By Joseph Epstein

The writer, drawing on some of his own childhood experiences, reflects on the meaning of sports in one's life and concludes that, in the lessons-learned department, the "agony of defeat" wins out over the "thrill of victory."

When someone once approached Don Ohlmeyer, the well-known American television producer of "Wide World of Sports," saying he had a question he wanted to ask, Olhmeyer, cutting the man short, replied, "If the question is about sports, the answer is Money." And sports, not only in America but globally, has in recent decades seemed to be chiefly about nothing else: astonishing salaries, hugely lucrative endorsements, television contracts using numbers one is more accustomed to see in textbooks on astronomy.

Yet I myself have always thought that the real sports story was about failure. Sports, athletics generally, is an activity in which even the great winners, the fabled athletes, finally lose, if only because their bodies eventually give out on them and they can no longer do what they once did with what seemed such magnificent ease that it set them apart from other mortals. The basketball player Michael Jordan, who has perhaps known greater athletic glory than any living athlete of our time, now that he can no longer play the game he loves, seems I won't say a tragic but a sad figure. In sports even winners are usually losers, for, as in life itself, so in sports, there are not all that many smooth exits.

And so it goes...until the next game.(© Reuters NewsMedia Inc./CORBIS)

But for the average American boy - and girl - for all that athletics builds muscles, instills discipline, if one is lucky adds a bit of character, in the end there is also an après combat triste about participation in sports. Considered statistically, a failure factor seems built into most sports. A professional basketball player who misses only half his shots from the field is considered magnificent. A hockey player who makes two shots out of thirty-five shots on goal has had a brilliant night. No professional baseball player has succeeded in hitting successfully above forty-percent of the time he bats for more than fifty years.

I have on my desk before me pictures of some of the members of the 1955 Kingstree, South Carolina, high school football team, recently sent to me by a friend who played on that team. The photographs are posed, the names of the players, as we say, almost worth the price of admission: here in their slightly antique-seeming uniforms are the McKenzie boys, Bull and Red, Roland Burgess, Needham Williamson, Jimmy Ward, and (my own favorite name) Buddy Gamble. My friend tells me that one of the most heroic among them wound up working as a short-order cook, another lapsed into alcoholism, yet another had a deeply troublesome son. Later, in manhood, trying to get to sleep, did they in their minds replay all those high-school football games, relive those glory days, after which life for many of them was pretty much downhill?

To be sure, many persons have built good lives on successful athletic careers. An outstanding example would be Bill Bradley, who was a great basketball star at Princeton University and later with the professional New York Knickerbockers, and then went on to become a United States senator and candidate for the U.S. presidency. Others have gone from athletic prowess to quietly impressive careers in law, medicine, and business, sports doubtless contributing to a confidence related to their already tested ability to operate calmly under pressure.

I grew up not in Kingstree, South Carolina, but on the north side of Chicago, Illinois, during a time when, if you weren't a respectably good athlete, you had better be witty or otherwise find a way to make yourself seem charming or useful. Our lives were organized around sports, and for us the seasons hadn't the names spring, summer, autumn, winter, but baseball, football, basketball, and (for some) tennis or track. As young boys, our lives were lived in the schoolyard, or hanging around baskets hung on garages in nearby alleys. At home when the newspapers arrived, we read the sports pages first, studying baseball batting averages and the statistics of team standings in the various sports. Television had just begun to be part of the furniture of the American home, and so one watched as many games and events, in the different sports, as time and parents allowed.

From the outset, athletics were exclusionary and taught the lesson of human limitation. Some kids were naturally better than others; there was always the sad situation of the boys who were chosen last in playground pickup games, who were usually exiled to the Siberia of right field in baseball, or assigned to work the coal mines of the interior line in football. Sports also gave a boy his first notice that the world was an unjust place, with gifts parceled out unequally: some boys could run faster, throw harder and farther, jump higher than others - and that was that. Intelligent practice could often make one better at all these games, but only up to a point. The kids who were naturals - and every schoolyard seemed to have one - could only rarely be surpassed by those who came by their skills through hard work. The world, clearly, was not a fair place.

My Losing Season, 2002

"Losing prepares you for the heartbreak, setback and tragedy that you will encounter in the world more than winning ever can. By licking your wounds you learn how to avoid getting wounded the next time....The word `loser' follows you, bird-dogs you, sniffs you out of whatever fields you hide in because you have to face things clearly and you cannot turn away from what is true. My team won eight games and lost seventeen . . . losers by any measure."

From novelist Pat Conroy

Well-coordinated, quick, with a strong mimetic sense that allowed me quickly to pick up the moves of older athletes, my early boyhood days in sports were my best ones. But I ran out of luck when I reached my 4,000-student Chicago high school, where I quickly understood that I was not big enough to compete in football, or good enough to play baseball. I did play freshman-sophomore basketball, and in tennis, along with a boy named Bob Swenson, I eventually won the Chicago Public League doubles championship, where the competition was less than fierce (the better players, groomed by country-club professionals, went to suburban schools).

I learned two hard lessons during my adolescence about my athletic limitations. The first was that I wasn't going to achieve athletically fit size, but would remain, as I am today, smallish and slender. The second was that I lacked the aggressiveness and physical fearlessness that came naturally to really good athletes. As an athlete, I was like a kamikaze pilot with an insufficient death wish. I was never cowardly, never "chickened-out" or "choked," as boys then said, but if I could avoid pain on the playing field I didn't at all mind doing so.

All I was left with as an athlete, then, was style. I acquired elegant strokes in tennis, a smooth jumpshot in basketball; in both sports, I had all the moves. But style can also imprison an athlete. The first-rate athletes usually both have great style and a readiness to abandon style when victory requires it. They can do so because they are seriously competitive; they want to win. Those of us entrapped by style want, finally, only to look good.

My inglorious athletic career, then, was essentially over when I was 18. I continued to play tennis for a while, though with increasingly less passion and pleasure. Living in the South, in Arkansas, I played for a couple of years in a YMCA basketball league. In my 40s, I took up the game of racquetball, but a hip injury forced me to drop it. And so I have long since retired to a comfortable green chair, from which I watch more sporting events than is sensible for a man who prefers to think of himself as cultivated.

As a sports voyeur - I hesitate to use the word fan - I have noticed that not only do my sympathies go out to, but I tend almost completely to identify with, losers. Defeat in athletics seems to me to carry more weight, is more fraught with significance, than victory. The thrill of victory, the agony of defeat, the cliché has it, but my guess is that for those who have undergone both, the memory of defeat in sports is stronger and sharper.

I think of the pitcher whose fingers slip a notch, and he serves up a fat pitch that a batter smashes over the wall; of a young man of (say) 19 who, at a crucial moment of a nationally televised college basketball game, misses two free throws that cause his team to be eliminated from an important tournament; of a girl gymnast of 14 who slips and falls off the balance beam at the Olympics; of a tennis player whose concentration and then confidence desert him against a weaker opponent; of a sprinter, a world record in sight, who pulls up lame just before the finish line; of a golfer who taps his ball a tad too gently and so misses a putt that would have earned him half-a-million dollars in prize money . . . . One could add to this list almost endlessly; the point, of course, is that in sports small, often unexpected, things can change a game, a season, a career, a life.

Coaches and inspirational speakers are fond of positing sports as a metaphor for life. As in life, so in sports, unremitting labor is said to pay off, obstacles are there to be surmounted, desire can sometimes be more important than talent. From here it is only a small jump to the conclusion that sports build character and it is character that always wins out in life. The best one can say in response to this is, it would be nice to think so.

But one wonders if athletic failure isn't ultimately truer to life than victory. Without meaning to be unduly gloomy about it, in life some people for a while have much better runs than others, but in the end we are all losers: the unexpected trips us up, we suffer setbacks, few are permitted to cross or even get near the finish line intact, the mortality rate - mirabile dictu - remains at an even 100 percent, and after the game the likelihood is that none of us is going, as American baseball and football players like to say after winning a championship, to Disney World. Three cheers for the winners, then, but save a couple more for all of us who do not win, and who can use the applause even more.

(© Matthew Gilson)

Joseph Epstein, well-known essayist and author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, recently received a National Humanities Medal from President George W. Bush at a White House ceremony for his efforts to deepen public awareness of the humanities. Epstein teaches English and writing at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

Back to top | Contents, U.S. Society & Values, December 2003