KP and Ronaldo: a tale of two narcissists

Simon Barnes has been chipping away at KP recently commenting on his self-love and near autism because of his inability to recognise others apart from himself. Some quite amusing lines along the way.


Kevin Pietersen and Cristiano Ronaldo: a love story


We can but admire two of the world's finest sportsmen. But not quite as much as they undoubtedly admire themselves . . .












The Aussies were a little quicker off the mark. They attempted to destabilise Pietersen by calling him Figjam, an acronym for F*** I'm Good Just Ask Me. Sometimes, particularly in the case of women, the G becomes Gorgeous. Either would do for Ronaldo and Pietersen; if they found themselves in the same changing-room, one mirror would never be enough.
And as the RBS Six Nations Championship looms, the question of Danny Cipriani comes up once again. Is the much talented, much humbled, much charged-down England fly half part of the Figjam Tendency? Or is he a young man trying to get his talent and his weaknesses into some kind of perspective?
Time will tell us more, but which do we want him to be? Are we willing him to be a sane and grounded individual who has come to terms with his gifts, or a dysfunctional human being with a reckless overvaluation of his place in the world?
It is nice to believe that a person with a personality defect must inevitably suffer from it, that a person who thinks too much of himself will inevitably be humbled. Such stuff works in a school story, but not in the real world, and not even in the world of sport.
In fact, there is a strong argument for saying that with Ronaldo and Pietersen, the source of their best work is their self-admiration: that they are winners precisely because they believe they have a right to beat everybody set in front of them.
Like many of us, my first sightings of Ronaldo led me to think of him as a water-fly, a bug with gilded wings, a painted child of dirt that stinks and stings. But soon after reaching this conclusion, I couldn't help but notice that every time he was kicked to the ground, he got up and tried the same trick on the same defender. This shows a rare moral courage and the question of whether it springs from self-love or the love of sporting combat doesn't matter a jot.
Last season Ronaldo scored 42 goals for Manchester United. He also fell over a lot, pouted, waved his arms at referees, believed himself a living martyr, dived, preened and prinked. You may find that part of it unattractive, but that didn't stop him from being an extremely effective sportsman. Perhaps even the finest in the world.
Naturally, there is a downside. You could see it in an instant in the penalty he took in the shoot-out at the Champions League final against Chelsea last May, in which he put in a - surely unsportsmanlike - pause in his run-up and then saw his penalty saved. When Ronaldo fails, he fails in a way that betrays his vanity. That's because his weaknesses and his strengths come from the same source, and that is true of everybody.
There is a strange vulnerability about the narcissist in action, particularly the sporting narcissist. Perhaps this rule counts double for the batting narcissist, because he must come against the fact of his own fallibility far more often than is convenient for the maintenance of his personal mythology.
Pietersen feels the little death of dismissal very deeply. For him, it is as if the stars had stopped in their courses and the sun ceased to rise in the east. It is not what is supposed to happen.
But Pietersen's self-regard is all tuned in towards success. Dismissal prompts him to work and to think and to do all he can to make sure such a terrible thing never happens again. His greatest gift is his ability to seize a great occasion and make it his. This was apparent almost from the start, when he played for England in a series of one-day internationals in South Africa, the country he had walked out on. Sledged, booed and jeered from pavilion to wicket, he proceeded to score big and flamboyant runs; runs, like the Ronaldo stepover, that were a considered and deliberate insult to his opponents and a huge, unretractable statement about his own self-worth.
Pietersen might be a nicer person if he were a bit more humble, but that is not the point. He has played two of the most remarkable innings I have seen in Test cricket, and both came from his sense of self. The first came at the Brit Oval, when his demented assault on Brett Lee secured the Ashes for England; the second in Adelaide, when he reduced Shane Warne to baffled impotence.
But that's the unfair thing. Narcissism doesn't necessarily impair talent. In the cases of Pietersen and Ronaldo, it does quite the opposite. You would think that narcissism would destroy all forms of talent, but this is not the case at all, even in the arts.
In painting, Gauguin and Courbet qualify as paid-up narcissists, while Dali's entire oeuvre, such as it is, is postulated on self-love. You'd think that literature would find out and lay bare the narcissist, but that didn't stop Hemingway from bringing us Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises, the finest piss-up in the history of literature. Wilde and Shaw produced their best work because of, not in spite of, their self-infatuation.
Perhaps one can argue that artists of the first rank - the very best of the best - are never narcissists. The greatest, by definition, lack boundaries; and self-love is a destructive limitation. Perhaps that is also true in sport: the self-regard of, say, Ian Botham and George Best, of Don Bradman and Pelé, is of a morally different order from the self-love we have been discussing.
But all the same, Ronaldo and Pietersen are among the finest practitioners of their arts and we can only admire them - even if we can never do so quite as much as they admire themselves.


Kevin Pietersen ‘near autistic’, says writer



The decision by Kevin Pietersen (pictured) to relinquish the captaincy of the England's cricket team comes as no surprise to Simon Barnes, the distinguished sports journalist and author. Writing in the Times, he observes it was inevitable given the 28-year-old's super-inflated ego and unchecked narcissism, and offers a critique of the player that could be mistaken for a psychiatric profile.
"Kevin Pietersen is like the actor who asked what he was supposed to do in the pauses. 'What pauses?' asked the director, who prided himself on the paciness of his productions. 'You know - the pauses when other people speak.'"
Barnes says that the South African-born player, who is married to the Liberty X singer Jessica Taylor, "has never been comfortable with that Other People thing. He has never quite got his mind around the fact that there are people who do their stuff in the world for reasons entirely unrelated to Kevin Pietersen. Small wonder that he didn't make it as captain of the England cricket team.
"Throughout his life, Pietersen has been disappointed by the world. His response, on every occasion, has been not to change himself but to change the world. When he comes across an uncomfortable truth, he gets rid of it, like Sir Alan Sugar firing an apprentice."
Concludes Barnes: "Pietersen's illiteracy when it comes to other people, his near-autistic understanding of things such as friendships and enmities and joys and worries, always isolated him as a player. This only increased when he was made captain."
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Whatever his other flaws, at least Pietersen doesn't cheat like that prick Ronaldo. Like all those prick footballers. You don't see him rolling on the floor begging for a free kick. You don't see him surrounding the umpire. You don't see him pretending to get hit by a bouncer.

I do enjoy watching football as a sport, but all footballers are pieces of shit.

Clamson wrote:You don't see him rolling on the floor begging for a free kick.

that would be quite a sight on a cricket pitch. who would he kick first? graeme smith?

You know the point I'm trying to make though!

Way too long to be read in one hit.

The One wrote:

Clamson wrote:You don't see him rolling on the floor begging for a free kick.

that would be quite a sight on a cricket pitch. who would he kick first? graeme smith?

Clamson wrote:You don't see him surrounding the umpire.

That would be quite a sight, too...

Ronaldo is worse than KP in every way.

Edit: He's probably better at football actually.

vilkrang wrote:Ronaldo is worse than KP in every way.

Edit: He's probably better at football actually.

Does KP know that?

"Is the much talented, much humbled, much charged-down England fly half part of the Figjam Tendency?"

i thought FIGJAM was a c4 invention

The One wrote:"Is the much talented, much humbled, much charged-down England fly half part of the Figjam Tendency?"

i thought FIGJAM was a c4 invention

I first heard it used about 10 years ago. It was applied to Shane Warne.