The Winning Trap

We are suckers for a beautiful woman, a handsome man, and winning. Myself susceptible to the first, admiring of the second, and guilty of the third, I nevertheless must retreat (or better yet, recoil) from the obsession with coming out on top. At least right now.

I like to think that I work around, live around, people with reasonably strong moral codes. They will likely shout down racism, recycle whenever possible, attend church far more than I do, and exhibit any number of neighborly traits that they don't have to, except that they have probably been raised right and seek to live out the traits that were instilled in them when they were young.

But give them a chance to win, and it will all go out the window.

The purchaser of the lottery ticket, the sports fan, the irate parent whose child has been "wronged", the hardcore ______ (insert political party here), the friendly arguer who turns unfriendly--all have to emerge victorious.

Some aspect of our lives, and maybe it's our capitalistic lives, has convinced us that there are some things that we absolutely must win. There are rivals that we must face down. There are paybacks that we must not concede. There are affronts that cannot be tolerated. There are situations that must be corrected, situations that are unimportant when compared to the amount of time and/or money that we are suddenly willing to invest in them.

Even though most readers of this blog are not Japanese, we nevertheless have mostly embraced the concept of "saving face," which is its own form of winning, but our face-saving is a perverted form. Somehow our pride has come to depend on the outcome of contests that we have not participated in or battles that we have not fought, but ones that are associated with the reputation of the institutions that we work for or live under, the academic institutions we attended, or, in the worst case, teams and organizations that we simply share geography with.

And our only hope of seeing the stupidity of this is if it is a situation where we don't care whether or not we win. I exist right now in that rare void. I see the folly of sacrificing personal and societal values in order to win. Right now, the desire to win that surrounds me concerns sports. And I am miserable. Sweet Jesus, I am miserable. I am so consumed with the wrongness of what I am watching that I can barely think of anything else.

Of course, if this were a situation where I did need to win, then it really wouldn't matter if Satan incarnate was driving the race car or passing the football or running for the office that is important that I have put my hopes behind. I, too, have been consumed by the desire to win sports. If you are a Steeler fan as long as I have been, then you have tolerated a member of the "Steel Curtain" taking pot shots at cars on the freeway back in the late 70's and you have tolerated your quarterback assaulting a young woman in Georgia just in the last couple of years, and any number of misdeeds in between.

But it feels different right now, because no matter where we work, whether it's the U.S. Post Office or Bennigan's or some corporation in a high rise building in a large city, that place of employment espouses some set of institutional values, and however hokey those values might be, however overwrought a mission statement might seem, we still grab for those values as some kind of a benchmark. And if we feel like we are not hitting that benchmark, then we start not to believe.

Because nowhere, even in the most cynical, profit-driven Wall Street firm does the motto read "We will win at all costs" or "We will chuck our values out the window in order to win." No place is that outwardly craven.

Winning is a trap. It becomes its own goal and casts aside any benefits or lessons or silver linings or whatever noble might have inspired a desire to win in the first place. Left instead is just the winningness itself, an unpolished stone, which brings only the briefest of satisfactions, which is all that it can do, because when we are left time for any kind of reflection, we can't help but remind ourselves what it cost us to get there. By the time that stone is cut and polished, we haven't the interest and can barely look at it, so focused are we on the next stone, the next win, that we must attain.

Vince Lombardi Can Kiss My Pasty White A$$

The Secret of My Success - Night Ranger (mp3)
Everybody's a VIP to Someone - The Go! Team (mp3)
(Link removed due to DRSM violation warning.)

It's all because of me and my old man. God, I fucking hate him. He's like, he's like this mindless machine I can't even relate to anymore. "Andrew, you've got to be number one. I won't tolerate any losers in this family. Your intensity is for shit." You son of a bitch. You know, sometimes I wish my knee would give and I wouldn't be able to wrestle anymore. He could forget all about me. -- Andrew Clarke (Emilio Estevez), The Breakfast Club

My daughters' U10 soccer team won three games in a row on Saturday to take home the league championship. No one on their team had ever played select soccer. Only three of the eight girls had ever played together before, and two of the three were my girls.

Oh yeah. And I was their coach.

The Vampires -- yeah, that was our team name -- weren't superbly talented, and their coach had never played in or coached a game of actual soccer in his whole life. The only reason I was the coach was because our original coach backed out, and the only way the five girls who wanted to play together could was if I were willing to do it. My first email to parents included something to this effect: "If your goal is to win, or if you expect your girls to dramatically improve, this is a bad idea. I can only promise you that we will try to have fun and teach what we can." Trust me that I'm not being humble when I say we barely met our meager goals.

Very rarely does having a philosophy that values other things above winning actually get rewarded with winning. If victory isn't the priority, it's not fair to expect to be rewarded with victory, right? So please allow me this rare opportunity to bask in it.

Granted, a lot of serendipitous factors played into our ultimate victory and were much more important than anything I did or any philosophy I espoused:

1. It rained all fucking season. More than half our games were postponed or cancelled, as were more than half our practices. This didn't hurt our team as much as it did teams who actually have great and beneficial practices.
2. In the tournament, we were given a Christmas gift of a blind draw. Three of the four debatably better teams all played in the other half of the bracket.
3. Because all teams started the season with small rosters -- 7 or 8 players for teams that play six to a side -- injuries and absences made it tough to field a team. Several coaches used "pick-ups" all year to beef up their team, and those pick-ups were frequently U10 and U8 select players. (And trust me, a select U8 is regularly better than an average U10 player.) These coaches asked that this tournament make exception to standard rules and allow pick-ups. I opposed and said that we should play 5 v 5 when necessary rather than allow for what I lovingly call "assassins."
   
4. All seven of our girls showed up for the tourney. We played the last two games 5 v 5, and the other team had no subs.

In short, we had a bench, we hadn't been padding our team, and superior coaches didn't have as much time to improve their players. Add up those factors and my scrub team of very decent soccer girls, playing under a philosophy of "have fun and work together," won a title.

One of our girls hurt her knee the weekend before. She could hardly run, and when she did, she resembled Forrest Gump when he was on those leg braces. But I played her anyway. I called her "SuperSub," because her job was to go in when any of the other girls were tired. And she gave it her all even though she had no business being out there if winning was our goal.

When those three whistles blew, and those girls knew they'd won, each of them could know confidently that they had played a part in winning. From the injured sub to our stud goalie to my daughters. It wasn't just Self-Esteem-Boosting Lefty Dad talking. Each girl on our team contributed an invaluable part of the victories. To be able to say that, and mean it, and see in their eyes that they believed it... that was far better than the mere victories. (Unfortunately, it's soooo much easier to believe that shit when you also win.)

To say coaching is taken a little too seriously in the 21st Century is like saying that walking on water is kinda neat. Nerds like me believe coaches are given far too much power, influence and credit.

The way some people at our school talk, you'd think coaches invented the light bulb and helped ensure world peace. Too often, we hire teachers based more on what coaching vacancies they can fill rather than whether they teach well. We'll take a B- teacher who coaches the right thing over an A+ teacher who's willing to learn how to coach. (And it's not just our school. I dare you to find a handful of male principals in any public system who weren't coaches before they got promoted.)

Meanwhile, our school's history is chock full of smart teachers who didn't know jack shit about their sport somehow leading teams to state titles. But we ignore that and instead hire "professional" coaches; that is, people who find a sport more important than all the other stuff involved in the process of education. And we apparently live with this decision by saying that what kids learn on athletic fields carries with them the rest of their lives. (As opposed to, you know, geometry and The Scarlet Letter, which don't have nearly the staying power as lessons learned from wrestling. In math terms, that's Cross-Body Ride > x.)

Ever read the infamous email from the man I call the Green Death Soccer Coach? It's quite the work of art. Even though I think there's a chance the dude was totally kidding, I can say quite confidently that had he been in the South, he would never have faced the kinds of negativity and consequences he saw up in Massachusetts. Down here, we promote these coaches. These dudes are now principals. Or Nick Saban.

Competition and competitiveness in their proper places, in the proper perspective, are wonderful and powerful things. But our society of parents and adults looks and sounds more and more like Andrew Clarke's dad every day. And either too many of us seem to think it's OK, or we don't care enough to change it.

In the finals, the other coach took a girl out in the final six minutes because she wouldn't get back on defense when we scored our final goal. The girl was big. She'd been playing non-stop the whole game. What's the big shock here? But he basically conceded defeat when we played five of the last eight minutes in a 5v4 game. To teach her a lesson, I guess. That being 10 and utterly exhausted is no excuse.

I'm a little competitive. Otherwise I wouldn't be celebrating the fact that my girls kicked the collective asses of all those serious coaches obsessed with winning. At this very moment, I feel very much like Bud Adams in the Buffalo luxury box. That's what a few beers can do to someone who knows it's not easy to keep the value of victory in perspective. So you'll have to forgive me if, for this one brief moment, the forces of Fun and Perspective won out over The League of Winning Is Everything Jocks and I cheer a little harder than the moment deserved.

God bless Night Ranger, but it's a miracle there's any cliches left after they used so many of them on this one song. And God bless The Go! Team for making songs that sound both sooo so '70s yet soooo so kewl.

Pinch Me

I Want to Take You Higher - Sly + the Family Stone (mp3)
Pop Goes the Weasel - 3rd Bass (mp3)
Dare - Stan Bush (mp3)

Written mostly unedited, whilst intoxicated and celebrating late into the night...


Two things came to pass on Tuesday, November 4, 2008:

1. A person of color has assumed the highest position in our country.
2. The gross and stubborn hubris of the Republican Party was finally and fully acknowledged.

An entire race of people in America will wake up tomorrow with a slightly more positive view about life, about our country, about our world. Their tears are genuine, and their joy is pure. Voters like myself and millions like me get to celebrate with them. We didn't vote for a black man. We voted for a man we sincerely believed would take us and our country in a different, better direction. And we voted against a party -- not a man -- that valued power and the abuse thereof over principle and duty. Barack Obama has, over the course of more than a year, taken a very specific and consistent tack and sailed it. Some can call it smoke and mirrors, but it's the most consistent collection of smoke and mirrors you'll see in any candidate in recent history.

If the Democrats fuck up their chance in the next two or four years, if they overstep their bounds and do anything approaching what extremist conservatives tried so hard to tell everyone, you're damn straight voters will make them pay.

John McCain's concession speech was befitting someone who wanted so badly to be a "Maverick." He did that speech the right way. I even think it was sincere.

This election never had anything to do with John McCain. My conservative friends and relatives might not have been aware of it. Maybe they were too distracted by their accusations of a "liberal media elite." Maybe they pacified their beliefs with words like "socialism" and "terrorism" and "plumber." Sarah Palin may have made what could have been close into a blowout, but it wasn't about her, either.

The underrated Harrison Ford film "Presumed Innocent" has one of the great final lines of recent film history: "There was a crime. There was a victim. And there is punishment." That line is the story of the Republican Party in the 21st Century.

One day, when the Republican base is not so full of venomous spite and so purely in a "with us or against us" mantra, they might even realize that it wasn't McCain and Palin that lost. It was them. It was their vitriol and their lust to win without compromise or negotiation. Our country is about getting along, about working together. Conservative Christians and the ultra-rich don't want to work together. They want to make the rules, and they want everyone else to cower, to follow, to hide. Anything less than total dominance is considered failure.

Thank God they failed. I hope it takes them a couple of decades to realize how close to the sun they flew. I hope it takes them decades to realize that their Politics of the Immovable Object is pathetic, outdated, embarrassing and... well, un-American.

When Bush beat Kerry in what was percieved as a "mandate," Dubya earned 286 electoral votes. Barack Obama will fall just shy of Clinton's numbers in 1992, as electoral votes go. That bastard -- can I call him that?? -- rode two very close victories as if they were "mandates" for him to take a big ol' shit on the heads of anyone and everyone he and his cronies wanted. I guess conservatives slept well with it, because they didn't do much to stop it. They mostly cheered him on.
 
Well, your day of reckoning arrived on Tuesday night. You'd best eat that poop sandwich and digest it, because that's the only way you'll learn how terribly off-course you took yourselves and your country. We cannot, as a country, come together if you won't budge from your perch.
 

I hope you will. I hope you'll consider it. As I type this, I'm watching Barack and Joe Biden welcome their families. I'm looking at a First Familiy unlike any we've ever seen, unlike any most of us have ever allowed ourselves to imagine. I haven't cried tears of joy like this since I first saw Corey Haim's football team give him a standing ovation in Lucas. I can't imagine feeling a more powerful rush of optimism for my country, for our country, in a more dire time. The Obama family is enough to soften a lot of very crusty cynicism. The air is suddenly different.

Maybe some Americans will hope he fails. Maybe you're one of them. If so, I hope he proves you wrong. I hope he listens to your concerns, like he says he will. I believe he wants to be your President, too. And that belief only makes me cry harder.

And the less I hear the god-forsaken word "mandate" -- a word Dubya has forever tarnished -- the better off we'll be these next four years.

Who can limit themselves to just one, two, or three songs in such a triumphant and exhilerating moment?? "It Can Happen" by Yes, "Beautiful Day" by U2, "The Rising" by Bruce, and a whole flock of songs only slightly less cheesy than "Dare" (which comes from The Transformers soundtrack from the 1987 animated movie).