No Room for The Agony of Defeat (Part I)

I recently read a critique of the movie industry lamenting how box office dollars are the only real determinate for a movie’s “success, importance, significance, and value” in our culture. For sure, discussions regarding a movie’s ultimate value always seem to make their way back to money, notwithstanding the critical acclaim a movie receives.

Lately I’m wondering if a similar reordering of priority is ruining our view of sports, as increasingly questions regarding “success, importance, significance, and value” get boiled to one category—the won/loss column.

A week before the biggest cultural sports event in our country, it’s worth asking: When did we who love sports allow winning to become all that matters? Not just an important category, but absolutely ALL that matters?

Pressure to win is nothing new, of course, but a definition of “winning” that leaves no room for anything other than championships strikes me as a recent development. As one friend notes, college and professional teams seem to have embraced the standard that “you make the most money if you win and you win if you make the most money.” The body and soul of sports have certainly been sacrificed in the temple of Nike, residence of our culture’s figurative and literal gods—money and victory—and both sport and its followers suffer as a result.

Evaluating ourselves entirely against the measure of being “the last one standing,” a standard of perfection that most will never attain and those who do will find impossible to maintain, drains sport of its majesty, its breadth, its depth. We’re gutting the games of their intrinsic substance and leaving their carcass for the blog-vultures to devour. Win it all or else.

When coaches are fired after a few years with above-.500 records but no playoff appearances, when college teams are ignored and often vilified for 11-win seasons (or more accurately for the one loss that kept them out of the computer-generated final dance), when getting to the second round of the playoffs isn’t good enough, when going undefeated in the regular season then falling one miraculous catch short of winning the Super Bowl necessarily leaves you out of the “Greatest Teams Ever” discussion, it seems we all become losers because something is drained from the pursuit of competition itself.

I love to win, love to watch winners. I've never felt I won enough, never felt the teams I watch win enough.  But I need to resist accepting a mentality that equates “losing” with being a “Loser,” that punishes all who fall short of gaining the temporary and fleeting prize called “championship”. Maybe we should strive to be at the top without making that our only pursuit along the way.

By revisiting character and discipline as legitimate categories of success.

By learning how to win and lose well without ever accepting either as being what defines us.

Maybe it’s time to redefine (or remember?) why we play games in the first place.

Editorial