After the Locker Room

Part One

The locker room is hard to write about without sounding sentimental, because the thing that makes it specific is structural rather than emotional, and the language available for it tends toward the emotional. The structure is what matters.

What the locker room provides, for the duration of a career, is a particular bundle of conditions that almost never appear together anywhere else in adult life. Daily physical co-presence. Shared physical work. Shared physical exhaustion. Shared stakes that fall on everyone in the room together. Continuous low-grade humour as the medium of communication. A common language of inside-references nobody outside the room would understand. A common enemy, often, in the form of the opposition, the table, the season, the contract negotiations, the press. And underneath all of it, the unspoken acknowledgement that everyone in this room is doing the same hard thing at the same time, on the same calendar, with the same body that is the same instrument it is for everyone else.

That is a very particular thing. It is intimacy of a kind that does not require speaking it, because the conditions produce it whether anyone names it or not.

When the career ends, every one of those conditions ends. The daily physical co-presence ends. The shared physical work ends. The shared exhaustion, the shared stakes, the inside language, the common enemy, the unspoken acknowledgement, all of it ends. The room disperses. The conditions that produced the intimacy go with it.

Most retired athletes describe a kind of grief about this that they do not always have language for. The grief is not about the people necessarily. The people are still alive, still reachable, still occasionally in touch. The grief is about the structure of intimacy that the locker room was supplying, which has not been replaced by anything else and, in the standard course of post-career life, will not be.

This is the loneliness people refer to when they say they miss the locker room. It is not the people. It is the kind of company those people, in those conditions, were able to give.

Part Two

The standard response to this loneliness is to try to substitute for it. Find a new team. Join a board. Start a foundation. Take on a coaching role with the next generation. Build a peer group of other retired athletes. The substitutes look promising and many of them are useful in other ways. None of them, in my observation and in what athletes describe publicly, reproduces the specific thing the locker room produced.

The reason is structural. The conditions that produced the intimacy are not present in the substitute. A board does not share daily physical work. A foundation does not share physical exhaustion. A peer group of retired athletes shares the past but not the present. The substitutes are all reaching for the same goal, but the conditions of the original cannot be recreated in the new contexts, so the result is something that looks similar in form and feels different in practice. Many former athletes spend several years cycling through substitutes and ending up in something close to the position they started in, only with a few more boards on the CV.

I had my own version of this. After I left the bank I tried versions of the same play, on the assumption that the texture of the M&A team or the trading floor could be reconstructed in a different setting. The networking dinners. The new boards. The carefully curated peer groups of other former senior people. None of these were bad. Some of them have been useful. None of them produced what the floor produced. It took me longer than I would now recommend to stop trying.

What I found, eventually, was that the work was not to reproduce the locker room. The work was to develop forms of intimacy that the structure of the career had not let me build. The friendships that are not transactional. The conversations that do not have an external referent. The relationships where the question of what is being produced together is not the organising principle of the connection. These are slow to build, particularly for someone whose adult life has been organised around production. But they are buildable, and they hold a different kind of weight than the locker room held.

For an athlete in this arc, the equivalent work is likely to look the same in shape and different in pace. The relationships that endure post-career are likely to be the ones that were already, during the career, not entirely about the career. The new ones, built afterwards, are likely to grow slowly because the conditions that build relationships fast in elite sport are not present outside it. This is not a failure. It is just a different timeline, with different ingredients.

Continue reading: The Wrong Target →

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