Date: Fri 08-Mar-1996

Publication: Bee

Author: KIMH

Illustration: I

Quick Words:

Column-Harmon-Losing

Full Text:

Losing To Win - Column/Kim Harmon

Losing To Win

I got to wondering - as I watched the Newtown High School girls basketball

team lose in the South-West Conference finals to Masuk, saw the Newtown High

School boys' basketball team do the same to Kolbe in their conference finals,

and watched the wrenching agony on all those faces - if we're putting too much

pressure on ourselves to win.

Is it all worth it?

Two years ago, at the National Basketball Association All Star festivities, a

young kid took a three-point shot at a million bucks and heaved up an air ball

that left him weeping inconsolably afterwards.

This year, at the National Football League Pro Bowl, a New York City police

officer passed up a promotional exam to try and kick a 35-yard field goal for

a million bucks and by the time the ball dribbled across the goal line he

realized his enormous gamble had failed.

That question - is it worth it? - preyed a lot on my mind a couple weeks ago,

on the ride home from Brookfield just moments after the NHS girls were beaten

physically and mentally by Masuk in the finals of the SWC tournament. The

question preyed a lot on my mind because I felt a little bit of the pain, too

- a small scrap of the agony, I guess, that mushroomed inside that gymnasium

as the hopes of a good basketball team met the cold, wet fist of reality.

I felt a little of the pain because I wanted to see the Lady Indians win not

only because it would be a great story and great copy for the sports pages,

but because I wanted to see those girls become champions. Almost to a player,

every one of them deserved it for all the effort they had expended to be

there. But they lost.

Was it all worth it?

I was about to say - no - even as I anticipated a restless night in bed,

visions of bricked shots and turnovers haunting me like phantasms from a

sick-bed fever dream, but then I realized what I was about to admit to and I

hastily changed my response.

I said it out loud, too, in the car even as, on WFAN-660, the St. John's Red

Storm was blowing another Big East game.

" Yes, " I said, " it is worth it. "

I know I don't know what it's like to feel a crushing defeat and the only

brush I had with a meaningful championship was this past summer with the

Gervais Brothers in the Newtown Slo-Pitch Softball League, but the prospects

of either would be a lot more savory than the everybody-wins-nobody-loses

mentality that seems to be sweeping through youth sports today like a red

tide. Maybe the kids today are learning how to perform, but are they learning

how to win? Sports is competition and participating just for the sake of

participation seems genuinely pointless if you don't have some sort of goal,

some sort of hope to be better than somebody else - better than everybody

else. Is there a competitive spirit in youth sports anymore or are the

organizers trying to bleed that out? There is a competitive spirit, as small

as it might be sometimes, like a solitary match flame in the middle of a

darkened stadium, but it is there. It lives much brighter in the travel and

select teams, though, because somewhere there are people who want to achieve.

They all want to win. Problem is, kids today don't learn how to win. Coaches

and parents are almost afraid to win and most certainly are afraid to admit

that anyone has lost, because the stigma of losing - they suppose - is such a

detriment to the self-esteem of these young players.

Some years ago, working with a Little League baseball program, I was

instructed - pleaded with, actually - to change any game reports that

reflected a winning margin larger than 10 runs into five runs or fewer. Being

a relative rookie, I actually complied for a week, but when I ran a 5-3 box

score and wrote how Joe Smith drove in seven runs with a couple homers and a

triple, that experiment ended.

It is this message that competition - and with it, the threat of losing - is

bad that makes me scared. What is wrong with losing if losing is simply the

unfortunate side-effect of running into a team that is better?

The Lady Indians wanted to win. They wanted to beat Masuk in the finals of the

SWC more than they wanted anything in their lives and when they had the face

the reality that they weren't going to do it, then there were tears and there

was pain.

But is that bad? Just because the agony of losing of a championship game, of

seeing your career end on such a note, is so painful does it mean that the

actual experience is not worth having?

I think from the pain of losing comes the desire to win. I also think you

can't learn how to win if you don't feel the pain of losing and when the

competition isn't on the basketball floor anymore, but out in the world

somewhere, then everything - the winning and the losing - is all worth it.

Every bit.