Two jolts accompany the news of the shocking death of a young athlete.
Theyab Awana: a talented footballer who had ambition to become UAE's best
Former managers and officials paint a picture of Awana, a key member of the UAE's 'Golden Generation'.
Our close friend
Theyab Awana is 'lost forever'.
Theyab Awana
is mourned by thousands at funeral.
Theyab Awana
dies in car accident near Abu Dhabi.
In pictures:
Theyab Awana for club and country.
The first stems from the impossible sadness, from
's heartbreaking age of 21, from thinking about a family enduring the unthinkable. This jolt comes laced with all the horrible questions about fate and reason and cruelty.
No matter how many of these terrible stories one learns, no matter how commonplace they can seem when following the news, the mightiness of this jolt never changes.
It's the second jolt, the background one, that hits squarely in the sports pages, because it involves one of the reasons we all bother to watch and follow games. It's the one about the athletes who play the games well and how, in some real way, they represent the opposite of death.
Go to a stadium and watch them, and death becomes about the last thing that comes to mind. Not only do they provide some of the most visible examples of strength and swiftness, and not only are they usually uncommonly healthy, but they operate so visibly. The capacity of stadiums to epitomise life is probably the No 1 aspect that keeps the games going even with all their much-publicised ills.
Then you take all the footballers and all the rugby players and all their might, and even within that ilk there are those who somehow seem more alive than the rest. Awana was one of those. It was not just the back-heeled penalty against Lebanon that people all over the world watched in July and again on Sunday and Monday.
In addition to his budding and promising talent, he had that dose of charisma that makes people notice. You could call it flair or style, but whatever you name it, it most certainly qualifies as alive and serves as one of the ultimate examples of alive.
That's part of why you might stare at such a terrible headline that surfaced on Sunday night and Monday, and you might reread yourself into a daze. You might gaze at it for minutes and still not find it quite true. These stories never seem believable when they happen to anyone, but they take on an extra edge of implausibility when it is someone who provided such a visible example of vitality.
Even if you have heard a hundred stories of athletes dying suddenly, and even if you were at Daytona when Dale Earnhardt, the legendary race car driver, died on the last turn of the last lap, and even if you saw a whole city go into shock such that burly men cried at the breakfast tables of diners the next morning, these things never fail to stun just as much as they did the previous time.
With footballers, that feeling might be even more pronounced because the game requires one of sports' most profound levels of fitness and therefore of vibrancy, ardour and dynamism.
The handful of cases of recent years include Spain's Daniel Jarque, 26 when he died, and Nigeria's Endurance Idahor, 25, and earlier this year the former Chadian national player Lokissimbaye Loko, 30, and Japan's Naoki Matsuda, 34.
As their deaths from health issues jolted those who knew them and worked around them and also those who watched them, it can be even harder to process a death that occurs quite apart from the training sessions or the matches. That probably packs an even steeper jolt of,
No. Surely not. That cannot be true.
With Awana, maybe it helps just one infinitesimal fraction that through the kindness of YouTube and other video clicks, the people who knew and liked and loved Awana can go again and again and regain various moments of the vividness.
At least as humans forever running around without any answers to these things, we have managed to invent something that lends just a smidgen of deathlessness against the undefeated force of death.
Within the framework of the ambitious UAE, Awana played excellent football and looked excellent doing so.
Surely he would continue doing so for years and even decades to come. This tragedy from Sunday, this news, this would be just about the least possible thing.
Follow
The National Sport
on
& Chuck Culpepper on
