By Anton Taylor
At one point or another, everybody feels like a loser. It comes to you at certain times; an ebbing suspicion which creeps in to your mind and tells you that you are just one of those people who will never get it right. It is a desperate, sinking feeling which pulls you under and orders you to give in. It is the lump in your throat and the burning of your eyes when, despite trying so terribly hard, your journey ends in defeat.
Everybody has felt this way. Anybody who says otherwise is either lying or so insecure that any form of self-examination is impossible to them, lest they glimpse the ocean of fear and shame flowing within them.
The strange thing is that while everybody has felt like a loser, not everybody is in fact a loser. Certainly, there are losers in this world. They are the scared ones: those who would give in and accept the mean words of the bullies. It's the people who ignore those bitter put-downs, who ignore all the past failures and strive forward, who are winners. But doing so is difficult and tiring, and for many of us events happen through life which make us forget how good thing can be.
Every now and then, however, something happens which reminds us that we can be the guys and girls who get everything they want. Last Monday, after years of battling, as the Ikeys lifted the Varsity Cup trophy, thousands of us felt like those good-looking popular people who get it all. Who win. And we should feel like that. Because we do have it all, and God knows, we possibly deserve it.
Although they deserve the utmost credit for their achievement, the Ikeys victory does not belong to the rugby club. It belongs to all of us. For it was all of us who created the belief that has spread into every facet of UCT living. It was all of us who loved UCT so much that we were willing, year after year, to once again risk that fierce pain of disappointment and give all our hearts to the hope that we could win.
You see, the reason we are winners is not because we have the Varsity Cup. It is because despite the years of coming so close and failing we believed that we could have it all. Winning last Monday just makes it easier for us to see what we have always been.
No matter what happens to us in the rest of our lives, no matter how we've felt about ourselves before this point, there is one fact which we should never forget: there was a time when we were truly at one of the best places in the world. Where we were at one of those unattainable places you'd see in movies, with the triumphant sports teams, top academics, insane parties, impossibly beautiful settings and an unrealistic number of good-looking students. We belonged to a Golden Place during a Golden Age, and there is nothing that anybody can do to ever take that away.
There is a great deal of sadness and suffering in the world, but sometimes there is happiness without pain and triumph without sorrow. And for this time, we are those lucky few who can have it all. Let us never forget this feeling.
**Anton Taylor is entitled to write such articles, for he has been at UCT every year of Varsity Cup's existence and then some. This article was originally published on 19 April 2011 in Volume 20: number 5 of Varsity newspaper**
