Long ago, before my favorite baseball team, the
Boston Red Sox, won the World Series, their first
such victory since 1918, 86 years ago; and before
Senator John Kerry was defeated in his race for the
presidency by George W. Bush, way back then, some
wag, a Red Sox fan and avid Democrat, set forth the
moral quandary this way: if you could choose only
one victory, the Red Sox or John Kerry, which would
you choose.
When the question was put to me, I hesitated for a
moment, much like Jack Benny once did when approached
by a robber, who said, “Your money or you life!”
When Benny didn’t quickly reply, the robber said,
“Well?”, and Benny famously replied, “I’m
thinking,
I’m thinking.”
I opted for a Kerry victory, but watched and
followed the Red Sox playoff games with unabated
enthusiasm and, yes, joy.
As I stayed up late last Tuesday night to watch
the election results with foreboding and something
akin to despair.
The lives we live with sports and politics, with
relationships and jobs, are always an admixture of joy
and despair, of successes and failures, of love and
loss. Would we want it otherwise?
How do we prepare ourselves for the inevitable
losses of this life if our favorite teams always win?
Until this year Red Sox fans have lived with the
realization that even in good years, in the end their
team will falter and stumble, and we go to their games
or follow them in the papers or on television as
Sisyphus went to his rock, beginning again and again
and yet again, pushing it back up the mountain. Yet
Albert Camus, remembering the old myth, wrote that
despite inevitable defeat when the rock rolled back
to the bottom of the mountain again, one would have to
imagine Sisyphus happy, as it was the struggle toward
the heights that was important.
But fans of more successful teams, like the New
York Yankees, don’t have that kind of stoic acceptance.
Nebraska football fans are slowly learning it.
Twenty years ago or so we were woken up suddenly
at 2 a.m. by an explosion at our neighbor’s house.
All we could see when we looked out the window were
the tail lights of a rapidly-disappearing car going
around the corner. The next morning we saw that our
neighbor’s mailbox had been blown apart by some small
device, and we presumed that because our neighbor was
Tom Osborne, the coach of the Nebraska football team
that had just lost in the Orange Bowl, someone, bathed
no doubt in alcohol, had wanted to send him a message.
As one who enjoys the competition and the spirit
of sports, I am regularly embarrassed at the occasional
excess of fans, those people who go through life
blithely unaware that in competitive games there are
winners and losers, and that tomorrow is always another
day, next year another season.
Accepting loss is particularly difficult among
people who think of themselves as perpetual winners,
who in sporting contests or in international conflict
raise their finger to declare themselves, or their
team, or their nation, “Number One.” Our emphasis
is
always on winning. And we do want our candidates to
win, our football and baseball teams to win. There is
nothing shameful in that, but, in fact, we probably
don’t want that at all. Or that, at any rate, is what
Roger Angell once taught me, in a book about baseball.
Angell, who still writes for “The New Yorker” wrote
in
a column a long time ago that as a fan he wants things
to go well for his players, his teams, but he wonders
aloud whether he wants them to be perfect. What he
really wants, he thinks, is that
Our teams be losers as well as winners; we
must have bad luck as well as good,
terrible defeats and disappointments as
well as victories and thrilling surprises.
We must have them, for if it were other-
wise . . . we would have been granted a
wish - no more losing! – that we would
badly want to give back within a week.
(SEASON TICKET, p 309)
Players know these things better sometimes than
do fans. But few of us handle loss very well. It is
difficult to lose and sometimes we will do almost any-
thing to win. Or react badly when we do not. I once
read a book about sports violence, about people hacked
to death by machetes after a soccer match in Guatemala,
of a football coach in Australia who showed his team
pictures of mass shootings and burials at Auschwitz,
and then said, “Imagine that was your father, your
mother…go out and avenge them.” A Florida football
coach, to put his team in a fighting mood, bit the
heads off live frogs.
Well, that doesn’t put me in a fighting mood at
all, but the point is that winning becomes so integral
to our own well being that we will forever overlook
Roger Angell’s wisdom.
Sticking with examples of sports figures for a bit
longer, there is the plight of the ex-athlete who has
aged, retired. Said one, “In hockey you live by what
you do on the ice, not what you are as a human being.”
It must be hard to see their youth leave them, and
when some grope for years trying to regain the sense
of self they enjoyed when the crowds cheered and the
huge paychecks came rolling in.
Best they die young, as A. E. Housman almost
says in his poem, “To An Athlete Dying Young”:
The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.
Today, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.
The poem goes on, but the point is clear. Fame
is fleeting. There are fields where glory does not
stay – typical Housman despondency, but nevertheless
true. It is a regular theme of male novelists. John
Updike dealt with it in the first of his Rabbit Ang-
strom novels, RABBIT RUN – the ex-athlete who can’t
seem to manage in the real world. There is a fine
short story by Irvin Shaw, “The Eighty-Yard Run.”
The main character is Christian Darling, who had been
an important figure on campus and who had made an
80-yard run one day in football practice. And then
he is 35 and his world has changed immeasurably. He
had married his college sweetheart and things had been
good for a time, and then she began to change and
then the stock market dropped and he didn’t have much
of a job, but she had one. And one day, his wife away,
and swiftly moving away from him, he finds himself on
the old college football field:
Darling half-closed his eyes, almost saw
the boy 15 years ago reach for the pass,
slip the halfback, go skittering lightly
down the field, his knees high and fast
and graceful, smiling to himself because
he knew he was going to get past the safety
man. This was the high point,
Darling
thought, 15 years ago, on an autumn after-
noon, 20 years old and far from death,
with the air coming easily into his lungs,
and a deep feeling inside him that he
could do anything, knock over anybody,
outrun whatever had to be outrun. . . .
The high point, an 80-yard run in the
practice, and a girl’s kiss and everything
after that a decline. Darling laughed.
He had practiced the wrong thing, perhaps.
He hadn’t practiced for 1929 and a move
to New York and a girl who would turn into
a woman. Somewhere, he thought, there
must have been a point where she moved up
to me, was even with me for a moment, when
I could have held her hand, if I’d known,
held tightly, gone with her. Well, he’d
never known. Here he was on a playing
field that was 15 years away and his wife
was in another city having dinner with
another and better man, speaking with him
a different, new language, a language
nobody had ever taught him.
Darling stood up, smiled a little, because
if he didn’t smile he knew the tears would
come . . . .
Charlie Brown’s line comes to mind here: “How
can we lose when we are so sincere?” It is easy to
enjoy the feeling of winning and no one likes to lose,
except we do so all the time. I have a friend who
played on a college basketball team that lost 21
straight games. He said to me: “I didn’t have the
emotional equipment to handle those defeats with
much agility!” Of course he didn’t. How could any
of
us?
We have been taught the importance of winning, at
the office, in business, in bed. We have been told to
have a winning personality, how to influence others.
No one ever taught us how to lose, when we lose all of
the time.
“We live by losing what we are.” We all really
know that, for we know that change and growth means
that we lose something, that we leave something behind.
I quietly mourn the growth of my two youngest grand-
children, two girls, five and nine, who, of course,
will soon be six and ten. To them their changes are
exciting; to their aging grandfather, their changes
mean that they are not what they were. We lose our
children when they grow and we send them off into the
college or to jobs, and we rejoice with them at the
same time.
The poet wrote that he was “rich in the loss of all
I sing.” “Rich in the loss?” Not always, to
be sure,
for some of our losses are wrenching, devastating, and
though we recover we are not quite the same persons
anymore. My father died a year ago; my wife’s mother
died in August. Even expected losses hurt.
And we all lose as we age. Goethe said that “age
takes hold of us by surprise.” and I suppose that is
right. So we lose mobility, eyesight, hearing, hair.
The evidence of loss is all around us, but still
society is focussed always on winning. Americans, es-
pecially, I think.
A number of years ago a political columnist – I
think it was James Reston – writing about the art of
losing, noted that we handle such an art badly. So he
rewrote some of the famous lines from American history.
His new version of John Paul Jones’ words were “I
have
just begun to quit.” And Commodore Perry announced: “We
have met the enemy and we are theirs.” And his Admiral
Farragut said, “Damn the torpedoes, full steam astern,”
and General McAuliff, at Bastogne, said “O.K.” And,
of
course, General MacArthur, on leaving the Philippines,
said, “I shall never return.”
Learning how to lose is one of the essential bits
of human wisdom. We learn that losing is not always
fatal. Some people, to be sure, are unwilling to try
anything new lest they should fail, but theirs is a
life of premature death. That is no way to avoid loss;
indeed, it enthrones it. It is only by risking our
persons from time to time that we live at all. And,
anyway, Chesterton had it just right –and I thought of
this during recent weeks as I watched the Yankees
collapse – that if a thing is worth doing it is worth
doing badly.
Everyone I know fails from time to time and I guess
I like them better for that. And I like them best when
they can absorb their defeat and move on to another day.
Those who keep dwelling on their defeats soon grow
wearisome. Boris Pasternak, in his novel, DR. ZHIVAGO,
has a character say: “I don’t like people who have
never fallen or stumbled; their virtue is lifeless and
of little value.”
E. B. White once wrote of his difficult dog, Fred:
“Life without him would be heaven, but I’m afraid
it
is not what I want.” That seems to me to be an
essential piece of wisdom that none of us can do with-
out. Life without a lot of Freds in our lives would
be heaven, or so it might appear at first light. I
feel that way every March when the winter refuses to
depart the prairies of Nebraska – surely a Fred. But
life without winter is not really what I want. I don’t
really want a life without discomfort, without con-
flict, without disappointment. Life without the pain
of loss would be heaven, but I think it is not what
anyone of us would really take. We don’t want that
kind of heaven. What we want is full and worthwhile
life, outlined as it always is by its limitations.
What we want is not life without sorrow, but a full-
ness of experience that absorbs sorrow and joy, icy
winters and lovely autumns, losing seasons and winning
seasons, living and dying.
I think it important that we somehow learn how to
lose, that we somehow learn that we can make mistakes
and survive them quite well. And that our political
candidates can lose without major peril to the repub-
lic.
In a sense I have been talking about having a
certain confidence in life. Those who are willing to
lose are confident about life. They know they can
learn as much from defeat as from victory, from
failure as success. Any Boston Red Sox fan knows that
defeat is not the end of the world, that there is
always next year. And wise women and men surely know
that happiness does not always lie in being Number
One as much as it lies in the struggle itself.
We all struggle sometimes to survive in the
world, to make it through occasional dark nights of
our lives. And we do it, usually. “There is no sun
without shadow,” said Camus. There are no victories
without defeats, no risks without failure, no life
without death.
The late philosopher, Sidney Hook, sums it all up
for me. There is, he wrote, a certain richness and
satisfaction in knowing that
There is a point at which every system will
fail us. There is a moment when friendship
falters, when neither loyalty, love, or faith
is strong enough to carry the weight of our
expectations…Whatever our strength, it will
someday be surpassed…
We must eschew the unlimited demands we make
upon the world and ourselves, which presupposes
that time can stand still or be reversed, that
there are no losers in conflict, or that all
problems are necessarily soluble.
By learning to lose, we learn to live.
