Winning isn't everything

Our parents often told us when we were little that winning isn't everything. I, like most people, accepted this as another lame thing which our parents tell us to make us feel better when we are sad. To me, "winning isn't everything" was the verbal equivalent of taking me to get some ice cream after losing a baseball game or getting a slice of pizza after a soccer game. I remember sitting there in my mud soaked uniform, after a tough game, at the point of tears, and all the consolation that could be offered was "winning isn't everything." Wow, thanks Aristotle. That is up there with money can't buy you everything. We pretend it can't, but deep down we know it really can.But the older you get, the more you realize that winning isn't everything. Championships come and go. You sit there staring at the television, watching your team jump up and down with looks of utter delight on their faces, and you feel the same euphoria that they are feeling. How long does that feeling stay with you? The satisfaction of a championship is as fleeting as a joint at a Grateful Dead concert: it's not going to last! Most of the time, a championship was expected. Most fans go into a season expecting nothing less of their team than a title. Almost all of the time, by the time your team has made it into the championship game, or series, it is expected that they will win. Rarely, your team is a complete long shot, no chance in hell, underdog. If this is the case, your joy may last longer. That is, if it finally hits you that they actually won. Regardless, the euphoria will inevitably abandon you within a week of seeing your team win. What's left? Bragging rights? It is truly a fantastic feeling when your friend brings up how his team is better than yours.Then, you coyly ask, "who won it all last year?"This will make him quieter than C-level on a Sunday morning. While pouring salt in his wound is fun, and expected of any true friend, it can only give you so much happiness. Before you know it, it will be the off - season and that championship, which was so inspiring and made you feel so happy at the time, will just be a memory.

Winning a big game yourself is also a great moment, but will not last as long as you'd like. Whether you won a baseball championship in elementary school (this humble author) or won something that people outside of your extended family watched, you are aware of how fleeting winning can be. Interviews with professional athletes after a championship always betray that they remember very little from the time of the final play to the next morning. What champions remember is how they played. You remember that tackle, or that home-run, or that three-point shot at the buzzer. It truly is important to live in the now. Ralph Waldo Emerson said: "With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future.I live now." Next time you're watching your team or playing the game yourself, don't look at the score and receive your sole happiness from the win/loss column. Try to watch every play and enjoy it for what it's worth. In the end, a game is just one in the millions you will see.

The memory of the play, or how an athlete plays, is what is important. Appreciate the apparent miracles that we are lucky enough to see and the greats we are lucky enough to cheer on, because some day they will just be another name in the long list of greats. Professional sports as we know it are relatively young. In 200 years, who is going to care who won the World Series in 2008? I defy you to tell me who won the 1932 World Series and that was only 77 years ago. What lives on is the spirit of the game. The sport itself is just an organism and every game, player, or even play, is a calorie which the sport consumes to grow into the great being that is an idea; not even a thing. A true fan of the game can close their eyes and imagine the crack of a bat on a sunny day in July, or the sound of crunching and cracking of football players steaming into each other as you sit in the stands bundled up on a cold November day, or the scrape of the ice then the boom of a skater flying into the boards in an unnaturally warm arena. It is the game itself that is important; not the individual games. The athletes we should admire are those who understand the game and their place in the game. They should be just as big of fans of the game as we are.They are the ones who play through the pain because they know that in sports, like life, time doesn't wait for us. They seize the moment, and live it, and are humbled by it.

So, if you find out that Kevin Garnett is going to be out for the playoffs and you're sitting in your room wondering why God would play such a cruel joke or you find yourself in a McDonalds covered in mud on the verge of tears, remember that winning isn't everything. It's how you play the game. As Al Pacino's Tony D'Amato says: "On any given Sunday you're gonna win or you're gonna lose. The point is - can you win or lose like a man?