Time Essay: To an Athlete Getting Old

In the last few rounds, those watching felt a growing and almost unreasonable pathos. It was an emotional force considerably larger than the spectacle—a heavyweight champion losing his title—might be expected to generate. The moment carried an accumulation of memories and meanings that are involved in the drama of great athletes aging and failing.

Even when performed amid the Naugahyde and flash of Las Vegas, sport can serve a kind of liturgical function. It becomes a parable: those few athletes who are gifted with a certain magic become proof of the splendors that the body can achieve—the feats of grace, strength, speed, skill, stamina. But the athlete’s half-life is so short; his decline and failure become a model of the mortality in everyone.

Muhammad Ali has caused inflammations of metaphysical prose in a number of writers; perhaps the urge ought to be resisted. But sport and play can lend themselves to extravagant speculations, and Ali is one of the most abundantly complicated figures in the history of games. His career in boxing has of course been totally entangled with his celebrity—Ali may be the most famous man in the world. Since he took the heavyweight title from Sonny Listen in Miami Beach 14 years ago, “the Greatest” has been the protagonist of a vast popular psychodrama in which sport was only a part. But more vivid than his conversion to Islam, his anti-Viet Nam politics or his famous mouth is the memory of his sweet dancing vitality in the ring. That recollection played in the back of people’s minds, almost in their subconscious, last week as they watched a 36-year-old man too tired and slow to hit the boy who was taking everything away from him.

Such a ritual transfer of the championship can touch deep, unarticulated feelings. If men dread death, they also look nervously behind them as they age to see what younger people are hurrying up to replace them, not only on the job but on the planet. The passing of champions can be cathartic; it is part of the large, primitive theatrics that sports perform.

There are relatively few athletes whose glories and declines seem to acquire an emotional importance. Quarterback Joe Namath, who retired several weeks ago after 13 years in pro football, is one. In his early years with the New York Jets, Namath’s popular image had more to do with booze and stewardesses than football. His feats alone brought the upstart American Football League into parity with the National Football League. But like Ali, Namath’s lasting imprint in memory involves certain splendidly perfect moves: his flickingly fast release of passes, his clairvoyant readings of defenses and where his receivers would be. Like Ali, Namath could be an arrogant gamesman: he preposterously predicted that his 17-point underdog Jets would beat the Baltimore Colts in the 1969 Super Bowl—and they did, 16 to 7.

Arnold Palmer has not won a major tournament since 1964, and these days, at 48, he often fails to make the cut. But he goes on, playing 25 tournaments a year. Golfers can survive in competition longer than most professional athletes. Julius Boros, for example, first won the P.G.A. championship at 48. But as Palmer has admitted, few men go on winning past 40, and Palmer’s 5 children are in college now. Despite the long I stretches between displays of his old brilliance, a battalion of “Arnie’s Army” remains, believing in I him, a little like Lee’s Confederates after Appomattox. What the army remembers are the things that made him the first man to turn golf into a truly popular spectator sport: his remarkable assaults upon a golf course, audacious physical attacks that swept his followers with him by the millions. Just this month he was the king of the clubhouse at the Bob Hope Desert Classic, surrounded by what the press tellingly described as “middle-aged groupies.”

Age is not always an enemy. Experience can equip an athlete with a savvy to compensate for what he has lost in reflexes. As Ali said in demanding a rematch with Leon Spinks last week: “I may be old, but I’m not dumb.” But in physical competition, an old pro’s tricks can only postpone retirement.

What is the best time to retire? Jim Brown, the great running back of the Cleveland Browns, quit at the height of his powers, in 1966, before he began having to fight his age. By contrast, Willie Mays went on until he was 42 and found himself stumbling around under fly balls for the New York Mets. There is a natural season, a range of ages, for athletes in most sports. Russia’s Olga Korbut, a gold medal gymnast in 1972 at the age of 17, appeared sadly middle-aged four years later. Rumania’s Nadia Comaneci, whose gymnastic performance at the 1976 Olympics received perfect scores, seemed almost hefty a year later. Swimmers age more quickly than moths.

Sometimes, when beholding the contractual orgies that professionals indulge in, bidding their prices higher and higher as the years pass, it is possible to suspect that the whole professional sports business artificially prolongs athletes’ careers, keeps them slogging along for huge sums of money long after their powers have faded. Occasionally that happens. But men and women in most sports do not even reach athletic maturity until they are well into their 20s, or even later. It was not until she had hit 31 that Virginia Wade won Wimbledon last year.

Housman’s familiar poem tells of an athlete dying young:

“Now you will not swell the rout/ Of lads that wore their honours out,/ Runners whom renown outran/ And the name died before the man.” Al most as powerful as the drama of athletes aging is that of the golden boy destroyed in his youth.

It is the difference between, say, Lear and Lycidas. Hobey Baker, a masterpiece of athletic talent at Princeton in the years before World War I, died in 1918 when his plane crashed in France. After his graduation, Baker had said sadly: “I realize my life is finished … I will never equal the excitement of playing on the football field.”

Last year another Princeton man, Bill Bradley, retired after ten years with the New York Knicks. In his book Life on the Run, Bradley wrote of “the Faustian bargain” that the pro athlete makes: in return for glory, he must eventually “live all [his] days never able to recap ture the feeling of those few years of intensified youth.”