The search for a dignified end to a sporting career

The more complex point is that once they're done, even when they've achieved all they need to, sportsmen struggle to come to terms with suddenly not doing what they've done for so long.

Roger Federer was defeated by Rafael Nadal in the Australian Open semi-finals.

For no one does the end arrive quicker, and is forever closer, than for the sportsman.
Each new day is one day less than before, and thus one in which the body is a day older, a day slower, a day lesser. All life can be seen dwindling daily to an end, but in sports this narrowing of time is far more urgent and always far more exposed.
No sooner has this year begun than endings loom as pressing matter. In India, Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman have already been retired once, falsely as it turned out, by blobbed masses of cricket administrators - no face, voice or spine - and mischievous journalists. Still, it is difficult to imagine either lasting the year. (Sachin Tendulkar, however, is clearly too great or too close to an inconsequential landmark to be told - or asked - to retire.)
A semi-final defeat at the Australian Open, in the meantime, and 24 months since his last grand slam win, means that Roger Federer will read and hear more this year - in the nicest words possible - that it may just be time. Andrew Strauss, who is very much not the Federer of left-handed batting, will still find it in him to empathise with the Swiss given that his long-term lack of runs no longer floats indifferently within a bubble of English cricket success, but is bogged right down in the fresh morass of defeat.
Over in the English Premier League, Paul Scholes has actually ended his current ending and un-retired, entering an exalted and bizarre room inhabited mostly by Pakistani cricketers and boxers. And though Thierry Henry never actually did so, his return has felt like he has come out of retirement.
This business of retirement can be an unsettling one, not only because it is not easy to know whether something irreversible has set inside a player or whether it is merely a temporary slip. Sometimes sportsmen will recognise the approaching of the end and make adjustments, or change their approach entirely.
Slowing reflexes can be compensated for, a loss of pace can be balanced with better positional sense and so do players prosper for just a little longer. It makes them doubly fascinating, like Ricky Ponting, the Australian cricketer, recently, or Ryan Giggs, the footballer, over the past season or two.
With men such as Federer and Strauss, often there isn't even a discernible erosion of skill. Sometimes others are just getting better, different and better, bearers of a new standard. With others, such as Laxman, for example, or even Scholes last season, the decline can be more apparent and sudden.
But by this stage, what they're really doing is battling the conceit of the rest of us who think we know that it is time for them to leave.
It is a terrible conceit that says it's better to leave while people are asking "why did you?" rather than "why didn't you?" leaving on a high gracefully rather than carrying through a low gracelessly.
Why should sportsmen care what people say? Why should Dravid, Laxman, Federer go at any time other than of their own choosing?
It is not for them to understand they are past it. This is all they have known. It is what they have sweated towards their entire lives. To expect them to leave voluntarily and suddenly, when others think the time is right is presumptive nonsense.
Which is also why, of course, retirements are rarely final these days. It's not just that sportsmen feel they have something left to achieve. Otherwise Sir Alex Ferguson, who had won pretty much everything with Aberdeen and Manchester United, would not have scrapped plans for his retirement in 2002. Neither would Bjorn Borg have attempted a comeback, or Michael Jordan or Ian Thorpe or even Scholes.
The more complex point to endings in sport is that once they're done, even when they've achieved all they need to, sportsmen struggle to come to terms with suddenly not doing what they've done so intensely for so long. And they are still, by any standard, young. Many stay in the sport in other capacities, which can be fulfilling but can also end up finishing unfinished business through the lives of others.
The only thing for it would seem to be golf, a sport where nobody retires, where you can pass a peak quietly and play on beyond it, against yourself and the land, and be accorded some dignity as you do so as well.
 
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