You may already be a loser.
–Sweepstakes letter received by Rodney Dangerfield.
It happens to all of us all of the time, and it begins early. Little League, science fairs, spelling bees. Later there are pink slips, unrequited love and, finally, death. For millions of people, the wrong Ping-Pong balls drop every day. Who among us has never lost–in a job, in a relationship, on the tennis court? Losing is part of the price of life. Death and resurrection, dying and renewal–these are the kernels of life. Losing is the story of men and women, all of us born to sorrow.
Born losers.
Losing is a necessary part of competing, or, as Gore Vidal, puts it: “It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.” For every winner, there is at least one loser, and usually many more. Losing is one of life’s constant companions, ever unwelcome, ever there. The Rolling Stones had it right–you can’t always get what you want.
Nevertheless, losing is a taboo in our society. The ultimate put-down is “loser,” and failure is the ultimate F-word. Homosexuality, divorce, mental illness and even child abuse have emerged further from the closet than losing. Hundreds of books have been written on how to win, scarcely any on how to lose.
Yet there’s a lot to be said for losing. For one thing, you’re among friends. For another, there are many more ways to lose than there are to win. Losing is so much more interesting than winning. Winning isn’t always worth its weight in blue ribbons, and losing can be positive and ennobling if it compels us to examine why we lost.
Have we forgotten that losers changed the world? Columbus missed his target by thousands of miles, Thomas Edison had most of his inventing triumphs before he was 40, and in his later years rolled up an ever-increasing number of failures. Failure and poverty dogged Charles Goodyear all his life. Mozart died impoverished and was buried in the paupers section of a church cemetery. Van Gogh was a suicide. Most of the first edition of Walden was remaindered into Thoreau’s personal library. Churchill distracted himself from defeat with painting, writing, gardening and breeding butterflies.
George Custer was a successful commander during the Civil War, but he would not be remembered at all had he not become one of American history’s biggest losers for his last stand–immortalized in a thousand paintings and 500 books. In fact, last stands by outnumbered warriors are remembered and revered from Thermopylae to Dien Bien Phu, from Masada to the Alamo.
“The Shipping News,” E. Annie Proulx’s widely acclaimed novel, tells of Quoyle, a lumpish, hapless, third-rate newspaperman working on a fourth-rate newspaper, who is plagued by self-doubt and failure but finds redemption in love with Wavey, a shy, gentle woman with a retarded son. There are no rich people, no beautiful people, no brilliant people–no winners. Yet Quoyle has enormous appeal. Why? Because there’s a little of Quoyle in all of us.
Americans need to lose their fear of losing, and something as universal and important as losing deserves serious attention.
“The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.”
–Rainer Maria Rilke.
George Patton said, quite accurately, that Americans love a winner and won’t tolerate a loser. Defeat is a kind of death in our society, which accords fame, wealth and honor to winning in sports, politics, business and the arts. Vince Lombardi, Leo Durocher and Billy Martin all had bad things to say about losers, and these ideas cling like barnacles to the hull of the American psyche. Winning is America’s Holy Grail.
We still embrace the Horatio Alger myth; we still think of ourselves as a nation of little engines that could. No dream is impossible. It’s part of the frontier spirit. For the cowboy hero, nothing is beyond reach. As long as we remain optimistic and work hard, we can make it happen.” Therefore, we should go for it.
Winner worship is embedded early. Children returning from games are asked whether they won or lost when they should be asked whether they had fun or asked nothing at all. Parents often play games with their children and allow them to win, ill-preparing them for the game of life. Some educators believe that flunking a class is so detrimental to self-esteem that they advocate moving children along to the next grade whether they pass academic muster or not. So rather than giving them the experience of losing, we are shuffling children through an educational system already overly tolerant of incompetents and setting them up for a bigger failure later in life.
It was our fear of losing that kept us in Vietnam so long, and today the unthinkability of defeat makes us say things like, “Why don’t we just go into Somalia and re-establish order?” or “Why don’t we just lock up all the criminals to get rid of crime on the street?”
Stanton Wheeler of the Yale Law School, a national expert on white-collar crime, says people steal and embezzle not because they have chosen crime as a way of achieving their goals but because they cannot tolerate the humiliation of a bankruptcy or other personal financial loss.
Advertisers are not interested in anyone except winners for product endorsements, and among television’s most popular shows are those in which the entertainment industry engages in an orgy of self-congratulation with Emmys, Oscars, Tonys, Grammys. . . . In his new book, “Song of the Phoenix: The Hidden Rewards of Failure,” John Lord, writes that our national obsession with success prevents us from admitting failure .
“Listen, you , life isn’t always a . . . football game! You won’t always get the girl! Life is rejection and pain and loss. . . .”
–A Fan’s Notes,” Frederick Exley
Nowhere is winner worship and loser loathing more evident than in sports, which is a reflecting pool of American society.
Here there are far more losers than winners (even Ted Williams failed 6 out of 10 times at the plate on his way to batting .406 in 1941), and the need for modern athletes to cope with losing has made sports psychology as common as weight lifting and diet in the typical regimen.
But for most athletes, the main stress is coping with others’ reactions, rather than their own, to losing.
The careers of many fine athletes have been damaged or lost in a single, public moment–a hanging curve ball, a fumble on fourth and one, a slip on the ice, a dropped relay baton. In all of sports, there are no bigger losers than baseball pitchers. They are paid as much or more than other players, but pitchers are expected to appear only once in every four or five games. There is nothing else like this in sports. And when the game is over, the box score lists not the losing first baseman, or the losing right fielder, but the losing pitcher. He’s the one who lost the game.
So it should be no surprise that about half the suicides in baseball history have been pitchers.
Mitch Williams was a pitcher for the Phillies last year, and in helping his team win the National League pennant, he saved 43 games in 51 chances. But he had a bad World Series against the Toronto Blue Jays, culminating in the decisive seventh game when he threw a slider that Joe Carter hit for a game-winning home run.
Williams showed great maturity in dealing with losing: “There shouldn’t be tears,” he said. “I mean a ballgame is a ballgame. Sadness is when someone like Dennis Byrd is possibly paralyzed in a football game. But winning or losing a ballgame–that’s just the nature of the game.”
Not so mature were the Phillies fans. There were telephoned death threats and vandalism to Williams’ New Jersey home. Forty days later Williams was traded to Houston, where this year his career fizzled.
In his adversity, Williams joined a list of unfortunates that probably began with Ralph Branca, an intelligent, sensitive man who was on the wrong end of baseball’s Shot Heard Round the World–Bobby Thomson’s home run on Oct. 3, 1951, that gave the New York Giants the pennant at the expense of the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Branca never was the same again. He injured his back the following spring and won only 12 games over the next three seasons before retiring. His story has been told over and over, like a Homeric epic, and his pain was described by Roger Kahn in his masterful book, “The Boys of Summer.”
Defeat, particularly dramatic defeat, confirms our worst image of ourselves,” Kahn wrote. We are not effective, after all, not truly competent, not manly in crisis. We may dismiss a coach, but we cannot elude blame. We have failed. Everyone knows we have failed. We know it ourselves. We stand naked, before an unflattering mirror, hearing hard laughter that includes our own.
Branca wanted to be remembered as the 21-year-old pitcher who won 20 games for the Brooklyn Dodgers, but he could never get out from under one pitch among the 40,000 or so he threw in a 12-year career. “You know,” he once lamented, if you kill somebody, they sentence you to life. You serve 20 years and you get paroled. I’ve never been paroled.”
Williams and Branca themselves seemed to handle losing quite well; the real crunch was brought on by pressure from fans who couldn’t deal with losing. The factor of “fan identification,” linking one’s self-worth to a team’s success or lack of it, is a potent force in American sports. Indeed, experts say that the psyche of an entire community can be affected by the success or failure of a professional team.
Which naturally brings us to the Cubs and the White Sox. Three generations of Chicago baseball fans have seen the same thing: No team from the city winning the World Series. The Cubs haven’t done it since 1908, the Sox last did the trick in 1917.
Other cities–Cleveland, Boston, Houston, come to mind–have similar problems–but they have only one team. Nevertheless, the Cubbies and the Sox annually draw millions of loyal fans. Ron Deluga, associate professor of psychology at Bryant College in Smithfield, R.I., says the fans of consistently losing teams can go through something similar to the five stages of death-related grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and, finally, acceptance.
The fear of losing has sent sportsmanship the way of peach baskets, leather helmets and drop kicks.
Goaded by the American public, America fielded a basketball team at the 1992 Olympics that was so skilled it could destroy any opponent–competition and sportsmanship were abandoned in favor of a sure thing. America’s team turned out to be a boorish pack of prima donnas.
At the same Olympics, there was the unseemly spectacle of American sprinter Gwen Torrence, after finishing fourth in a race, accusing two of her opponents on national television of taking performance-enhancing drugs. How else could she have lost? Other American Olympians accused judges of biased decisions, accused one of their own coaches of lying and blamed false starts and bad equipment for losing.
Many other international athletes were annoyed and irritated by the Americans’ reactions to defeat, and one of them spoke out. Mike Fennel, president of the Jamaica Olympic Committee, said: Unless Americans can dominate everything, they are not happy. We live in a world in which Americans should understand that others are also allowed to win. When Americans lose, they find it easier to say that the winners were on drugs.
In the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, Mary Decker-Slaney of the United States and Zola Bud of South Africa collided in the women’s 3,000-meter final. When the two bumped, Decker fell to the track injured and in tears. Budd, running barefoot, finished seventh and was booed by the angry crowd. There had never been any animosity between the two runners, nor did any come out of the accident.
“Our business in this world is not to succeed but to continue to fail in good spirits.”
–Robert Louis Stevenson.
America’s other great arena is politics, and few losers suffer more acutely than defeated candidates. “In politics, winning is everything,” says Robert Butterworth, a Los Angeles psychologist who specializes in losing. After the end of a grueling political contest, it’s almost normal for the public to quickly dismiss the loser, but when a candidate is defeated they can suffer an emotional reaction similar to the grief and mourning that follows the death of a close relative.
George McGovern knew he was going to lose the 1972 presidential election, but the magnitude of defeat–he carried only Massachusetts–left him devastated. It took him several years to get over the sense of personal rejection he felt.
Jimmy Carter was stunned by his landslide 1980 loss to Ronald Reagan, and for about five years he all but vanished from the national political scene; he took no part in the 1984 presidential campaign–even though his former vice president, Walter Mondale, was running against Reagan.
But even close elections can be crushing. Hubert Humphrey’s loss in the 1968 presidential election, by less than 1 per cent of the popular vote, threw the normally ebullient Minnesotan into a prolonged despair and melancholy that lasted several years.
No contemporary political figure dealt with losing as much as Richard Nixon, that man of soaring victories and sordid defeats. William Safire, the former Nixon speech writer, called him “The man who defeated defeat.” But it was Nixon’s drive to win–and we may assume his fear of losing–that drove him to trample his foes and ultimately proved to be his undoing.
“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no use being a damn fool about it.”
–W.C. Fields.
Much of that peculiarly American phenomenon, the midlife crisis, has to do with losing–specifically, the realization of the gaps between our aspirations and our achievements. Because America offers such fabulous opportunities to everyone, competition and success are almost a secular religion–losing is considered almost un-American. But people move up the corporate or professional ladder until they eventually reach a level that requires 100 per cent of their ability; at this point, they begin to lose more than they win.
Psychologist Gilbert Brim advises that, although new goals are necessary to keep us from becoming bored, remember that we don’t have to up the ante in the same field. Sooner or later, the level of challenge exceeds our skill, and we start losing. Instead, keep life interesting by involving yourself in a different activity–perhaps a sport or a hobby–that offers more room to move up. Go for breadth in your life, not just depth.
In a new book, “Your Own Worst Enemy,” Steven Berglas of the Harvard Medical School and Roy Baumeister of Case Western Reserve University assert that losing-averse Americans often engage in what they call self-handicapping–that is, taking on a severe handicap that will make failure more likely–and allow the individual to save face if he or she does in fact lose. They cite the French chess champion, Deschapelles, who would compete only if his opponents would remove one of his pawns and make the first move–thereby increasing the chances he would lose. If he did lose, he could then blame it on his disadvantage rather than his own limits.
Some experts believe that Americans’ fear of losing is related to fear of the ultimate loss, death. Indeed, they say there are people who attempt to lessen their fear of death by making their lives so dull and unrewarding that death seems less uninviting.
“Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won’t work.”
–Thomas Edison
Dr. Tessa Warschaw, New York psychotherapist and author of “Winning by Negotiation,” says the fear of losing permeates every aspect of American life.
“We’ll do anything to avoid the shame of losing,” he says. Losing means you’re a loser. We want to be risk-free, and so we just stay out of the arena. We don’t enter the fray. We’re afraid to make mistakes, and this fear of losing is a big reason that creativity is so diminished in America. We’ll cheat and lie to avoid that shame.
We have this mistaken notion that we must win all the time, but winning and losing don’t work in personal and professional relationships. Sports are getting rougher and rougher; it’s a war out there. Kids are watching this and learning not to resolve conflict, they’re just learning about winning the conflict.
Dr. Sel Lederman, a New York psychiatrist who specializes in issues of losing, says: “Any experience in life, winning or losing, is only of significance if we learn from it. Usually, we learn more from losing than from winning.
“Rather than go into despondency over defeat, or seek revenge, and blame others, the healthy response to losing is this: `Why did I lose? What was my role? Did I lose my concentration? Did I really do my best?’ This way you will enrich yourself, you will grow.”
Dan Jansen, the star-crossed American speed skater who kept losing when he should have won, became almost pathetic at the 1994 Winter Olympics until he finally won his last race. After Jansen lost his first race, his wife was quoted as saying: God cannot be this cruel. There has to be some other reason.
Maybe God didn’t even tune in the Olympic telecasts. Perhaps He was distracted by the events in Bosnia and Somalia.
