the time, just uses a silencing boot to step on your heart when it starts to sing.
The photograph comes to us without adequate detail. Did the man in white suddenly see his fallen rival and then wheel around? Is the man with his back to us weeping? Did they know each other?
Yet part of the drama of this picture is that so much is left unsaid and thus must be imagined. For me the man in red wears a crumpled, dazed face. For me these men are strangers but friends of football and of decency.
The photograph is not of famous men. The man in red is a national captain yet his name, Felipe Baloy, of Panama, doesn't provoke the memory. The other man is Terrence Boyd, a German-American who plays for an Austrian club and the US national team.
Their comparative absence of fame adds a gravity to the picture. We are not distracted by their faces as we might have been if it was Lionel Messi. Instead we focus entirely on the ordinary man offering this extraordinary gesture.
The photograph is humbling for it owns none of sport's arrogance nor its posturing. In its simplicity lies its power: one man fallen, the other comforting. You cannot tell which nations these men belong to from this picture, but you can tell their humanity.
The photograph that usually races fastest around the planet is of triumph - fists pumping and mouth screaming. But this picture is quieter, it makes us pause and reflect on a different beauty of sport for it is born of defeat.
More lose every week in sport than win. Of eight men in a race, seven lose. Of 64 men in a tennis event, 63 lose. They swallow their public beating and disappear mostly unseen. They are the forgotten. Even their victorious peers will offer a cursory handshake and forget, for sport moves on always to another match.
The photograph stays with us because Boyd did not forget. He did not move on. He went to Baloy, who perhaps does not speak the same language, but in his embrace nothing was lost in translation for it spoke of solidarity, understanding and compassion.
The photograph has an added poignance because of Baloy's date of birth. It is Feb 24, 1981, which is scarcely auspicious, but it tells us this: By the next Cup, in 2018, he will be 37. In all probability, too old. So this was it. The captain's chance to play in this mythical Cup had run out.
Boyd probably did not know this, the age of his Panamanian rival, the last chance, but he would have known Baloy's despair at being so close. Because the only person who intimately appreciates an athlete's pain is his fellow athlete.
Mixed martial artist Eddie Ng, who hits people for a living, was asked this question on Thursday about defeat, despair and rivals and replied: "Yes, it's something only fighters can understand. Unless you feel it, and you yourself made that sacrifice, you can't get a feel of what it's like."
The athlete knows the training his rival has done, the years invested, the mornings of aching bodies. And he knows the agony of effort gone unrewarded. On this day Boyd won, Baloy lost, but both know the uncertainty of the footballing life.
The photograph matters because we need reminders. We need to know that for all the whining and cheating and racism that sport is still a place of character and fine characters. Now we do.
The photograph will soon be old news, forgotten as new images hiss across a planet. For now though, it it still here, attached to a tweet in Boyd's Twitter account and accompanied by these words from him:
"Respect Panama."
So let us gently add just this:
"Respect Boyd."
Now watch a video that show that kids have the Terrence Boyd's spirit
Watch this video about how a boy sportingly handed over the baseball he had caught during an MLB game to another boy who had missed out in catching it.
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