It is never good to attend to the desires of others for yourself. When you risk succumbing to the dangerous temptation of pretending to be what others expect you to be, over and above who you really are or need, you face danger. The example of professional sports, with its maximum exponent of football, is paradigmatic of the matter.
There is a paradoxical sense of brutal triumph in natural talent that finally leaves the path of success. And there are certainly many more cases than we can imagine. I'm sure that kid who dribbled like nothing, with a cigarette in his mouth during high school games, was a raw genius. But he passed it, it was not what filled him and it was over.
It is true that you can think of the above example as a real shame. And that is why he spoke of "paradoxical sensation" ...
But the point is that the talent that ends up in the idol does not always discover that his dream is as he imagined it. Nothing is free up there. Nothing you do is going to be free from millions of judges. No movement or decision is going to lead you to full freedom. Advisors, psychologists, family members, fans ... from the elite athlete a heavy tortuous chain is linked in many cases.
In this novel we meet Tom, a footballer who finds himself in that limbo of the rising star, in purgatory or the anteroom that finally makes him the God of sport that he wanted to be. And yet the dream of a child is turning into a nightmare, the counterweights drag too much wills that can weaken at some point (and we can all do it).
The higher you climb the higher the fall can be, it is a physical law without more ...
But Tom can glimpse a way out, an escape and suddenly he senses that the most desired by a human being is only freedom….
In the novel we also discover the darkest part of the environment, of the clubs, of the famous bubble that begins to close over the mass idol that, stripped of everything, is only a human immersed in anxiety and the variability of people's perspectives according to a match was good or bad ...
If you like football novels with a background, you might be interested in my book Real Saragossa 2.0, a story about soccer, hidden interests and dark realities ...
You can now buy the book A natural talent, an interesting novel by Ross Raisin, here: