Listen, I don’t make the rules, I only suffer under them, and the term “suck” is our current most commonly used word to express that one is terrible at something. I suck at a long list of things, but with age comes wisdom if you don’t suck at getting old, and I’ve at least come to appreciate that sucking at things is an excellent way to carry on being a kid.
Following Valentino Rossi’s not-so-hot two years on the Ducati, the talk has begun in earnest that whatever’s wrong with the bike or not, he is too old. He’s washed up, his best years are behind him.
Rossi is 33, which is about how old I was when I got a knee down on a track for the first time. Troy Bayliss almost made it to 40 before his wife talked him into retiring—a family decision I’m sure the Baylisses will have plenty of time to discuss in their golden years wobbling round the golf course (since TB really wanted to un-retire not long after retirement). Among the advantages of sucking at most things is the crystalline realization that if the sucker were ever as good at a thing as Bayliss was at racing motorcycles, he would have to be dragged away from it kicking and screaming. Go out on top? What, and leave all that champagne in the bottle to go flat? One who truly sucks would suck out the marrow then start in gnawing on the bone, à la the great Pierfrancesco Chili, who is probably somewhere plotting a comeback right now.
Luckily, when you show a proclivity for sucking at sports at an early age, the sort of competitive drive your top athletes all share gets quenched early and replaced by a more practical attitude. Given a choice between Rossi’s career and, say, Colin Edwards’ when both were on factory Yamahas, I seriously think I’d go with the Edwards program. When he breaks into the top five, everybody’s happy. When he doesn’t, not many people notice, and there are plenty of believable excuses. CE gets nearly all the perks with about a tenth of the pressure, and if he doesn’t make as much as Rossi, he’s still rolling in dough. Plus, he can go wherever he wants without creating a riot. It doesn’t suck at all to be Edwards.
Some of these poor guys seriously can’t stand to lose, or so they profess, though I think a few years writing advertising copy or scrubbing toilets at the airport would likely hip them to the fact that being a perpetual no-hoper in MotoGP isn’t such a bad way to go, given that the educational requirements are all similar. But maybe it really is a testosteronal thing. In fact, the physical evidence would argue that it is: Now that I’m in my 50s, a lot of my racing heroes are long retired. Some of them are younger than I am, but very few of them look it. With all that testosterone comes gray hair and less of it. And psychologically, what’s it like to go from being at the center of this whirlwind of excitement to being retired in your 30s? What now? What’s left but the downslope? How could you not feel old before your time?
I just read that Valentino’s a tennis fan and keeps in touch with the great Roger Federer, about whom similar murmurings are lately being expressed as younger players chip away at his dominance. Tennis is an even crueler sport; Federer is 31. John McEnroe and Pete Sampras now play seniors events, and at 53 and 41 years old, both are already looking like old men.
The problem is that when you were as good at a thing as these guys were, it’s obvious and well-documented when you begin to slip back down. You won all these championships and races almost effortlessly, and now you’re out there sweating and busting ass in public and you just can’t win anymore. What’s changed? You’re old and washed up, that’s what, and now it’s the long slide into the abyss.
If you suck, things are way different. I’ll never be as fast on a racetrack as a Canet or a Cernicky much less a Mick Doohan, but the key thing is that since I never was any good to begin with, I’m personally convinced that I’m no worse than I ever was—as a matter of fact, I think I get a little better/faster every time I go out there. I think I’m still learning, and since there never was any discernible “peak,” who’s to say I’m coming down from it? Critically, nobody’s keeping lap times or statistics. The way I play it, tennis is not quite an aerobic sport, and whatever athletic ability I’ve lost by growing older (again, hard to quantify, since I never had much to begin with) I like to think is made up for with three decades worth of accumulated treachery.
To age is human, to suck, divine. In the words of the great Frank Sinatra, here’s to the losers. Bless us all.
