It’s almost here again. America’s annual love affair with conquest and triumph. Some call it a rite of spring; others, a metaphor for life. Actually it’s the 134th season of professional baseball.
This event conjures up different images. Beautifully sculpted players in their larger-than-life spring-training uniforms. Squinty-eyed pitchers coiling to unleash that 100-mile-an-hour strike. Squatting catchers, diving infielders, somersaulting outfielders, furious grins and victorious index fingers filling our TV screens while bellowing, bare-bellied bleacher fans enjoy going nuts.
I love it! And yet here’s one fan who has some questions about the whole delicious insanity of it all: actually about all sports, including the upcoming Super Bowl, NBA playoffs and swath of NASCAR races.
I grant that kids need idols, adults need diversion, franchises need a return on their investments, Wheaties needs new faces on its boxes and investigative reporters need steroid stories. OK. But just for a moment let’s look at this upcoming season more philosophically.
Isn’t what we’re about to experience over these next few months really one big national obsession, a chronic fixation with winning at all costs? I think so and I’ll tell you why. Because this passion for being No. 1 burns deep in the very marrow of our bones–sometimes a passion to be admired; often an appetite that borders on the pathological.
The pennant survivors and the World Series winner will earn banners in the press, interviews on ESPN, plus that inevitable congratulatory visit to the White House. But, for just a moment, I would like to make a modest case for coming in second.
I suppose nothing is more repugnant to the American psyche. Ever since our forebears sprang upon this continent and subjugated its land and people, there has been a national insistence on being first at whatever we do.
Nothing’s wrong with winning, but my question is: Since there can only be one first in each of society’s categories, what about the millions of us in second place? Or third? Or less? Are we to be seen as diminished? Less worthy? Less among more?
I think it fair to say there have been more times in our lives when we have lost rather than won. And yet we’re still here, aren’t we? Loss in life or in sports or among nations for that matter is not terminal. There will always be other challenges that we can take on, other battles we can wage.
Or–when we have grown wise enough–that we can simply ignore altogether.
