Dave Wannstedt is too nice.
My male football informants, knowing that my sports IQ is six points lower than my shoe size, have apprised me recently of Coach Wannstedt’s deepest sin. So have various of the professional sports pundits who are paid to figure out why the big bad Chicago Bears can’t win a game of tiddlywinks against a team of frogs.
“Too nice,” they sniff. “Too nice,” they squawk. “Way too nice,” they sneer, as if nice were lice, as if no coach before Wannstedt had committed such a heinous crime, this failure to terrorize his team to victory.
Is Wannstedt indeed the evil Prince of Niceness? Should he be reviled for coaching like Phil Donahue instead of like Ivan the Terrible?
Let’s leave that to finer football minds and consider instead the larger question: Is nice a vice?
Many of us have a confused relationship with niceness, our own and everybody else’s. “Be nice,” our mothers chided us from a fragile age. We were thus guided to tiptoe and curtsy through life in pursuit of an attribute the dictionary defines as “pleasing and agreeable in nature,” “exhibiting courtesy and politeness.”
And we were happy to be thought of as pleasing, agreeable and polite–until it occurred to us we might be more successful if we were tyrannical, paranoid and otherwise jerklike. Until it crossed our minds that, in the minds of many, “nice woman” equals “bore” and “nice guy” translates to “wimp.” Until we realized that too often being nice is like wearing a neon sign that says, “Kick me.”
Yes, nice is a sneaky, two-faced word.
Nice pants, nice work, nice house. Who could object to being told that? No one–until the thought strikes that if the speaker were truly impressed, she would have said great pants, brilliant work, a house to die for.
Nice can flatter you to your face, belittle you behind your back. It’s a pat on the head, a B+ kind of compliment. It’s a teddy bear, a yellow ribbon, a song by Barry Manilow. At its worst, it’s as sweetly suffocating as the potpourri at Ye Olde Kountry Shoppe at the mall.
“She’s so nice,” was the ultimate high school accolade for girls when I was growing up. And so we strove to be, you know, like, really nice, all sugar and spice and other things too cute to name, until we grew up and got in touch with our inner snakes and snails and unmentionable puppy dog parts.
Many of us still wanted to be nice, but sometimes we got sick of smiling. We learned it could be fun to snipe and glower. Besides, we learned that nice could be the slow boat to nowhere.
Even the nicest people must sometimes concede that nice is not enough.
“I’ve told you nicely seven times to stop spitting on your brother!” says the parent who learns the insufficiencies of nice the hard way.
Bosses, too, know that nice does not necessarily inspire obedience or brilliance, which may explain why “nice boss” is not a common word pair. Go ahead. Put “nice” and “boss” together. Does that work for you? I must admit, however, that the best boss I ever had is not likely to be called nice.
But many of us still value nice. We want to be nice and want people to be nice to us. We regret that nice has become an insult and a tragic flaw. I consulted a woman who is universally known as nice and asked her how she felt about her reputation.
“Being known as nice, is, well, nice,” she said. “Or it used to be before it took on the diminishing connotation. There are a lot of @ $%! out there,” she said, using a not-nice word, “and it’s nice to have nice people around.”
Of course, she is not the coach of the Chicago Bears. If she were, she would encourage them to win by bringing them fresh-baked cookies, which, according to my football informants, is approximately how Coach Wannstedt runs his team.
But if the quality of niceness we prize in our friends is not what we reward in a football coach, Coach Wannstedt shouldn’t worry. On that big scoreboard in the sky, it’s still the nice guys who win.
