The pressure is from the stars themselves. They expect the best and if they don't deliver, it is horrible for them. With a sport like tennis, where at any tournament there can be only one winner, there are going to be a lot of perfectionists having to deal with disappointment. You need to be incredibly mentally strong."
Not all are. Former England cricket all-rounder Vic Marks has a poignant insight into the realities of being an athlete. "Sometimes as a cricketer," he says, "you just long for it to rain." But why? "So you don't have to play. With cricket, perhaps more than any other sport, everything you do is measured and analysed for all time – your failures are a matter of enduring public record."
"Fans say: 'You've got it good, you're on hundreds of thousands of pounds a week, so how can you moan?' – but most football players think the fans don't really understand what their lives are like."
A terrible fear of failure is one reason the life of the sports star can be rather less than the realization of a beautiful dream. But there are others: horrendous training schedules, endless travel, foul fans, boredom and lack of privacy. "Everybody thinks it must be so wonderful to spend the winter in the Caribbean or Australia, but it's not when you're away from your family and you're standing outside for eight hours five days straight."
In his autobiography, Agassi describes the sheer difficulty of getting out bed one morning towards the end of his tennis career. "I'm a young man, relatively speaking. Thirty-six. But I wake as if 96. After two decades of sprinting, stopping on a dime, jumping high and landing hard, my body no longer feels like my body. Consequently, my mind no longer feels like my mind."
That passage will resonate for any player nearing the end of their career, with a body once in prime condition now a bundle of aches and pains that prefigures more intense physical suffering in later life.
There is, a horrible coda to this story of sporting misery. In his 2007 book Silence of the Heart: Cricket Suicides, historian David Frith wrote that cricket has a suicide rate that exceeds the national averages for the respective cricketing nations, and estimated that more than one in 150 professional cricketers have taken their own lives. Why? Frith concluded that cricket is an all-consuming endlessly absorbing sport and after retirement the thought of life without cricket is intolerable.
The mental and physical pain of playing sport and being at the top of your game may be bad enough, but the existential horror of realizing at the end of your career that you are no longer part of that world is surely worse. Perhaps, these players didn't hate their chosen sport. More likely, they loved it too much.
Author and Credits: Stuart Jeffries - The guardian