What We Also Call Winning

W is for Win

One of the most helpful questions any writer can ask of their nom de plume, regardless of genera or format, is this one: Then what did they do? All action, the driving force, mixed with healthy a dose of conflict, hides behind a good story. The action will set up a scenario where the protagonist(s) are faced with the challenge of making value judgments. The story ends when they fail to act. If our the hero decides the effort required of him exceeds his skill set, or if the heroine deems the task too tall for her. When this happens we all lose. We lose interest, we lose hope and we lose the game. We look elsewhere for our motivation, inspiration, role models and, at its most base, entertainment.

It was with great anticipation that yesterday, the first Sunday of the 2019 college football season that we had the graphic real-time opportunity to gauge who gets it and who doesn’t. Half of the teams are now 0-1. The other half are all 1-0. As advertised, there was blood, carnage, drama, non-lethal fistfights in the trenches and blunders of monumental proportions made by ‘management.’ There were dropped balls, missed opportunities the color of gold, bad decisions, bad attitudes and bad language.

All, with the exception of the felonious managerial errors, committed by kids, under the white-hot spotlight of stadiums full of rabid alumni, sponsors, friends and family alongside TV audiences roughly the size of third-world countries. Welcome to the pressure cooker scholar-athlete.

Most likely if you have been marching down this long and lonely path with us for any legitimate length of time you have heard me opine of winning and losing. On the differences between them and the answer to the age old question asking if indeed winning is the only thing.

The short answer is no. I will expand that theme as succinctly as possible today and attempt once again to impress upon you the reality of the myth, or maybe better, the truth hiding inside the lie. I wish politics was so easy.

Suppose I blurted out in a crowded bar immediately following an ugly loss by he home team, that the only true winning is losing. Would you expect that someone, ANYONE, would buy me a beer in celebration of my deep understanding of human psychology and intramural athletics?

No. I might even be forced to find my car with a bloody bandana pressed to my nose. But after further review (sorry) it has long been my contention that any player, team or community that is serious about improvement, must lose. Get beat in the first game. Lose and lose ugly. Get curb-stomped, spanked and left laying by the side of the road bruised, beaten and embarrassed.

Then, and only then, will the need for self inspection, analysis, commitment and dedication to duty be called into play, because, up until now it has all been talk. You, we, they, us must take a brutally honest assessment of the current situation, analyze the reasons behind the humiliation, find the weak links, isolate the instances of breakdown and FIX THEM.

In college football, in non-bye weeks, you have seven days to accomplish all that. One of those days calls for recovery, and one for a taper, so in all actuality, the coaching staffs have a just handful of days, to regroup, re-motivate, reeducate and reload. Five days to change the culture.

If this is done successfully with a modicum of tact, skill, diplomacy and compassion, the teams that currently stand at 0-1 have the change of witnessing the true phenomenon of team sports, the gathering of momentum. Everyone must buy in and be willing to sacrifice, to grow up in a hurry, to trust their pit buddies and to shake the stinging loss, the mistakes, the errors and the fumbles from their consciousness in order to get back to the positive approach required of champions.

Everybody gets hit. Everyone gets knocked down. Guts are checked and commitments accessed. All loss is in the past tense. We may have failed once but now we are moving towards success. Growth and effort count if the future is to contain improvement. We call this the personal evolution of the individual athlete along his or her path to establish respect among their teammates, coaches and opponents.

Or, what we also call winning.