Losing

My blog has been a little sports heavy lately, but I have to do at least one more. It's a week until the Super Bowl and the college championship just happened. Here's my take away on sports. It feels 100% good to win and it feels 1000% bad to lose. I'm glad Seattle beat Green Bay, but I feel Green Bay's pain. I usually don't listen to sports interviews, but I heard some of the Green Bay players talk in the days following the loss. They were beyond crushed. If you're going to lose in the playoffs, lose early and lose by a lot. Don't do it like they did - Lose in a championship game, and blow a commanding lead to lose in overtime. Ouch. On the other hand, Seattle was excited to win, but that only lasts for a little while. Then all the focus is on the Super Bowl. And if they end up losing that, they'll feel terrible about their season. Of the 30 or so NFL teams, only one ends up feeling really good. And usually there will be some clown from that team that will say that doesn't mean anything unless we win next year too. So no one is really happy and most are completely crushed. They have to look forward to next season when again all the teams but one will be unhappy. Why do we watch sports anyway if the odds are we end up sad? The Super Bowl should be like little kids sports. We play, but don't keep score. Then we all get participant ribbons, a snow cone, and we all go away happy.

Same with my little Ducks. They had some final team get together after the season, and all the quotes were about how they wish they could have won that final game. Think of how many colleges there are. Oregon ended up number two of all of them. Not good enough, though.

To end my sports blog, Ernie Banks died yesterday. There are a lot of jerks in sports. Whatever the opposite of the word jerk is, that describes him. Every time someone talked about him, it was how great a player he was, but mostly what a class guy he was. I got to see him play in an old-timers game in Portland along with Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, and Joe Dimaggio (best day of my life). For some reason, not unlike the story of Job, God decided he would play his entire career with the Chicago Cubs. So he never won or even got into a World Series. But, if anyone had the right philosophy about winning and losing, it was probably him. He seemed to just love to play.

In about a week, the Super Bowl will end up with me being pretty happy or completely destroyed. Maybe the secret is to root for teams like the Cubs. Let's just go out and play and enjoy ourselves. We don't have to be burdened with what happens if we don't win, because we know we won't. It would probably be a more pleasant experience.