cautionary tell
WINNING IS EVERYTHING
reviewed by
NICK CATALANO
____________________________________
Nick
Catalano is a TV writer/producer and Professor of Literature
and Music at Pace University. He reviews books and music for
several journals and is the author of Clifford
Brown: The Life and Art of the Legendary Jazz Trumpeter,
New York
Nights: Performing, Producing and Writing in Gotham
and A
New Yorker at Sea. His latest book, Tales
of a Hamptons Sailor, is now available. For Nick's
reviews, visit his website: www.nickcatalano.net
When
he began coaching the Green Bay Packers in 1959, Vince Lombardi
was widely quoted as saying “Winning isn’t everything
. . . It’s the only thing.” Later, after winning
several championships (and the first two Super Bowls) he often
claimed that he was misquoted and what he really said was “Winning
isn’t everything . . . The will to win is the only thing.”
At the end of his life he backspaced again “I wish I’d
never said the thing . . . I meant the effort. I meant the goal.
I sure didn’t mean for people to crush human values and
morality.”
Sports
journalist Grantland Rice once said “It’s not that
you won or lost, it’s how you played the game.”
As evidence that Coach Lombardi steadfastly subscribed to this
philosophy and not the misquoted one, we have Jerry Kramer’s
best-selling account Instant Replay. In his book, hall-of-fame
guard Kramer bemoaned the fact that Lombardi often took the
joy out of winning a game by lambasting players if the team
actually played badly. And if they’d lost a game but played
well he avoided any criticism. A close study of Lombardi’s
life’s constantly shows that it was a commitment to Grantland
Rice’s wisdom that truly expressed his competitive philosophy.
Other
disinclinations of “winning-is-everything” abound
in the sports world: After winning his most recent of several
Super Bowls, the great 49er quarterback Joe Montana sat alone
in his locker room hesitant to remove his uniform. For hours
after the game he had been besieged by reporters and TV commentators
from everywhere hailing his athletic immortality. But he after
everyone had left he felt a strange sense of emptiness. He had
‘won’ everything imaginable in his career but he
found himself mumbling “Now what . . . ”
The
great French historian, educator and sportsman Pierre de Coubertin
who was responsible for re-instituting the Olympic games in
1896 uttered his philosophy thus: “the important thing
in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part; the important
thing in life is not triumph, but the struggle; the essential
thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.”
In the modern Olympiad, five-time rowing gold medalist Sir Steven
Redgrave upon being congratulated on being champion in Los Angeles
uttered to himself “Well, what are you going to do next?”
The
literary world has given us a legacy of master works illustrating
the deception of the winning-is-everything mind game. Edgar
Allan Poe’s narrative poem “El Dorado” tells
of the journey of a gallant knight who, after struggling for
an eternity finally realizes that the gold of El Dorado (or
riches in general) is unattainable in this world. Robert Louis
Stevenson in his essay “El Dorado” echoes Poe’s
theme but expands it suggesting that the winning-is-everything
approach fails in any instance where it is the only goal of
for the seeker:
Happily
we all shoot at the moon with ineffectual arrows; our hopes
are set on inaccessible El Dorado; we come to an end of nothing
here below. Interests are only plucked up to sow themselves
again, like mustard. You would think, when the child was born,
there would be an end to trouble; and yet it is only the beginning
of fresh anxieties; and when you have seen it through its
teething and its education, and at last its marriage, alas!
it is only to have new fears, new quivering sensibilities,
with every day; and the health of your children's children
grows as touching a concern as that of your own. Again, when
you have married your wife, you would think you were got upon
a hilltop, and might begin to go downward by an easy slope.
But you have only ended courting to begin marriage. Falling
in love and winning love are often difficult tasks to overbearing
and rebellious spirits; but to keep in love is also a business
of some importance, to which both man and wife must bring
kindness and goodwill. The true love story commences at the
altar, when there lies before the married pair a most beautiful
contest of wisdom and generosity, and a life-long struggle
towards an unattainable ideal. Unattainable? Ay, surely unattainable,
from the very fact that they are two instead of one.
Plutarch
in his famous Lives recounts the story of Alexander
the Great who was distraught after his legion of conquests.
“When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain he wept,
for there were no more worlds to conquer.” In the third
Punic War as he perceived the city of Carthage burning, Roman
conqueror Scipio Africanus the Younger was said to weep bitterly
at the price paid in human lives and culture because of his
winning-is-everything pursuit.
In
Homer’s legendary epic Odysseus chooses to spurn the offer
of immortality from Calypso. He contemplates how the Gods are
actually envious of humans because they have done everything
and have no goals to achieve; they can’t experience the
fulfillment that a journey through struggle brings. And so he
turns down the offer to become a God choosing to maximize his
human existence and the gold obtainable only from the life journey
that humans make.
Quixotism
is a will power defying materiality. It is the attempt to make
a utopian vision a reality but like all utopias it is unacceptable
in a world where idealism is shunned. Thus, although Don Quixote
wasn’t victorious in the pragmatic world, the imaginative
vision and struggle that Cervantes has given us is a winning
recipe for a fully lived life.
The
desire to win at any cost is a major aberration of an unenlightened
society. And the claim that winning obliterates all ills is
deceitful. The principle of winning at any cost has been a concomitant
of capitalism and it is in the business world that its evil
is most evident. In the 1960s so-called seminal economists came
up with the, by now, wide practice of mergers and acquisitions
to enhance corporate growth. It made little matter that workers
everywhere would lose their jobs as a direct result of this
practice but few focused on the societal harm that ensued. During
the recent recession it was discovered that brokers (Goldman
Sachs et al) were actually selling short investment
products that they had touted as good buys to their clients.
These clients lost big but the
brokers who manoeuvred these ‘derivatives’ won handsomely.
Credit rating agencies (Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s)
failed to target this corporate abuse for fear that they would
lose their huge fees. Major bank loan officers wildly granted
mortgages to bad credit customers because they made more money
in these kinds of transactions. The winning-is- everything philosophy
has now permeated every facet of the working world no matter
the breaches of ethics involved.
It
is not dominant in the world of children. Doctors Frank Smoll
and Ron Smith report in Journal of Applied Sport Psychology,
“Contrary to what one might expect in a highly competitive
society young boys and girls prefer playing for coaches who
stress skill development, personal and team success, maximum
effort and fun . . . rather than for coaches who maintain a
win-at-all-costs approach.”
As
Wordsworth once uttered “The child is father of the man.”
If adults could return to the beliefs that they had as children,
the aforementioned evils of winning-is-everything might eventually
evaporate.
