Mental Health, Crime, Sport, Community, and Island Life: The Post-Retirement Struggles of a Fiji Soccer Hero

Kieran James,Yogesh Nadan

doi:10.1007/s41978-021-00088-1

Abstract

This article explores the soccer career of the ex-Fiji national-team player, Henry Dyer, and his post-retirement struggles. He experiences ‘fragmentation’ because of two ‘epiphanies’ (traumatic life-events)—his failure to get an elite coaching job after retirement and failure to secure an overseas playing-contract. After a period of fragmentation, when he cut all ties with the sport, he has reinvented himself as a caring person who, through the social and support club, Nadi Legends Club, visits ex-players going through illness. We also use Henry’s story as a gateway to explore (1) race and class aspects; and (2) masculinity issues. We look at the case through the theoretical lenses of symbolic interactionism and Foucault on power.

Highlights

This study builds on the extant literature and is a bit different from prior work by not focusing on an athlete’s debilitating injury or illness but on the serious disappointment and alienation faced by an international soccer player, Henry Dyer, as a result of not being given an opportunity to manage or coach a team at the elite senior level within his home country of Fiji Islands.1 (Fiji Islands, hereafter Fiji, is an island nation of 926,000 people located in the South Pacific Ocean.) Henry feels disappointed at not receiving an overseas club contract during his playing days which would have secured financial stability for himself and his family
As at August 2019 Henry served as assistant headman at Nakavu Village and lived a life of subsistence farming, village council meetings, night-time kava and drinking sessions, and practical poverty
He went on regular fundraising activities, on behalf of his village, and, ironically, usually received higher donations than anyone else because of his soccer-legend status He had arrived at a salvaged self, after much anguish

Summary

Introduction

1.1 General IntroductionSome important literature within the discipline of sport and physical education sociology (e.g. Gerschick & Miller, 1995; Sparkes & Smith, 2002, 2003; Sparkes, 2000) has attempted to study in depth, via the ‘narrative analysis’ method (Sparkes, 2015 page 21), one or more athletes who have faced traumatic life-events and how these events have impacted upon these people’s ‘sense of self’ (Smith & Sparkes, 2005 page 1103; Sparkes, 2015 page 21) and self-worth. Gerschick & Miller, 1995; Sparkes & Smith, 2002, 2003; Sparkes, 2000) has attempted to study in depth, via the ‘narrative analysis’ method (Sparkes, 2015 page 21), one or more athletes who have faced traumatic life-events and how these events have impacted upon these people’s ‘sense of self’ (Smith & Sparkes, 2005 page 1103; Sparkes, 2015 page 21) and self-worth. Henry’s story includes his descent into criminality during the mid-years of his playing career (he and his co-offenders committed several after-hours burglaries at jewellery stores in the western part of Fiji); and his prison-based rehabilitation after serving jail time in 1987, the year of the country’s first two military coups. Cowman (2016 page 98) writes that ‘[g]ood collective biography does not attempt to divorce individuals’ own views of their experience from the social and political contexts in which these experiences were situated.’ As a part-European, Henry’s life was irrevocably shaped by the transition from colonialism to post-colonialism in Fiji and Colonel Rabuka’s two military coups of 1987

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion