Losing It: A lifetime in pursuit of sporting excellence

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.

Table of Contents:
PART ONE: PROTOSTAR - A STAR IS BORN 1 The Great Cricketer 2 Bloody Cricket 3 A Leaping Wolf 4 God on Our Side 5 Top of the Tree 6 The Honours Book 7 Semi-naked semi-courage 8 For the Love of Violence 9 Hell is Other Rugby Players 10 Death of an Athlete 11 One of the Elite 12 Head of the River 13 Oedipal Ping-pong 14 Faster Than You'll Ever Live to Be 15 The Graveyard of Sport 16 Sport is Bourgeois PART TWO: SUPERNOVA - PERIOD OF MAXIMUM BRIGHTNESS 17 Elimination 18 A Good Start 19 A Madman's Joy 20 Enter the Dragons 21 Emergency Exit 22 Well Hard 23 The Monsoon Match 24 Clever Trevor 25 Promotion 26 Notes from Everest 27 Zen in the Art of Goalkeeping 28 Dodgy Keeper 29 Three Times a Champion 30 All in the Golden Afternoon 31 The Gate Closes 32 Ghost of a Cricketer 33 Foundation Myth 34 The Real Thing 35 Sport's Dreamtime 36 Perfect Dolores 37 Eddy Pratt 38 Death of a Wicketkeeper 39 Match Drawn 40 Sporting Perfection PART THREE: RED DWARF - A STAR IN DECAY 41 The Fall of Oedipus 42 The Big Fish Cup 43 The Very Essence of Sport Acknowledgements

About the Author :
Simon Barnes is a multi-award-winning writer with more than 20 books to his name, including The Meaning of Sport and How to Be a Bad Birdwatcher. He was the Chief Sports Writer of The Times until 2014, and has written sports columns for GQ, The Spectator and many others. @simonbarneswild

Review :
Funny, thoughtful, tragic and touching. Don't be fooled that this is a book about sport - it's a story of (often unrequited) love. There are many aspects to sport and many perspectives. The common denominator is that Simon writes beautifully and in extraordinary detail about all of them. An intriguing personal journey into how sporting failure can inspire people, it’s thought-provoking stuff for all amateur players It is the memoir of a sporting non-great … Barnes can be pointed, precise yet poignant. His memory of youthful pursuit carries echoes that will resound with most. A fascinating piece of work Another knock-out read by the multi-award-winning writer Simon Barnes Barnes uses his wealth of knowledge and experience in sport to tell an engaging tale of the endless hunt to achieve success