Leaving The Game.(Turning Points)

Byline: Imran Khan

Imran Khan on why he gave up cricket for the rough-and-tumble world of Pakistani politics.

The first turning point in my life came at the age of 9, when, in 1961, I saw my cousin score a century (100 runs) against England for the Pakistani national cricket team. Suddenly I was driven to focus on this extraordinary sport. By the age of 18, I had managed to win a spot on Pakistan's team myself. Yet my first outing, to England in 1971, was a disaster. After the tour, I was dropped from the team. Everyone thought my cricketing career was over. But that early failure only fired my enthusiasm to excel.

The next big challenge came when I went to Oxford. It is not easy to study at a top university and compete in sports (I was captain of the Oxford cricket team) at the same time. Yet I knew what an advantage a quality education would give me over other cricketers, and so I persevered.

After university, I returned to professional sports, a career that taught me much that was useful later on. Cricket showed that if one fights right up to the last ball, one can win in impossible situations. And one loses only when one gives up. Failure, I found, was sometimes more useful than success -- provided you made a careful diagnosis of your defeat and then worked hard to eliminate your flaws. Losing was a disaster only if you let it demoralize you. The more one challenged oneself and took risks, the stronger and better one became.

In 1984, my mother was diagnosed with cancer, and died a painful death just a year later. That proved another turning point -- a wrenching one. A few weeks before her death, I met a poor villager at a hospital in Lahore who labored all day to buy medicine for his brother (who was also dying of cancer). Suddenly I was confronted with the injustice of Pakistani society: while the rich could travel abroad for treatment, ordinary people had no access to quality care. There was no specialist cancer hospital in Pakistan, and most people could not afford expensive cancer medicine.

Till that point I had never been particularly concerned with charitable pursuits. Sports tend to make one ruthless -- there are no prizes for coming in second. But I soon decided to build a cancer hospital in Lahore to help Pakistan's less fortunate victims -- a project that took 10 years to complete. Ordinary schoolkids proved my greatest allies; they saw me as a cricket icon and helped me ...