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.

Winning?

The Awkward Stage--"The Morons Are Winning" (mp3)

As a young teacher, I liked to partake in all of the competitions against students--flag football, basketball, etc. It didn't really matter that much that I was expected to block or that I didn't get in much in a b-ball game. We did it because we lived in the dorms, because we knew the boys, because the kind of trash-talking that went on before and after was part of the friendly rivalry and essential camaraderie that we had with our students.

But soon, a certain element of the faculty took over--the ones who had to win. At that point, there was talk of strategy, of recruiting, meaning talking to faculty who hadn't shown up, but who could help the team, of practicing, rather than just showing up for the game. It wasn't too long after that I stopped playing.

Some years later, after the death of Pete Maravich, a group of over-40 faculty members formed a Geriatric Basketball Association, a weekly outing of friendly/competitive basketball that. There were a couple of us who were allowed to join because we "played like we were over 40." What that really meant was that we understood the spirit of the "league." That spirit involved pick-up games where we tried to make the teams even, where we would play for a long time before we even played for points, where we tolerated the guy who drank wine before we played and could clear out the lane just with his farts or the guy who couldn't shoot at all or the intra-departmental rivalry at point guard or music teacher who didn't know the rules of basketball and just blocked people.

After a couple of years, some younger faculty arrived on the scene, and hearing of the weekly game, asked if they could play. Almost immediately, you can guess what happened. The young Physics teacher who still fashioned himself a skilled post player was bashing bodies with an older guy who knew someone who knew someone who let him into the league. And there were heated words and stand-offs and people storming out of the game on at least one occasion.

You see the pattern. It would be too easy and a mistake, I think, to put the blame on the young. This isn't about young vs. old; it's about the need to win, to dominate, to crush one's opponent at the expense of everything else.

I see it even now in my Fantasy Football league. Sure, all of us would like to win, would like to have the $100 that goes to the overall winner, but most of us know that our league was formed as a social league. It is indeed kind of humorous when you think about it, grown men thinking that they "own" a team and getting so fired up about winning with that team that they are no-nonsense at the draft and get into the minutae of league rules and don't really engage all that much socially. It's something that all of us who play, I'd guess, have been caught up in at one time or another. Maybe.

I just feel it a little more right now. Maybe it's the economy (which is a convenient excuse for anything anyone can think of--not having sex? It's probably the economy) and there's someone who doesn't so much want to win as feels like he needs to win. If you get into our league needing to win the $100 first place, you are in the wrong place. Fantasy Football is far more about luck and who you happen to pick up in the middle of the season than in any strategy on Draft Day or whatever research you may have done in preparation for it.

I suspect it's bigger than that. The need to win has become so pervasive in our society that, for many people, loyalty to a sports team or a presidential candidate or a date is unlikely to survive any serious downturn. We're as fickle as the politicians who base decisions on the polls that capture our fickleness. And what we--as schools, as political parties, as participants in competitions--will do to win has long since breached the boundaries of acceptable behavior.

Along the way, just at this school, I can remember softball tournament started by a sophomore leadership organization. In its best moments, it was the all-school tournament where I could play on a team called "The 700 Club," which had nothing to do with the Christian Network show and everything to do with having to have at least a 700 on at least one part of the SAT. Needless to say, the team did not go far, but the fun, the camaraderie, the self-awareness that the team wasn't about winning, that's what the tournament did for these boys.

It became the tournament where a 10th grade student umpire's call at second base caused him to get chewed out by a fully-grown, supposedly-adult faculty member. Where in the same faculty/student tournament, faculty members recruited teams a year in advance, and where faculty members got into shouting matches with other faculty members' wives who were sitting up in the stands. That the tournament no longer exists is now blamed on a shift in the varsity sports alignment, but those of us who have been here know that the fun went out of the tournament long before it died its slow, eventual death.

The funniest, not-so-funniest aspect of having to win is that the drive to get there destroys everything around it, so that by the time everything is in place for the best possible chance of winning, there isn't anyone who still wants to play. Yeah, that makes me sad, in a way, but I like it. It's the revenge of those of us who are not ultra-competitive. I guess it's how we win.