It's always good to remember why the games are played.
From: https://ricochet.com/285887/archives/fifty-six-to-four-the-tears-of-a-sportsman/
With a single exception, every team that takes the field, the ice, or the court will end its season in disappointment. When the last shot is taken, when the last whistle blows, there will be just the one champion. That champion will dance and jump and hug and cry, overcome with the ecstasy of hard-fought triumph. But for every other team, the season that began with dreams of glory will end with the grim misery of having been tested and found wanting.
If the pursuit of glory is the only aim of sports, the sheer volume of grief at the close of every season would leave sports a monstrous barbarity, a grotesque mix of cockfighting and The Hounds of Zaroff, a blood sport practiced only by the desperate and the depraved. Decent people would recoil in horror at the thought that we would subject children to an activity that by design will leave many of them in tears. It would be denounced as voyeuristic, ritualized child torture, and there would be a national movement to see it banned forever.
It is precisely this thinking that has given rise to the now ubiquitous participation ribbon. Unable to see the true virtues of sports, transfixed by the transitory, but inevitable disappointment of the athlete in defeat, the well intentioned medicate away the sting of loss by recasting it as a perverse subspecies of victory. By cloaking failure in the trappings of glory, they reinforce in the child the adult’s secret belief that sports is about winning and that anything other than winning is unacceptable. The result is children who not only mistakenly believe they are winners, but mistakenly believe that a winner is the only thing it is okay to be.
But sports is not about victory. It is not about glory. The trophies and attaboys that you get for winning a title don’t make all the years of losing worth it. The brutal utilitarian calculus that pits the ecstasy of the winner against the accumulated grief of the many, many losers doesn’t add up; someone standing on the podium, smiling and contented, doesn’t offset the oceans of suffering that victory wrought. Not even close.
Sports is about adversity. Not about overcoming adversity, but about confronting it. It is about learning how to win with grace, but more importantly it is about learning how to lose without despair. It is about coming to realize that it is the effort, not the outcome, that makes us noble; that the more forlorn the hope, the sweeter the struggle.
From: https://ricochet.com/285887/archives/fifty-six-to-four-the-tears-of-a-sportsman/
With a single exception, every team that takes the field, the ice, or the court will end its season in disappointment. When the last shot is taken, when the last whistle blows, there will be just the one champion. That champion will dance and jump and hug and cry, overcome with the ecstasy of hard-fought triumph. But for every other team, the season that began with dreams of glory will end with the grim misery of having been tested and found wanting.
If the pursuit of glory is the only aim of sports, the sheer volume of grief at the close of every season would leave sports a monstrous barbarity, a grotesque mix of cockfighting and The Hounds of Zaroff, a blood sport practiced only by the desperate and the depraved. Decent people would recoil in horror at the thought that we would subject children to an activity that by design will leave many of them in tears. It would be denounced as voyeuristic, ritualized child torture, and there would be a national movement to see it banned forever.
It is precisely this thinking that has given rise to the now ubiquitous participation ribbon. Unable to see the true virtues of sports, transfixed by the transitory, but inevitable disappointment of the athlete in defeat, the well intentioned medicate away the sting of loss by recasting it as a perverse subspecies of victory. By cloaking failure in the trappings of glory, they reinforce in the child the adult’s secret belief that sports is about winning and that anything other than winning is unacceptable. The result is children who not only mistakenly believe they are winners, but mistakenly believe that a winner is the only thing it is okay to be.
But sports is not about victory. It is not about glory. The trophies and attaboys that you get for winning a title don’t make all the years of losing worth it. The brutal utilitarian calculus that pits the ecstasy of the winner against the accumulated grief of the many, many losers doesn’t add up; someone standing on the podium, smiling and contented, doesn’t offset the oceans of suffering that victory wrought. Not even close.
Sports is about adversity. Not about overcoming adversity, but about confronting it. It is about learning how to win with grace, but more importantly it is about learning how to lose without despair. It is about coming to realize that it is the effort, not the outcome, that makes us noble; that the more forlorn the hope, the sweeter the struggle.
