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The road to the top end of professional sport is littered with broken dreams

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Craig Ray is the Daily Maverick sports editor.

Professional sport is a giant pyramid and what we generally see is its tip. We don’t see the mother working three jobs to feed her child’s sporting dream, or the coach who takes a talented player under his wing.

First published in the Daily Maverick 168 weekly newspaper.

I’ve played in a few golf pro-ams over the years and, barring one occasion when I played with a seven-time European Tour winner, they have all been with what you would term “journeymen professionals”.

What has always struck me is how good these guys are. One of the players, a young South African who was trying to make it in the US and was grinding on the secondary tour, had arrived that morning to play The Links at Fancourt Estate in George.

It’s a brutal course at the best of times where an over-par score in a regular professional tournament can sometimes be considered a good day. On this occasion, the weather was fine and the strapping young South African lad shot a five-under 68 (par was 73). He had never seen the course before.

If the caddie told him to hit the ball with a draw around a dogleg, he did it. If he needed to fade a five-iron into a fiendish pin position from 190-odd metres, he had that shot too.

More than a decade after that encounter, he is still working at his game and playing sporadically on both South Africa’s Sunshine Tour and the US’s Korn Ferry Tour.

Most years, his official money winnings show modest earnings of $30,000 to $50,000, which, stacked against the cost of travelling, physios and coaches, as well as life’s “normal” expenses, means he is running at a loss.

At the main PGA Tour’s Valspar Championship last week, the little-known Michael Visacki became a social media sensation when he was filmed in tears on a phone call to his father, telling his old man he had qualified for the event.

Visacki had to fight his way through Monday qualifying to play in the event proper, sinking a long birdie putt on the last to qualify. Afterwards he told the media of how his family skipped meals to help pay for him to enter junior tournaments and how he has racked up more than 500,000km in his battered Honda Accord, going from tournament to tournament keeping the pro dream alive.

His raw emotion and no small amount of relief at having qualified, finally, at the age of 27, after trying for years to play in one big event on the PGA Tour, struck a chord.

It showed the other side of golf – and of sport. Making it to the top is hard. Visacki failed to make the halfway cut in the main event, made no money and was back to the grind almost immediately.

As watchers of sport, especially sport filtered through the lens of television, we seldom see the other side of being a professional. Most television coverage centres on huge events, big tournaments and often the biggest names.

Professional sport is a giant pyramid and what we generally see is its tip.

We don’t see the mother working three jobs to feed her child’s sporting dream, or the coach who takes a talented player under his wing. We don’t see the likes of parents leaving lives in Ghana and moving to South Africa to give their child a chance at a better life and that child then becomes a Springbok rugby player. We don’t see the kid who uses old second-hand boots and sneakers, or a single disused golf club hitting stones on a beach, before becoming a major winner.

For most people, playing sport is simply about physical health, enjoyment and perhaps a sense of community. But, for millions of people, sport represents a dream of a better life, a dream of fame, or a dream of fulfilling obvious talent.

And the road to the top end of professional sport is littered with broken dreams because, for one person to make it to the top, regardless of the discipline, means that at least one other person’s hope dies. Professional sport is all about crushing someone else’s dream.

In 130 years of Springbok rugby, for instance, there have only been 915 players that have played a Test for South Africa. For 100 of those 130 years, players were only selected from a small sector of our society but, even so, there wouldn’t have been many more players that made it – just their identities may have been different.

Cricket has even fewer and Bafana Bafana have capped just over 450 players. In baseball, America’s favourite and oldest pastime, there have only been 17,000 players in the major leagues.

Think about that. Of the hundreds of millions, if not billions, of kids over 12o-odd years who have played baseball in the US, only a tiny percentage of those have made it to the pinnacle of that sport. It underlines how hard it is to become a viable professional athlete – and how little we actually see of the pyramid when watching a big event.

Visacki’s story and those of countless others are inspirational and cautionary. To make a living as a professional athlete, being talented is not enough. Being hard-working is not enough. Being both is also not always enough.

So when we next watch Bryson DeChambeau, Naomi Osaka, Kevin de Bruyne or Simone Biles win another title and deliver another breathtaking performance, just remember that they’ve got there by clambering to the top of a pile made of broken dreams. DM168

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper which is available for free to Pick n Pay Smart Shoppers at these Pick n Pay stores.

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