Hockley called it a "soul-crushing" experience.
Defeat would be a crushing experience for either of them, and for those who adore them.
Having trained for years towards this goal, being overlooked is a crushing experience for an athlete.
That must be a crushing experience to learn you're not what you're genetically destined to be".
However it is dressed up, it has been a fairly crushing experience that leaves him with a lot to contemplate.
Few players handle defeat with the dignity or perspective Rafael Nadal brings to that morale-crushing experience.
The altitude's reduced oxygen level and the chest crushing experience of wearing restrictive body armour made for a pretty miserable affair.
Munga says he wants to find new ways of talking about the city: "For 20 years, Kinshasans have lived through every spirit-crushing experience – war, crime, corruption, shortages, poverty and the break-up of the family.
For director Michael Cimino, the failure of "Heaven's Gate" (due precisely to critical repudiation of the film due not just to a blinkered indifference to its brazen originality but in knee-jerk response to reports of its budget and its extraordinarily exacting production), was a crushing experience.
"While the Killer Album reissue didn't reunite the Ruthless Rap Assassins," Andy Cowan says, "it did get them back in the same room for the first time in 19 years – repairing bonds that had been frayed by their soul-crushing experience under the major label machine".
The destruction of some of the last populations of the animals that shaped us, as well as the natural world, inflicts, I feel, a great wound in our lives, diminishing the wonderful planet on which we evolved, shrinking imagination, crushing experience.
