AND THE WORLD KEEPS TURNING

It’s been an eventful weekend out there, hasn’t it?

The Rugby World Cup came to an end, and although Wales weren’t playing, it was still great to see the cut and thrust of the final matches play out, and then of course we all lost a great comedy figure with the passing of Matthew Perry.

Seeing the tournament finish, then waking up on Sunday to the news that one of our ‘Friends’ was no longer around made me think on the way that people who mean something to us leave an enormous hole when they leave us.

At the Rugby World Cup, which takes place every four years like the Olympics and the Football World Cup and is a massive world wide event, players get the chance to pit themselves against other nations to discover who’s the best. It’s a huge honour to be selected for an event like this and it can very often be seen as the pinnacle of a players career, but this also brings along with it the chance that it could be a players swansong.

At the end of each World Cup, there are players who call time on their careers at the highest level and this time was no different. Wales legends like Alun Wyn Jones, Justin Tipuric and Rhys Webb all announced their retirement from the international game before the tournament started and Dan Biggar made it clear that after the event concluded, he was finishing too. Leigh Halfpenny was another to announce after he’d got back home that he was calling time with Wales and just like that, players who’d provided years of service to the cause, those all too familiar faces who were the architects of so many great memories for fans of the game slip away to the legend status of just being memories.

Matthew Perry is a global star and recognisable almost everywhere on Earth thanks to Friends and the other shows and films he starred in. How many people grew up watching each new Friends episode with family or their own tight knit group of pals? How many memories do we all have surrounding the work that Matthew Perry produced?

My wife and I quote Friends to each other on occasion as we watched them all together and they can feel like an almost ‘calorie free’ TV show because it’s on all of the time. Watching an episode if there’s nothing else on just feels like that super comfy sofa that just fits you properly and you can remember all the good things that come along with the particular episode or season.

It’s the same for both of these things, the retiring players and the loss of entertainers, as we watch as a piece of what makes us us is taken away. I can remember as a kid, my parents reacting when they heard news of an actor they knew from way back when passed away and as with so very many things we witness, it’s only much later that you ‘get’ it.

The world will keep on turning and we’re all going to keep on aging. It’ll always happen that those people we looked up to, those people who were a part of our memories, even if we never met them in person, will stop playing, stop working, or pass away, and leave us with a hole we never expected.

Eventually, we’ll be the ones doing the leaving.

Memories are what we’re making all of the time, and the best ones we have are those that come from something important to our life. Whatever created that memory, be it a person or a team, or an object or an event, recognising and then accepting that time has claimed them in some way or another brings into stark focus how fleeting we all are. It shows us that we’re aging along with everyone else and eventually, these people and places will all be gone, living only in the memories of people who loved them in their individual ways.

I just hope that when my time comes to leave the stage, that people think of me fondly.

Stay safe all.

COMES TO AN END

I’m a rugby fan and last week, out of the blue, the news broke that the Wales and British and Irish Lions captain, Sam Warburton, was forced to retire from the sport at the age of just 29 due to injury. Now I’m not going to just lament the fact that the Welsh team has lost a vital cog on the run in to the next World Cup, although that’s not good in itself. Rather, I want to consider pain.

Sam had to make the choice that all players dread though happily, so few have to deal with in such an acute fashion. He’d been smashed up so badly, so regularly that he was struggling to raise his arms without stabbing pain. He’d put his body on the line so often that finally, the scales had tilted far beyond balance. He wasn’t able to get his body to do what he wanted it to do and continuing to play would have just made the problem worse.

Could you imagine being in such pain all of the time that you can’t move fully, that you’d have to make structural changes to the way you live your life to just be able to function? Giving up the life you love because of the sheer brutality of what you do?

Sportsmen and women can find themselves crashing into this very issue and there has to be thought from the head and not the heart about the choices that need to be made. Sport is, when you scratch away all of the training and structure and importance, all about fun. We all start playing sports because we want to and we continue because we enjoy it. Even the players at the very top of their sports share the same core as the enthusiastic amateur. It could be very easy to then say “I want to keep having fun” and not hang up the boots but the reality comes to us all eventually that our bodies just hurt too much.

I was always getting injured when I played rugby. I had the nickname ‘Fingers’ because I kept on breaking mine. I’ve been concussed at least a dozen times, broken other bones, torn ligaments and pulled tendons and in my twenties, it was just one of those things. But I’m in my forties now. I’ve had three knee surgeries attempting to resolve a problem, my back and neck always ache and I’ve got arthritis in my hands. It’s nothing major so I’m not looking for waves of sympathy, rather it’s just the price I have to pay for the life I’ve lived.

Now we all have to recognise that we can’t just live life without thought for the future. I called time on my playing career when I became a manager at work. I knew that my job had to take precedence so despite knowing that I’d like to still play, the real world had to come first.

Now this situation is a reality for all of us to some degree or another so it’s something that’s going to form a part of what I’m writing in the Circle series. The feeling of regret at the loss of a massive part of who we were, the daily truth of the pain of a life lived and the nagging uncertainty that we made the right choice.

Pain is the price we all pay for our lives in one form or another. The fact for all of us will be that our bodies are going to show the effects of what we do and we have to make the choices as we go to balance the good with the bad. I wish Sam Warburton well as he strides into his retirement, but there’ll always be the tiny voice in his head as the years pass that asks if he made the right choice. Only he’ll know the truth of that.