The journey beyond Sport

By Efe Ukegheson

Sport is forever…..until it isn't

Sport is a beautiful thing,it is one of the things that has the ability to change lives,  but what happens when life happens; and sport is taken from you and time starts flying by? How do you take yourself back to the start? How do you mentally rebuild yourself to chase that dream again? How do you accept you may have moved on? 

You hear about it all the time unfortunately, ‘he was destined to be…..’ but he tore his ACL, or he suffered a mental breakdown or they simply just never figured it out. Mental health, despite it starting to gain traction, is still one of the most overlooked topics within sport. Once you reach a certain level every athlete will have similar skills and abilities, and it’s simply a question of opportunity, physical health and mental fortitude as to who performs the best. The greatest athletes this world has seen often have some of the toughest, most unpredictable journeys thus creating the inspirational mindsets and people that they become. But life is unpredictable and has a funny way of redirecting us down different paths to remind us who’s really in control here. How do you transfer all those incredible intangibles to a different purpose? How do you let go of something you’ve worked towards your whole life? How do you move on with…life?

My Jounrey in sport

Basketball. At one point the love of my life, the be all and end all, the sole determining factor of myself worth, what I believed to be my destiny and my sole purpose for God putting me here, until it all came crashing down. Covid sparked the start of the end for my hoop dreams. Life at home became a lot more problematic but aside from that, the silence of the world’s activities and issues gave me some time to really sit down with myself and figure out both who I am and what I truly want to do with my life.

I realised basketball played a significant role in my life and I enjoyed it but I didn’t really love it for what it truly was. Basketball made me feel like I was worth something – a feeling my childhood had never given me – it filled a void of pain by patching over my deepest wounds with attention, notoriety, success and validation: but when it came to the actual sport itself, sure I liked it but I didn’t love it as much as I had convinced myself for years I did. Maturity also made me realise when you get to the professional level it’s not really basketball anymore and when a hobby becomes a job it sucks.

Fast forward a few years and I'm happier, I still play basketball at a very high level whilst pursuing my true passion (finance) which is something I have always been interested in alongside basketball.I’ve healed my inner child and the wounds basketball used to hide for me no longer cut as deep so all in all I’d say things worked out pretty well.

Endings come before new beginnings

Mental health is a critical part of sport, it affects our passion, our motivation for other things, sometimes it can also be a determining factor of our self-worth and it can feel like the be all end all of our lives. There is so much more to life than sport, and sometimes it requires the absence of sport to recognise that. I definitely wouldn’t have been where I am today if I had continued my path in basketball (I’d 100% be pro right now),instead I would've been so deeply troubled because I wouldn’t have had time to process my journey nor would I have been doing something I truly want to do. A part of my heart still sinks knowing I most likely would’ve  played professionally till I’m 30, and sometimes I wonder if I would have been able to become the world changing athlete I aspired to be. My dreams have changed and more importantly, I’ve changed as an individual and so has what I want out of my time spent on this ball of soil.

Life changes and so do people, and sometimes this can come with tough decisions. Did we really love that sport or did it fill a void for us or hide us from some sort of deeper issue that the glitz and glamour outshined? Often times athletes are extremely hard-working and one would assume this is just simply a great quality they have but this could also be for other reasons: for example it might be a deeper issue with self-worth and thinking they aren’t good enough and so being the ‘star’ on a team masks that, perhaps maybe they loved that bit of it, but they didn’t love the sport for what it was, they loved it for what it could do for them, like a bad relationship.

In the end, finding purpose, fulfilment and true happiness , in my opinion at least, is what matters the most even if you have to give up something to obtain it. Whatever you lose will always be replaced by something way better.