Does Aging Bring Sadness to an Athlete?

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The crowd is going nuts, he made the winning basket, and the Warriors win! This sounds a lot like an athlete at the high school level of sports winning the game and everyone gets excited. High school is the primary years of learning a sport and finding your talents. As you enter college and continue to do sports, you find that your talent is met with many other people who also are good at a particular sport. Sports can be anything including basketball, football, soccer, badminton, tennis, ping pong, and even cross country skiing. You are considered an athlete if you participate in any sport. So being named an athlete is an honor because your skills are put to the test at all ages which leads to the question of: does aging bring only sadness to an athlete? In this essay, this question will be answered from many different points of view including external and internal validations.
Firstly, can aging bring sadness to an athlete? This question can have multiple answers of yes and no, but with my agreement with A. E. Housman I believe athletes do get sad. Athletes can become very saddened that they can’t play the sport they have loved forever because of old age. We see this today in many profession sports around the world, where once you turn thirty-five or older, these players retire because sports teams no longer want them. Sports teams want the young people to take over the spots that older athletes are in now. We can look at the National Basketball Association for an example, the athlete Tim Duncan of the San Antonio Spurs is close to forty years old and nearing retirement age because the younger, faster, and stronger athletes are pushing him out. This can sadden the player because of the blood, sweat, and tears he put into the ...

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...fans and loss of physical strength and endurance.
In conclusion, I agree with A.E. Housman and his idea that athletes get sad because of the fact that they age and become too old and weak to keep up with younger athletes. We can see that even today with sports teams in America that there is always a cycle of younger replacing the older. We can see players be happy and sad because of their forced retirement due to the aging process. They are happy because they get quality resting time to be with friends and family and can spend their money freely. And sad because the talent they have been playing all their life is no longer something they can physically do because they lose the breathe easily and need more resting time. So yes, I agree with the author because athletes lose their fans to younger people, and lose their endurance levels all due to the aging process.

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