In the afternoons I would take a book to my bedroom before taking a nap, but often I found myself just thinking about what on earth I would do if I wasn’t a professional footballer. What other life could I lead, how else could I get through the days and provide for my family? That thought brought terrible insecurity, but at least I thought about it and fought my way to some understanding of what would be coming, so that when I stopped playing it didn’t come as too much of a shock. For some lads, when they are told it is over, they just go to pieces.”In a foreword to Frith’s Silence of the Heart, Mike Brearley, the former England Test captain and now a professional psychoanalyst, writes of his regret that he couldn’t have done more to help David “Bluey” Bairstow, the chirpy and combative Yorkshire wicketkeeper who shocked the cricket world and his old team-mates four years ago when he walked into his garage and hanged himself. “I knew David quite well, I thought, as an extrovert and solid professional,” says Brearley “Perhaps all extrovert people conceal a less obvious self. However that might be, David became fatally depressed.”Bairstow had worries about money, about the health of his wife, about the slippage of his life, but those who knew him best could not get it out of their heads that something had probably died in him when he had to put away his wicketkeeper’s gloves. He was the most competitive of characters, voluble in his passion and proprietorial about the values of the game that he had entered as a grammar school boy, with special provision to sit his GCE examination before rushing away to play, of all games, a Roses match against Lancashire.His old team-mate and another former England captain, Ray Illingworth, may have got to the heart of it when soon after Bairstow’s death he said: “I knew ‘Bluey’ had a few problems, but I was gutted when I heard the news.

He was such a good lad at heart, and he felt so much about the game. He didn’t care who he offended if he felt there was a point to be made He played hard and he fought hard to win. He loved the game in a way which in these days I don’t believe is so common. He loved it so much – maybe too much.”For Graham Obree, like Bairstow and all those sad witnesses to the darkness that can follow the sporting light, there were additional reasons for the onset of despair. He had been diagnosed as a manic depressive and Christmas time was particularly oppressive for him in that it brought memories of his beloved brother Gordon, who died in a car crash just as Graeme was coming down from the high of his world record success.Yet the unifying fact in all these cases is that triumphant young men were all obliged to face the rest of their lives without the edge and the distinction, and, perhaps, the distraction that had been provided by the sporting action. A hollowness had come in to their lives, one that could never again be filled.. The fourth International Olympic grand prix for bridge will take place in Salt Lake City in just over three weeks’ time, concluding two days before the Games open.

If you missed the other three, it may be because they didn’t take place anywhere near any Games, but in the confines of the Olympic Museum beside Lake Leman in Lausanne. Now, however, bridge is upping its bid for Olympic status by putting on a show where and when it counts.”Unlike previous occasions,” the World Bridge Federation website proclaims, “bridge will be demonstrated to the public and the International Olympic Committee officials who will have gathered for the Winter Olympics. Some of the world’s top players have been invited to participate in what is believed to be the final step to bridge becoming an Olympic discipline.”So there we go. Come the 2006 Winter Games in Turin, bridge could be up there with alpine skiing and bobsleigh Just one thing troubles me about this It’s a complete nonsense. Call me old-fashioned, but I thought the Olympics were about sport, and by my dictionary’s definition, that means “an activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others for entertainment”.We’ve been here before.

If I mention ballroom dancing, I’m sure it will jog your memory. While the arena for that particular activity remains strictly ballroom, its ultimately fruitless submission to be included within the Olympic fold at least bore some scrutiny. After all, if ice dance was allowed in, with its subjective judging on interpretation and style, then surely a less slippery version could be admitted? Having said that, of course, no ice dance would have meant no Torvill and Dean, which would have been out of the question.But to return to the card game – if I may term it that. The rising Olympic hopes of those within the WBF – not to be confused with the WWF – were made clear at the last Federation Congress, held in Maastricht in 2000. There, Jose Damiani, the WBF President, highlighted the fact that numerous countries had been able to join their national Olympic committees after his organisation was recognised as an International Sports Federation.Damiani concluded the Congress, the official record shows, by inviting all the delegates to join him for cocktails.