What use is sport? Why defer your studies and waste the years? Why wake before the light to lose more than you win? Why choose a life of tin cups and inadequate earnings?
Most Singaporean athletes just shrug. They’ve heard a version of these whys. Sometimes they are questions with concern, sometimes they are just patronising. And maybe they’re just too tired after practice to explain the university they go to, the one of almost no off-days, where the field is the classroom, and tests come daily, and the marking is harsh, and the lessons are in character building (try losing in front of thousands of people).
But if you’d like to get a glimpse of this education, go to any field, gym or pool. Or go and meet Danelle Tan. Age: 20. Chosen course: Football. Many students take the bus from their Singapore estate to class, she’s journeyed to London, Dortmund, Brisbane and now Tokyo to study. Most students learn in English, she has to master football while speaking German, Strine and now Japanese.
What do we want for our children? Experience, surely. To taste the world. To appreciate hardship. To be independent and wander. Tan goes to Brisbane Roar, gets injured and requires surgery in the first week of her season which “kills her momentum”, for the team’s playing well and it’s hard to force her way in.
There must have been tough, lonely days of rehab and fraying self-esteem and yet this is also an education into the self. “I think,” Tan says, “one of the most important things for an athlete is to back yourself and to be confident. Because if you’re not backing yourself, then who is going to do that?”
Still, it’s hard to go out and look for a new club, sending videos to people, maybe training with a club as Tan does with Nippon TV Tokyo Verdy Beleza where she is now, waiting for word, waiting to be picked.Tan is undramatic, matter of fact, but admits, “that period where you’re sort of waiting to hear back from the club… maybe you’re a bit more anxious”. Because she’s not an amateur any more and “this being my job, it becomes a bit more nerve-racking”.
University is an institution with a fixed address, but sport is a travelling campus which is often uncomfortable. “I hate moving. Just as you feel like you’ve settled down and found your routine, you’re packing up and moving again, saying goodbye to friends”.
Everyone wants to settle in one place and grow, but till that happens football can be a nomadic life, a wandering in search of the right cultural and athletic fit. “You see,” explains Tan, “a lot of cases of players in certain environments that are absolutely terrible, and then they go to another club and are thriving there”.
This fit with a club is complicated, a jigsaw of varied parts. “There’s a lot that goes into whether you’re happy where you are. How well you bond with your teammates, whether your coach believes in you, whether you’re even enjoying life in that country, whether your playing style fits the league or even your team”.
Football is a language but has multiple dialects. No culture speaks it the same and so players have to adjust to a “different grammar” in speech and play and attitude. In Brisbane, they trained and went home. In Tokyo, they eat together at the clubhouse (which Tan likes). In Australia, strength prevails; in smaller Japan “they’re very, very technical players and things like rondos, they do it all the time”.
Western nations shrug at hierarchy, Japan thrives on it. In one of Tan’s training sessions in a different field with a smaller changing room, the players have to use two changing rooms and are split by age. It may seem a minor thing but indicative of the adventures which shape young athletes and demand from then.
“You have to be very adaptable,” says Tan, whose new season begins on August 10. “Each team, each club, each country, is very different, and so if you’re stuck in your rigid way of thinking then you’re a bit worse off. But I think if you’re able to adapt to different cultures…. just the exposure of how things can be done differently often enriches you and elevates you as a player.”
The great college basketball coach, John Wooden, whose first lesson was to teach teenagers how to put on their socks properly (no wrinkles, fewer blisters, no game time lost), once said “adversity is the state in which man most easily becomes acquainted with himself”.
This is the state in which Tan – and every young Singaporean who chooses sport – exists, discovering herself, embracing discipline, surrounding herself with the ambitious, falling, rising, dusting herself off, claiming respect, craving examinations, joyously following a hard path. At the end not everyone wins a trophy, but they all emerge with what we’ll never own. A unique degree in life earned in a sweaty classroom.
