jóias de família

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"How players respond to pressure determines the standard they reach even more than their talent. Borg and McEnroe responded in different ways. McEnroe, cursed with inexplicable skill that obliged him to grapple with equally powerful egos in front of thousands of spectators, externalised the pressure he felt, to a histrionic degree.
He was a character from one of John Cassavetes's emotional movies, a mess of a human being, his rants a way to authenticity. 'I believe in the validity of a person's inner desires,' Cassavetes said. 'And those inner desires, whether ugly or beautiful, are pertinent to each of us and are probably the only things worth a damn.'

The Swede, on the other hand, was like one of the actors, or 'human models', in Robert Bresson's austere, spiritual films: 'The thing that matters is not what they show me but what they hide from me and, above all, what they do not suspect is in them ... It is the flattest and dullest parts that have in the end the most life.' To McEnroe's complexity, Borg offered depth. (...)

(...) 'Freed from self,' wrote the 14th-century mystic Meister Eckhart, 'you are self self-possessed. And as you are self-possessed you possess God and all creation.'

'It should be joy,' Borg has said, explaining his retirement. 'It should be in the heart.'

If it is given to certain athletes to move between normal consciousness and a state of grace, then what do they do, what can they hope for, once their bodies let them down from Olympian heights? The saint may be ready to dissolve his body into the essence of the elements and enter the Body of Light. It's not so easy for the accidental mystic.

Some, perhaps, are destined to follow the path of an Augustine or Siddhartha, of dissolution before enlightenment, but in reverse."

Tim Pears
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

A googlar... uma pérola do jornalismo desportivo...