A little bit lazy…

I've been meaning to post these next few items for a while now. They're all essays that I wrote in my "The Essay" class that I took a couple of years ago. I'll post one a couple days a week.

This first essay is a little bit out dated. We've won three games over the last two seasons and we look like we should win a few this year.

On Losing

In 1988 the Baltimore Orioles opened their season with twenty-one consecutive losses. The 1976 and 1977 Tampa Bay Buccaneers went winless for the two entire NFL seasons. The NCAA record for consecutive losses in football is held by Macalister College at fifty. Every major league baseball season there are 3860 games played. Which means there are 3860 losses. I list these facts neither to shame the teams or their players, nor to honor them in some way. I'm simply stating the facts. In my last two plus seasons of football coaching my teams are currently 0-22. Losing is on my mind.

Losing has been on my mind a lot through the years. My very first T-Ball team only won two games so I had to get used to it early. I don't remember ever playing for a league or conference champion in junior high or high school and with the exception of two seasons in college I've never been associated with a football team that has ended the season above .500. When I was a head coach of a small town high school football team we had what most people would call a terrible season. We didn't win a single game. We gave up more than fifty points six times in nine games and we only played three games where the final score was closer than twenty points. One game in particular stands out from that season as a shining example of our team's ineptitude. It was the fifth game of the season and we were headed up the road to play against the Claflin Wildcats. Claflin was the two time defending state champion. They were on a forty-four game winning streak and they were playing us for their homecoming. To make things just a little bit worse, two of the four seniors I had out on my team were injured and we only had fourteen healthy bodies suited up for the game. They scored on their first possession. We fumbled the kickoff and they scored two plays later. Our quarterback threw an interception on our second offensive play. Less than five minutes into the game it was already twenty-one to zero. By halftime the score was sixty to zero. Thanks to a mercy rule and their coach's good sportsmanship the final score was sixty-six to zero. It could have been two hundred. I have learned something about losing from that game and all of the games since: all of the cliché's about losing are false.

Losing doesn't make you stronger. It's Nietzsche who is always quoted as saying "that which does not kill us makes us stronger." Coaches are forever describing losses as learning experiences that will make their team better. Sports commentators are often talking about the virtue of losing a game so that your team learns to play through adversity. They say those things so people with great teams do not feel bad about not going undefeated. There is really very little to be gained by those loses. You gain the knowledge that you are not invincible. You gain the knowledge that you can't win them all. You gain self-doubt. Rather than making you tougher, that one loss no matter how close lets doubt slip into your brain and that doubt can mean the difference between winning and losing again. The biggest thing you learn about is how to lose. Vince Lombardi is probably the closest to being correct when he says "winning is a habit, unfortunately so is losing.

Another way people say losing strengthens players is that it builds character. One loss or an occasional loss especially in the formative years can help build character; too much success can lead to hubris and a lack of empathy. But, like most things, those losses face diminishing returns. At some point people don't really get better at handling defeat with grace and being able to be gracious in victory is just as important a social skill as is handling a tough loss. It doesn't make me better able to deal with hard times because I've been on bad teams.

The next big myth about losing is that "It doesn't matter whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game." Tennis player Steffi Graph's response to that is "who ever said that probably just lost." It is possible to engage in sports as recreation, for health, or as a way to socialize, but if someone is keeping score, winning and losing matter. If winning and losing don't matter, why push yourself to achieve? Why give the extra effort necessary to make a difficult play? Why look for every advantage? Why test yourself against others at all? Arthur Ashe said, "you've got to get to the stage in life where going for it is more important than winning or losing." I agree with him when the fight is with injustice. As far as sports though, I would argue that you have plenty of time to reach that stage well after your competitive days are over. Why play the game if you're not playing to win? Winning is a lot more fun. But what about effort and sportsmanship my critics will cry. As Sean Connery's character in The Rock points out, "losers are always whining about doing their best." I agree that doing your best is important, but there has to be the goal of winning attached to it. Most people have no idea about their best. Best often becomes code for playing as well as I can without putting effort into getting better. "I did my best" becomes a free pass as if simply putting in effort excuses the inability to accomplish any goals.

People who are talking to teams that have just given a great effort but lost will often look for something to call a moral victory. "Great job coach you held them to fewer points than they've scored all year, you must feel great about that moral victory!" There is no such thing as a moral victory. The myth of the moral victory is supposed to make us feel better when we lose in the face of unbeatable odds. Any success, or even just strong effort through the second half against Claflin might have been called a moral victory. Knowing that our players didn't give up or that we almost won against a superior team doesn't make the loss feel any better. The players still feel the sting of defeat. The team's record still gets a game worse. Playing hard isn't something you do because you want to feel better about losing. Keeping a game close only makes you wonder what else you could have done to get over that hump. Those of us who keep playing in the face of adversity do it not because we feel better about or chances or ourselves because of these mythic moral victories, we do it because we love our sport.

The difference between being a good loser and a bad loser isn't that bad losers get upset and good losers don't. Bad losers make excuses. They blame others, especially the officials. They quit. They act like the game didn't matter. They spout all of the clichés about effort and sportsmanship and getting stronger. Good losers care about the integrity of the game, about their self-respect and the self-respect of their players and fans. They don't quit. They cry or get upset because it honestly hurts to lose. They don't blame others or make excuses. They hate to lose. You can respect a good loser. There are dozens of stories about football coaches' families who tread lightly the day after a loss. Those coaches are not poor losers. Vince Lombardi said, "If you can accept losing, you can't win." The people who laugh off a loss, mock their own teams, and say, "who cares, it's only a game?" are not good losers just because they seem to be in a good mood. They are people who hurt their sports. They make a mockery of the efforts of people who do care. It may be only a game in the grand scheme of things, but if it's your last high school football game, something you've been working toward for at least four years, it has meaning for you. If you're not upset about failing to accomplish your goal then you weren't working hard enough to reach it. People who laugh off defeats and mean it are people who refuse to put in the effort necessary to win.

The Claflin game was halfway through a season that ended without a win for us. Claflin ultimately lost in the state championship game. I don't know which would be considered a tougher loss. I know that having lost twenty-two consecutive games hasn't desensitized me to losing. It hasn't made me put the game in perspective or focus on the positives. Every loss hurts and every losing season reminds me of the summer of 1981 when a really bad t-ball team managed to somehow win two games.