Sports, Winning, and Age
When young, at least for me, professional sports was an important part of my life. Back then it was the Brooklyn Dodgers and Duke Snider who were my heroes. The games, especially the World Series, were extremely intense and exciting. There is nothing like youth to reach emotional peaks about a lot of things. It kind of taught us how to have hopes and the thrill of winning. When young, winning sometimes feels like is it everything. Some people never lose that mentality.
I coached for two years in High School out in Packer country. Like Lombardi, another hero at the time, winning was going to be everything, and I managed to coach with that mentality. At the high school level, and even the college level, a lot of coaching is motivational. Professional players have their own motivation—their salary and career are on the line. And high school kids easily (well maybe not so easily) can be made to focus everything on winning—like all of life will be a failure individually and collectively if we don’t win. With this coaching mentality the teams did substantially improve their win/loss record and standing in the conference, but it also got me fired. Winning at all costs can indeed come with a cost. Motivation is a game of emotions and the emotions spread out amongst teammates, parents, other coaches in the school, and administrators. Administrators hate commotion, confrontation, and debate. Therein lies the time bomb.
I never coached again and went another direction in my life, but professional sports remained a big portion of my life, just like with many people. I followed teams intensely and, especially in the playoffs. Old age, as it changes many things in life, often changes the intensity of rooting for a team to win. At some point in life many, including myself, begin to wonder just what is so important about ‘our’ team winning? It doesn’t change anything about our own lives whether our team wins or loses. When the Chicago Bears have a game, the pre game show goes 3 hrs before the game starts. And grown men debate loudly, energetically, and sometimes angrily about who is going to win or which player is better than another. One could, and some do, spend a Sunday from about 9AM to almost midnight attuned to professional football games. That’s 15 hours of football in one day.
Listening to these pre-game shows and endless days of post game analysis perfectly illustrates the inanity of it all. The best predictors of who will win football games hover at around 60% success rates, lower in any playoffs. That alone tells us that predicting football games is hardly any science or based on knowledge of the game itself. Yet these pre and post-game shows portray all these ‘experts’ pushing varied perceptions with the intensity and volume of someone who really does have the inside scoop. They throw stats, they put individual players on a pedestal and character assassinate other individual players based on unnamed sources, and back their analysis and predictions with the certainty of an Einstein with scientific results of a study. Yet someone like me, who knows little about the mechanics of football, can sometimes out-predict them over a season on who will win what games. It is very common, when people start arguing about professional sport teams, players, and coaches—for the arguments to get very heated, angry and often personal. It will all start off with opinions about individual perceptions until, having exhausted any ability to force the other person to see things a particular way, the old last resort to blame the intelligence or life experience of the opponent as the reason why one is right and the other is wrong, and then that becomes the final proof.
Football analysis and predictions are much like the stock market. Most all the reasons put forth by the experts on the stock market come after the stock market closes. If the market goes up, the good things which happened in the world become the reason. If the market does down, then any bad news that day is the reason.
Not too far back the main reason any individual stock went up or down a given day depended on the performance of the company in question. Today, while that factor is still in play somewhat, most stocks on a given day go up and down in unison. The market today is not driven by individual company performances but by factors which an average investor cannot control, but are under the control of the ‘big professional investors who have computer programs which drive the market. Because the big boys can control market movement they can instantly sell high and buy low with an accuracy that makes them wealthy—extremely wealthy. While the market game can be controlled by the clever computer programs, sport results cannot be controlled by anyone. Most of the factors which control who wins in football, if the teams are fairly close in talent, are beyond predictability. And it is similar in a lot of other major professional sports.
I still like to predict who will win or lose, much like we might buy a lottery ticket to see if we win, even though lotteries are for people who can’t do the math. I rarely watch entire games anymore. The reason is simple——why would I deliberately choose to be tensed up for 3 hours over a game? Young people love to be all stirred up, charged up, and be highly opinionated about a game which is often decided by a host of factors which are not controllable by the coaches or players. So picking the winners and checking up on who is winning periodically is about as involved as I choose to get. Frankly, I prefer, at the end of the day, to have learned something of substance than to have been preoccupied most of the day with a game, the results of which, have no bearing on my life or my level of contentment. Any contentment from our team winning a game is certainly of temporary duration. I reckon it can take our mind off serious situations like a death, or a financial problem, or a family problem, etc. But, when the game is over the serious problems in our life remain.
In retirement, if we get lucky and have decent health, and no major financial problems etc., then being so wrapped up emotionally in a game serves no purpose. I tell people that I am not looking for excitement at my age, just some peace and quiet and contentment. The smartest older people concentrate on just staying out of the way, off the playing field of life, and into the bleachers to simply watch the theatre of it all. Of course there was a time, when we were in our productive years, in which almost all of life was trying to make things go our way. We got told often enough in our productive years that we should not sweat the small things. By the time we reach retirement most of us are well aware that most everything is a small thing. I don’t react much anymore over what professional team wins or loses, but I do get emotional when I see individuals or groups happy over something or suffering in situations that are beyond their ability to control.
Most people never have all that much going for them from birth. Surprisingly, when I was teaching, most often the students who were the most conscientious, cooperative, engaging, personable, honest, trustworthy, dependable and unselfish were those struggling under the worst environmental situations. In that sense our ghettoes produce some of the worst and best humanity in life. Many of these people, for whom I had the most admiration, never went too far in life—not because they had no potential, but because their problems were so numerous and pervasive to their lives that they eventually tired and gave up, accepting careers well below their abilities. With great effort and manipulation, one could help such an individual over particular hurdles, but rarely all of them. If we all did what we could with all our mostly unearned blessings, the playing field for these less fortunate would be more level and they could sail through life with fewer and more leap-able hurdles. But of course, we are all, to varying degrees, too self-serving, too wrapped up in our own pursuit of money, titles, power, etc, to collectively alter the playing fields enough for more of the less fortunate to have greater chances to succeed. It is not just the plight of the less fortunate that makes me feel sad enough to feel like crying, but watching individuals or groups succeed in getting more justice makes me emotionally happy enough for them that I again feel like crying. Thus old age, to someone like me, is really a mixture of sadness for many others, happiness for those less fortunate who achieve some justice, and gratefulness for the many blessing I have received in life, most of them unearned and include the invaluable support from others along the way. Gratitude is a huge ingredient for a contented retirement, as is the personal effort in time, money, or direct intervention, to help those most in need. To the extent we share our excess wealth with those least fortunate in life we can achieve various degrees of contentment.
Sports is about winning, but life is about gratitude, helping the least fortunate, and adopting the Golden Rule as the ethical basis for life. Winning in sports is irrelevant, while the rest (above in this paragraph) is exceptionally relevant to any personal contentment in life.
