A Good Sport Knows How to Lose

Excerpt from chapter 2 from the book Raising a Good Sport in an IN-YOUR-FACE World

The taste of defeat has a richness of experience all its own.

-BILL BRADLEY (12)

At a Wisconsin State Athletic Director's conference that I spoke at a couple of years ago, one of the other speakers related the story of a high school football game that came down to one final play. The score was 7-6. The team that was trailing had the ball. The quarterback lofted a pass and the crowd roared as the receiver caught it for the winning touchdown. As the score of 12-7 was posted on the board, the coach of the winning team pointed out to the officials something they had missed: the receiver had stepped out of bounds before he caught the ball. The scoreboard was changed back to 7-6. Thanks to one brave coach who wasn't afraid to lose, his team's win was now a loss.

John Thompson, former Georgetown basketball coach, once said after a tough loss, "A few losses are good for the soul. You' need a few bruises." The awkward thing about losing is that no one is-quite sure how a player is supposed to act after a loss. We often tell our children not to cry after losing a game because they're supposed to be "good sports," but it doesn't seem quite right to walk off the field laughing, either.

Since every player will lose sometime, we need to help children prepare themselves in advance for those times when the inevitable happens. We need to explain to them that the best thing to do when they lose isn't to cry or to laugh; the best thing to do is to think. Crying over a game won't make a child play any better next time, and neither will laughing. Thinking, however, is always valuable.

Questions to think about after a loss include:

• Did I give it my best effort?

• Was I as mentally and physically prepared as I could have been?

• Was I fully tuned-in to the game at all times?

• How could I have helped prevent the loss?

• How could I have been of more help to my teammates?

• What did the other team do that worked well?

• What would I do differently if I could do it over again?

Teaching your children to ask themselves questions like this is far better than letting them blame the officials, the coach, or the other team for their loss. Of course, hitting them with these questions as soon as they step off the field after a 56-0 loss is not a good idea. Remember, your role as a parent is to support and guide-not lecture and preach.

I recommend first acknowledging your child's feelings of hurt and disappointment, and second asking if the two of you could get together when he or she isn't feeling quite so bad to talk about what happened. That is when you can point out that good players think after every competition-win or lose. That's how they learn not to lose so often.

I wonder what thoughts must have gone through the minds of the young football players whose coach turned their glorious win into a heartbreaking loss. I imagine more than one of them was thinking, "If only he hadn't seen our guy step out of bounds!" or, "Why couldn't he have just kept his mouth shut!"

But hopefully more of the players were thinking about the lessons they learned that day-lessons in honesty, morality, leadership, and sportsmanship. By understanding and valuing those lessons and incorporating them into their lives on and off the playing field, those "losing" players could ensure that their loss was, in the long run, a valuable win.

In her book Champions Are Raised, Not Born, Summer Sanders shares a story about how Dot Richardson, a member of the first women's softball team to win an Olympic gold medal, learned early in her childhood the value of learning from a loss:

On the way home, in the car, I'm bawling my eyes out," says Dot, “and my dad says to me, ‘What are you crying for?'” “You saw it! I lost the game for us!” I cried. My dad shook his head. “Listen,” he told me, “When you're on the field, you do it or you don't. Tonight, you just didn't do it. But you won't let it happen again. You'll practice harder.” Dot realized he was right. "I realized at that moment I was going to work harder so it never happened again," she recalls. (13)

Sanders also relates the story of Jeremy, who was a great swimmer in practice but had difficulty dealing with the pressure of a meet:

Jeremy's parents certainly didn't see any inherent good in failure, and so, I suspect, their attitude infected Jeremy. He came to see losing as something out of his control, something, therefore, totally terrifying... Yet, even the kids with the most talent must learn how to bounce back from failure, because it's part of competition... When I did lose, I understood it happened for a reason. Defeat meant I hadn't had enough experience going into the race. It never meant that I was doomed to fail again... Quite the contrary: I was in control. Failure just showed me what, exactly, I had to work on my stroke, my dive, my turns. (14)

I think two things that make losing hard for people like Jeremy (aside from the usual feelings of embarrassment and humiliation) is that first, losing makes you feel like you're not in control, and second, you don't see the value, or meaning in it.

I can think of no finer example of finding meaning in loss than Lisa Beamer, whose husband, Todd, was on United Flight 93 the only hijacked aircraft on September not to reach its intended target.

Todd Beamer, along with several other passengers, managed to overpower the terrorists and crash the plane before it ended up taking hundreds of innocent lives. In the process, Beamer and the other forty-three passengers on the plane died. At age thirty-two, Lisa Beamer was a widow, with two little boys and another child on the way. She could have cursed fate. She could have curled up into a ball and railed at how unfair life was because heaven knows, nothing could have been more unfair than what had happened to her family. Instead, she decided that the terrorists who took her husband's life would not take hers. She would not let them control her reactions or her actions.

Since her husband's insurance policy had left her provided for, Lisa decided to use the many donations she received after September 11 to start a foundation for the other children who had lost parents on the fateful flight. And when she needed to meet with her husband's former employer to discuss the company's participation in the foundation, she didn't hesitate to fly to San Francisco on United Flight 93. “I really wanted to make that meeting and thought, ‘I'm not going to let those terrorists affect my life anymore than they have,'" Beamer said. "I felt defiant, but I wasn't making any big dramatic statement. I just felt ready to fly again."

Todd Beamer's death wasn't the first tragedy in Lisa's life. When she was fifteen, her father died. It was the perspective she gained from that experience, Beamer noted, that will help her deal with her husband's loss. (15)

By choosing to learn from our bad experiences, we exert control over them. In his book Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood, William Pollack, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, shares the story of the Hawks, a group of high school football players from a middleclass suburb of a large north-eastern city. The Hawks were not only good football players, but many of them were excellent students, too. One day the Hawks went up against a tough inner-city team. Before the game, the Hawks' coach talked to them about winning and losing. He explained that the opposing team came from a school that didn't have a lot of money, so he didn't want to hear any of his boys teasing the other team about how they looked. He also said that if the Hawks lost, they weren't to say anything bad to the other side, "just shake hands with them and tell them that they played great."

Well, the Hawks went on to lose, badly. And when the game was over, they offered their congratulations to the other team. But they didn't leave it at that. Deciding they could learn from the experience, the Hawks asked their coach if they could do Saturday scrimmages with the other team so that they could improve their skills. As friendships developed, some of the Hawks players began helping boys on the other team with their college admission essays.

Pollack writes, "good sports are about learning from loss, especially about the recognition of limits... As Phillip Isenberg, Harvard Medical School psychiatrist and former Harvard football team captain, has pointed out, sports teach people that they have to live within the limits of the game and of their bodies, to realize their relative talents. No matter what one's skill level, there's almost always someone stronger, faster, or better coordinated. No matter how hard one tries to win, there's also the role of change - the injured star player, the distracting fan, the wind that carries the ball. And no matter how unfair, losing is simply reality." (16)

Losing is never as much fun as winning. However, a true loser is one who yells, cheats, hollers, sulks, and refuses to think, "How can I play better next time?" or, "I played my best, therefore my opponent must have played better than I was today." How your children handle a loss will determine whether or not they are true losers. Successful individuals find positives in failure. Mistakes provide them with information on what needs improvement. So instead of letting your children dwell on their mistakes, help them draw lessons from them for the future.

Letting it go, however, is easier said than done. Not everyone has the maturity, self-confidence, or self-discipline to forget a loss quickly. In an article adapted from his book Values of the Game, former U.S. Senator Bill Bradley talks about how difficult it was for him to learn how to cope with defeat as a basketball player. He said the defeat would hang over him "like a fog" for days. It wasn't until his second season in the NBA that he finally received the advice that would help him change his attitude. After losing a close game on a bad pass that he had made, Bradley was dejected. Then Dave DeBusschere, his roommate, set him straight: "You can't go through a season like this. There are too many games. Sure, you blew it tonight, but when it’s over, it's over. Let it go. Otherwise you won't be ready to play tomorrow night."

As Bradley said, "I realized that the more you carry the bad past around with you in the present, the less likely it is that the future will improve." (17)

The funny thing is, it might be easier for your kids to teach you about letting go than it is for you to teach them. I remember when I was coaching my youngest son's youth basketball team. We were playing in a big tournament where the winner would advance to the championship game. We ended up losing a close, hard-fought contest. As we were driving home I decided I should say something profound to my son, Peter. After all, I was a psychologist and knew a lot about sports and therefore had a lot of wisdom to share (I thought).

"You know, Peter," I began, "fifty percent of the teams that play basketball lose." No response from Peter. I tried a second time. "Fifty percent," I emphasized. Still no reaction. So I resorted to the time-tested method of reaching back into my own childhood. "I remember when I was your age I played in a game that I really wanted to win, and it was really tough when we lost." At that point Peter reached out, gently put his hand on my shoulder and said, "It's okay, Dad."

Children have a wonderful resiliency that adults often lack (either that, or they just have an awfully short attention span). After all, how many times have you watched one of your children come stomping through the front door, saying "I will never play with so-and-so again as long as I live"- only to watch that same child a half-hour later rush out to play with the same friend that only a few minutes earlier was his or her sworn enemy?

We adults, on the other hand, tend to nurse our grudges a little longer. Look at what happened to poor Bill Buckner. He let a baseball slip through his legs, costing the Boston Red Sox a World Series. The last time the Red Sox had won was in 1918. Who knew when their next chance would come? Despite his momentous gaffe, Buckner chose to remain in the Boston area after his retirement from pro ball.

Eventually, however, he had to move. Why? Because in seven years, no one let him forget the loss. Fans would still come up to him and make unkind comments. Buckner decided he didn't want his kids hearing about it all the time, so the family finally packed up and left. All because some people just couldn't let it go.

What does it take to be able to let go of a loss and move on?

Recognize and accept that some things are beyond your control. Despite the fact that I have been playing competitive sports for close to six decades, there are still times when I have difficulty in "letting it go." For instance, about a year and a half ago, I took up the sport of racquetball. One of my opponents – a veteran of more than fifty-five years at the game - beats me consistently. This doesn't bother me, but when I play another one of my regular opponents - a young man many years my junior - I can really feel my sportsmanship being put to the test when he wins. I think it's because I recognize that with my former opponent, it's his experience that is beating me. I know that experience is something that I can control. If I continue to practice and play racquetball, I, too, will become more experienced. But with my other opponent, it is his youth that is beating me, and there's nothing I can do about that. I certainly can't turn back the clock and make my sixty - something legs act like they did at twenty. Aging is something that is out of my control. Thus, one of the keys to letting go is recognizing the difference between those things that you can control and those that you can't.

As Reinhold Neibuhr wrote in his famous "Serenity Prayer":

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.

Understand that sport is about striving to minimize your mistakes, not about trying to be perfect. Unless you bowl a 300, it is rare that you will ever experience a perfect game in any The older I get, the more I realize that what sport is about - and what life is about - is trying to make fewer mistakes than we did the day before. There is no room for perfectionism in sport.

Now, a, lot of athletes might disagree with me on that-especially the elite ones. Some people take the view that if you're not striving for perfection, then you're not setting your goals high enough. But it is my feeling that those athletes who think they need to be perfect are the ones who will have the hardest time letting go. The pressure they put upon themselves will not only make it hard for them to deal with losses in a sportsmanlike way, but it will also take a lot of the joy out of their sports experience.

So if you see signs of perfectionism in your children, don't make the mistake of seeing it as a good thing. Certainly don't encourage it. Rather, help your children understand that everyone makes mistakes. Mistakes are okay. Mistakes are healthy. And you will love them no matter what mistakes they make.

• Remember that it is only a game. In all the sporting events I watched in the days immediately after September 11, the one phrase I heard over and over again was this: "It's only a game." Athletes repeatedly emphasized that neither winning nor losing seemed to hold the same importance when stacked up against the events of that horrible day.

When Hasim Rahman defied twenty-to-one odds to beat heavyweight champ Lennox Lewis, he became an overnight millionaire. But his father, a former prison chaplain, said, "What difference does it make if he makes millions and millions... If he winds up as a bad father, a bad son, and a bad husband, I'd rather see him give it all up." (18)

Sport has the potential to do tremendous things, but in the end, it is never going to cure cancer. It is never going to eliminate world hunger. It is never going to send an astronaut to the moon. What sport can do is lift people's spirits. It can bring people together. At its very best, it can help us put aside hatred and move closer to a shared understanding. But it can only do this if the highest standards of sportsmanship are met.

Athletes who remember this, who do their best to exercise self control in difficult circumstances, and who look at loss as an opportunity to learn something valuable will find that, no matter what the final score, they will always come out ahead.

Letting It Go

Win or lose we have to forget about what happened yesterday and move on to tomorrow.

-MIKE KRZYZEWSKI, LEADING WITH THE HEART (19)

The quickest way to get over a failure is to look in the mirror and admit you had a bad game. That way you start the recovery period that much sooner. That gets me mentally prepared for the next time. I'm never looking at yesterday and seeing how bad I played. I'm looking forward to tomorrow to see how good I can play.

-MICHAEL JORDAN (20)

Your children can lose a game and valiantly shake the winner's hand, and they can evaluate their performance after a loss to figure out what they did wrong, but doing all that doesn't guarantee that losing won't still eat away at them. In order to really know how to lose, you have to teach them how to let go of a loss.

MODEL-TEACH-ENCOURAGE

1. Discuss with your children in advance what they will do if they lose.

2. Remind your children to always participate in the traditional post game handshake. Let them know that when they do this, they are setting a positive tone for players and fans.

3. Find stories in the newspaper where athletes and/or coaches talk about their opponents in a positive way. Contrast these with stories where athletes and/or coaches criticize or demean their opponents. Ask your children who they think sets a better example of sportsmanship, and why?

4. Encourage your children to give credit to their opponent. They need to remember that sometimes the opponent just plays better, or the other coach does a better job.

5. Do not allow your children to blame a loss on injuries or officials. Over the long haul, these variables always seem to even out among opponents.

6. Teach your children that no matter how frustrated or upset they might be becoming during the course of a competition, they should never give in to the temptation to take a cheap shot at an opponent. They should not let bad behavior on the part of others provoke them into equally bad behavior.

7. Help your children recognize the consequences to losing control. (Golfer Matt Kuchar says that as a youngster, he once threw his clubs in a lake. His father made him jump in and fish them out.) Discuss other consequences of losing control with your children, such as incurring a penalty that handicaps the team.

8. Don't ridicule or yell at your children for making a mistake or for losing a game. Instead, say; “Even the best players make mistakes. I know you'll do better next time.”

9. Help your children understand that controlling their temper is a sign of mental toughness. Point out athletes you notice who keep their cool during trying circumstances.

10. To help your children handle stress better, emphasize effort and improvement, not winning.

11. Let your children see you making mistakes, forgiving yourself, and moving on.

12. Reinforce positive behavior by catching your children exercising self-control and rewarding them for successfully managing their emotions.

13. Enforce your own standards of behavior with your children. Just because their coach might allow them to throw their racket or helmet when they're upset doesn't mean you have to.

14. Help your children exercise self-control by expressing their feelings in ways that are not harmful to themselves or others. Help them determine, in advance, a cooling-off technique to use when they feel angry. This might include counting to ten, taking a deep breath, or thinking of a nonsense word to say (instead of using offensive language).

15. Help your children recognize their "hot buttons." This will make it easier for them to know when to use their cooling-off techniques.

16. Encourage your children not to stew over a loss, but to evaluate it for how they can do better next time.

17. Help your children learn how to accept a loss and move on to the next challenge. Ways to do this include allowing a set amount of time to feel bad (such as twenty minutes or half an hour) and then not letting yourself think about it; writing your feelings down in a letter or journal and then putting it away; talking about how you feel with a parent or friend; making a list of things you can do to be better prepared for the next competition.

18. Help your children put sports in perspective. Make sure their lives (or your family's life) don't revolve around sports, or a loss will take on greater significance. Remind your children that it is only a game-and show by your actions and words that you believe this, too.

19. Focus on fun, not scores. Male a habit after each competition to point out all the positive things that happened (e.g., the weather was great, the team made fewer errors, the parents learned a silly cheer, etc.).

20. Just as you probably have a special ritual for winning, create a special ritual for losing. (Perhaps winning means pizza and losing means root beer floats, or something like that.)

21. Don't try to shield your children from failure or loss. If they get the impression from you that loss is something to be avoided at all costs, as opposed-to something to learn and grow from, then they will have a harder time dealing with it successfully.

References:

1. Summer Sanders, Champions Are Raised, Not Born (New York: Delacorte, 1999), 135.

2. Rob Gilbert, ed., Bits and Pieces, vol. T, no. 23.

3. Sanders, 199.

4. Quoted in Jane Clifford, “Fatal Scuffle Between Dads a Deadly Lesson,” San Diego Union-Tribune, July 15, 2000.

5. Karen S. Peterson, “Why Everyone Is So Short-Tempered,” USA Today, July 18, 2000.

6. Erica Thesing, “Youth Sports World Is a Rage,” Sacramento Bee, July 13, 2000.

7. Bill Plaschke, “One-Punch Knockout,” Los Angeles Times, May 28, 2000.

8. Doug Smith, “ ‘Genius with Racket’ Changed Tennis’ Attitudes,” USA Today, July 8, 1999.

9. Doug Robinson, “Wildcat Player Shocked at His Loss of Control,” Desert News, December 1, 1998.

10. Diana Griego Erwin, “Ice Rink Killing No Blot on Kid Sports,” Sacramento Bee, July 13, 2000.

11. Cornelia Maude Spelman, Why I Feel Angry, (Morton Grove, Il: Albert Whitman, 2000, from the “Note to Parents”).

12. Bill Bradley, “Whatever the Score – Bounce Back,” Parade Magazine, October 18, 1998, 4.

13. Sanders, 93.

14. Ibid., 137 – 8, 142.

15. Marilyn Elias, “Widow of Sept. 11 Hero Carries On,” USA Today, November 21, 20001

16. William Pollack, Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood (New York: Random House, 1998), 281.

17. Whatever the Score – Bounce Back,” Parade Magazine, October 18, 1998.

18. Steve Spring, “ Rahman Has Grown as a Fighter, Person,” Los Angeles Times, November 11, 2001.

19. Mike Krzyzewski,  Leading with the Heart (New York: Warner Books, 2000), 231.

20. Quoted in David DuPress, “Megastar Still Having a Ball but Future with Bulls Clouded Until After Season,” USA Today, April 10, 1997.

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