An Ode to the Losers

Sometime in the next few weeks, someone’s child is going to make a mistake that ends a season. Perhaps it  will be a dropped baton in a relay race during the state meet or a soft goal allowed during the lacrosse quarterfinals.

Baseball and softball are particularly cruel games when it comes to this kind of anguish. Perhaps your son or daughter will strikeout with runners in scoring position or be the pitcher who gives up the game-winning hit.

Almost all success in athletics is predicated upon someone else’s failure.

Golf is an exception, but that game deals out psychological punishment so severe as to have no need for an opponent. You can bet someone’s son is going to pull a drive out-of-bounds or miss a three-footer that costs his team a championship.

Sports can teach us so much but the one thing it teaches best is how to deal with failure. This may come as small comfort to a parent of a teenager who in the face of bitter disappointment is suddenly a child again. Defeat can do this to us.

Howard Cunningham once famously asked Richie if he wanted a lifesaver after his son missed a critical free throw in a high school basketball game. Lifesavers are good and all but offering one probably won’t soothe the heartbroken teen in the age of Twitter.

Some will say the proper reaction is to point out that it’s just a game.  While this is a fine sentiment, it ignores the work and effort all high school athletes put into their sports.

And it also ignores the disappointment of striving for a goal only to come up short. The need to lament the loss is real and should be honored.

 I don’t know how parents should handle things when their kid double-faults away the state title.

I only know what I plan to tell my son.

The first thing would be to point him to a yellowing copy of “The Bristol Press,” where I worked for a time in the early-'90s covering town news while waiting for my life to begin. There he would find a huge, bold, headline “Filene’s Buys Plymouth Site.” My own front page story.

Of course, Filene’s hadn’t bought anything in Plymouth as the front page story in the next day’s paper made clear. It is one thing to make a mistake but quite another to make one that gets printed 35,000 times and preserved in the library for eternity. My journalism career nearly ended before it started.

This might not impress him much. Adult mistakes don’t often impress kids, which is easy enough to understand. Adult lives have compartments. There is work. There is family. There are friends. They do not usually mingle.

Not so in high school. There your peers are also your co-workers and your best friends.

Perhaps, then, I would tell them about the time in high school when we were playing flag football in gym class and an overeager would-be tackler ripped off my gym shorts. There I was in the middle of a high school football field in my underwear and this was before boxers were cool. The story had reached the entire school before lunch.

Good times.

Maybe this story would be better. There was the time I called a girl up and asked her out only to be told she had a boyfriend. (News to me.) No big deal, momentary disappointment, until she decided to tell folks about the phone call. Again, I think it took until lunch. The next time I saw her outside school she was with her boyfriend and I was cleaning up a dumpster spill.

Anyway, neither of those stories are about sports unless you count the flag-football element, which no right thinking person would, especially if they had seen this particular gym class play. True, they are tales of embarrassment and failure but they might not uplift the heart of a teen who has missed an open net with a shot that would have tied the game.

I’d have to dig deeper. There was the time when I missed all-conference by a single shot after three-putting both 17 and 18 from a total of 14-feet. I could tell him about the match we won until I discovered I played the final four shots with the wrong golf ball, which turned a win into a loss for me and the team.

Then there was the air-mailed penalty kick during a 2-1 loss in the youth soccer championships. And the time…well, it will be enough to let him know why his father is a sportswriter and not a professional athlete.

And then I’ll make it fast with one more thing. All these failures made me into who I am, that is to say, a man who met your mother and who has you as a son. This may not make him feel better but sometime in the future he may realize something.

They weren’t failures at all.