America needs to start losing again

July 29th, 2016

We will be on holiday when our youngest son’s fall soccer season starts on August 3rd.  Think about that for a minute.  Fall season.  August 3rd.

I haven’t heard from my oldest son’s coach yet, but I suspect that the first day of practice will be on some other obscenely early date.  And so will begin another round of Southern California youth sports that will see us shuttling back and forth in the minivan, awkward moments trying to put up the sunshade in 80 degree heat on a Saturday morning, a thorough vetting of post-game snacks, and the usual collection of parents and coaches who truly, honestly, don’t care about winning - at least not until the first close game of the season.

My children have been fortunate.  In 16 seasons (by my calculations) of youth recreational sports, they have been, on the whole, well coached by well-meaning adults who made teaching skill development and life lessons a priority over racking up victories.  Most of the parents we’ve come into contact with have been enthusiastically supportive and pleasant.  Yet every season we see sports bring out the worst behaviour in adults who would consider themselves good people, and I think that much of it has to do with the thrill and stress of competition, which they feel vicariously through their children, as well as being with and opposed to others who are experiencing the same thing at the same time.  I don’t need to go into details; we have all read about or seen for ourselves examples of this.  Good people doing bad things.

Confession: While I have never criticized my child in public or physically assaulted an official, I have certainly been that coach and have been tempted to be that parent, finding myself thinking and saying things in the heat of the moment.  I am certainly as guilty as anyone of this, and I am ashamed of some of my past behaviour.  My kids’ games provide me with ample opportunity to show the grace and self-control I frequently lack.

William Golding, the British author, claimed that all humans have the capacity for evil and that our society’s rules and conditioning provide us with the order necessary to resist the urge to do whatever we feel like doing.  Golding claims (most famously in his novel, Lord of the Flies, which is about a group of British boys stranded on an island) that this civilized behaviour is a mere veneer and that two things - fear and chaos - remove those inhibitions and enable us to give in to more primal, visceral urges.  Other social scientists have spoken of the thresholds we reach at which we succumb to the pressure for us to do things (such as berate an official or even our own child) that we know are wrong.

Now, I am not suggesting that Lord of the Flies is a perfect analogy for youth sports, its sidelines and dugouts (although I can certainly see some similarities), but seeing the transformation of placid parents and jovial coaches into bug-eyed, screaming agents of wrath tells me that competition, specifically the desire to win (or the fear of losing), brings out the worst in us.  In the fear of failure and amid the chaos of competition and thinking that victory will bring us what we want, we often give in to a primeval desire to win.  Whatever the cost.

Fear and chaos.  Two things that have typified much of this political season which has certainly brought out the worst in people, not least on social media.  And into that heady mix has come, as if we were in a gym or on a baseball field, the refrain, “America needs to start winning again.”  Donald Trump has said it.  Mike Pence, his running mate, has said it.  Of course, elections are about winning and losing, but how or when does a country win?  War?  Obviously, but I hope we will do all we can to stay out of it.  Trade?  I hope not.  In an interconnected, globalized economy, countries can hardly afford to be competitive at the expense of being cooperative.  In making more money?  Is that our goal as human beings and as Americans?  More to the point, when America wins, who loses? At what cost?  And do we even care?  But for every winner there is a loser.  For every celebratory dog-pile, there is a dejected dugout.  

As a coach of several teams that lost many more games than they won, I am very familiar with the view from the loser’s bench.  We once started an 18-game season 0-13.  Much of the time, despite all my positive thinking and hearty encouragement, I knew we would lose and lose heavily.  A desperate desire to win was abandoned pretty quickly.  So when the focus on winning was taken away, what could I as a coach focus on?  Teamwork.  Perseverance.  Sportsmanship.  Responsibility.  Character.  Love of the game.  In short, all the things that we claim we want our kids to learn through sport.  In fact, I would argue that what we learn in seemingly perpetual defeat is far more important that what we experience in victory.  Paul tells us in Romans 5 that we should actually glory in our sufferings, for they ultimately produce hope.  It is far easier to be magnanimous in victory when you know what the other team is experiencing in defeat.  Winning can be euphoric, to be sure, but it also engenders hubris.  Even as a teacher, I try to emphasize to my students and their parents that they need to learn how to fail.  Losing and failure teach us so much about ourselves, give us essential tools, and help us develop key character traits.  Why, then, are we so obsessed with winning?

It simply isn’t in our culture to even accept failure, let alone to actively seek it.  Can you imagine a parent proudly posting photos of her child’s devastation in losing a soccer game?  A NFL coach excited that his team had lost again?  A presidential candidate saying passionately that “America needs to start losing again”?  But I think we need to hear statements like these.  Even our politicians’ best moments seem to come at times of loss and grief - witness Presidents Bush and Obama during the Baton Rouge slain police officers’ memorial service.

What would it be like to live in a country that lost and embraced losing as a badge of honor?  
What would it be like to be part of a church in a society that frankly acknowledged its brokenness?  What would it be like to have politicians remind us of their own failures instead of their opponents’?
What would it be like to live a life that saw losing as the only way to success?

It would be harder, for sure.  Maybe the America we know and love would no longer exist.  But that doesn’t mean that our lives would be worse.  And I am convinced that it would be far, far easier to embrace civil discourse and unity and extend grace to those whom we feel are deserving of condemnation if we were to find common ground in our failures and brokenness.  For broken and failed we surely are.

The truly liberating thing about this is that as Christians, this approach to winning and losing forces us to acknowledge that there is only one victory that really matters, and it happened on a hill in Palestine 2,000 years ago.  In that light, what do life’s defeats matter when the ultimate victory is already won?

So after my son’s team’s first loss, I will be sure to listen carefully to our coach, the players, the parents, and my own heart.  And maybe, just maybe, in the car on the way home, I will say to him, “You know what?  I’m glad you lost.”