To understand Anna Karenina, Mellors, Molly Bloom, Dante, Romeo, Juliet and Bridget Jones you must also have loved and lost and won. To understand sport in the greatest arenas of them all you too must have played and lost and won, known shame, hope, joy, horror and glory.Simon Barnes has taken part in seven summer Olympic Games, five World Cups and ten Ashes series. Well, not exactly taken part, but certainly he was there and writing hard. And always, behind every victory and every defeat he ever recorded, there was the reference of his own sporting career, in which the bitter beauties of failure were occasionally varied with the intoxication of success.At school he was - at least at first - the opposite of a rebel without a cause: he was a sporting fool in search of a game he could excel at, alas finding none. When he was nine he thought he would somehow be miraculously good at sport. Sadly he never was. But the sporting fool within him never died and in his late 20s he tried again - a second sporting career, in which the triumph of hope over experience was more or less a rout. The dream had only slightly modified: he now thought he would be somehow miraculously competent.So he co-founded a football team and at last found himself the first-choice goalkeeper. Then he co-founded a cricket team, on the grounds that by doing so he would always be sure of a game. And at the same time, he got horsiness and discovered he was actually quite good at riding in competition.All these adventures taught him about sport: why we do it, what is required to be very good at it. He learned about the relationship of physical and mental skills, about fear and courage and physical pain. He learned about funk, about Zen-like calm, about the team thing, about the "me" thing. His sporting failure has been a joyous and profoundly informative part of his life, and here he tells the story of it.

PART ONE: PROTOSTAR - A STAR IS BORN1 The Great Cricketer2 Bloody Cricket3 A Leaping Wolf4 God on Our Side5 Top of the Tree6 The Honours Book7 Semi-naked semi-courage8 For the Love of Violence9 Hell is Other Rugby Players10 Death of an Athlete11 One of the Elite12 Head of the River13 Oedipal Ping-pong14 Faster Than You'll Ever Live to Be15 The Graveyard of Sport16 Sport is BourgeoisPART TWO: SUPERNOVA - PERIOD OF MAXIMUM BRIGHTNESS17 Elimination18 A Good Start19 A Madman's Joy20 Enter the Dragons21 Emergency Exit22 Well Hard23 The Monsoon Match24 Clever Trevor25 Promotion26 Notes from Everest27 Zen in the Art of Goalkeeping28 Dodgy Keeper29 Three Times a Champion30 All in the Golden Afternoon31 The Gate Closes32 Ghost of a Cricketer33 Foundation Myth34 The Real Thing35 Sport's Dreamtime36 Perfect Dolores37 Eddy Pratt38 Death of a Wicketkeeper39 Match Drawn40 Sporting PerfectionPART THREE: RED DWARF - A STAR IN DECAY41 The Fall of Oedipus42 The Big Fish Cup43 The Very Essence of SportAcknowledgements