For no particular reason, global sportsmen provide most of us with our real heroes. Across the board, success in life is often mirrored in how sportsmen struggle to achieve great things, struggle to stay great and when time comes, how they bow out from the big stage. Currently, not even his rivals are enjoying the spectacle of a Tiger Woods commanding worse and worse headlines about his appalling form, so much for a former Number One and largely the most successful golfer in the sport. But such is life. Another sporting hero of our time in Roger Federer who is also experiencing unexpected hiccups falling over in the way of previously such easy fodder as the likes of Novak Djokovic or Rafael Nadal quite easily by his own standards. Yet they fight and fight on as if their life depends on it.
For no particular reason, global sportsmen provide most of us with our real heroes. Across the board, success in life is often mirrored in how sportsmen struggle to achieve great things, struggle to stay great and when time comes, how they bow out from the big stage. Currently, not even his rivals are enjoying the spectacle of a Tiger Woods commanding worse and worse headlines about his appalling form, so much for a former Number One and largely the most successful golfer in the sport. But such is life. Another sporting hero of our time in Roger Federer who is also experiencing unexpected hiccups falling over in the way of previously such easy fodder as the likes of Novak Djokovic or Rafael Nadal quite easily by his own standards. Yet they fight and fight on as if their life depends on it.
For the record, Woods or Federer don’t need sport money anymore, because they and their offspring can live off what they have earned over the years perhaps for the next one hundred years comfortably. Woods is the highest-paid professional athlete in the world, having earned an estimated US$90.5 million (wow) from winnings and endorsements in 2010. It’s just that winners really never quit. Be it a Lewis Hamilton making dangerous, close to reckless moves on some exotic Grand Prix arena instead of sunbathing on some beach surrounded by beautiful bikini clad fans, or one Lionel Messi literally weaving his way within a forest of studded soccer boots looking to slash his wondrous moves and stop him in his wake instead spend a night in a Buenos Aires bar with drunk childhood buddies reminiscing about ‘life’.
So it goes that winners are just addicted to success and are always hungry and hungry for more. My favourite sporting hero is a freckled old man who actually never does sport himself, but for a freaking half decade, the old man has simply redefined the mantra of football success in the world. So old and yet so hungry for success, successful yet so ordinary, with a whole lot of mentions that are monetarily visited on his favourite apprentices in form of the famous ‘hairdryer treatment’ yet he lavishes the best of praise usually for his nemesis.
In Sir Alex Ferguson, you have a complete man who combines his successes and his failures to make a better man. I will never forget that terrifying May month, a week to a second mauling of the red devils at the hands of a youthful but magical Calatalonian side when the man confided to his friends – "I have a solution for the boy (read Messi)”. The solution never worked but the man began to plot for the next encounter on his, if well put, only remaining Europeans archrival. Will that moment ever come, nobody knows, but winners never stop trying. That statement summarizes how much a winner can spend plotting his next battle, even if it is just against ‘a boy,’ if we can even dare to call the Argentinean tiny soccer wonders that.
In our simple lives, we get so scared by trifles but looking at the big picture, we never will be winners if we mind so much about what our friends or family will say about our daring move to the future. It is that ability to plan, decide and decisively at that, that sometimes makes the difference between an ordinary and great man or woman for that matter. Nobody achieves anything without stepping on anybody else’s toes. We are freaking seven billion souls on this planet and we can’t spend our whole lives trying to make all of them happy even if there was a price for it. Neither Obama nor Pope John Paul the Second could.
Just like these sportsmen, if you really want to have some effect on this world, leave some legacy behind after you are gone, you have to develop a winner’s attitude and that involves getting off your lazy behind and doing something, whatever it is, just do something and stop waiting for opportunities and luck, just do something.
I wish you a wining mentality this Sunday!