OTTUMWA —
“There are no moral victories” is a common phrase you hear from players and coaches of any sport.
And it’s true to a certain extent: No true competitor is happy after a loss. Yet, it would be foolish to conclude that all losses should elicit nothing but disappointment from the losing team.
NBA Hall of Famer and former New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley lucidly made this point in his book Life on the Run:
“The winning team, like the conquering army, claims everything in its path and seems to say that only winning is important. Yet victory has very narrow meanings. The taste of defeat has a richness of experience all its own.”
Such was the case with the Ottumwa football team’s 27-0 defeat to defending Class 4A state champion West Des Moines Valley more than two weeks ago at Schafer Stadium. Though the Bulldogs were beaten – and Coltt La Velle suffered a heartbreaking season-ending injury in the game’s final moments — that night, the boys proved to the community, Valley, and perhaps to themselves that they can play with anyone. Heck, for one half the Bulldogs stood toe to toe with the top-ranked Tigers. At times, they even appeared to have Valley off-balance.
Early in the game, the Tigers didn’t seem to have anyone who could cover Ottumwa wide receiver Kyle Keck. Sure, it would have been nice if Keck’s long reception at the end of the first half would have led to a touchdown, but life is rarely perfect. And did anyone, other than perhaps the Bulldog players and coaching staff, really think that Ottumwa would only be behind 7-0 at the end of the first half? If you answered yes to this question, you’re either an eternal optimist or a chronic liar.
So even if it’s taboo to call the loss a moral victory, it still provided a crucial springboard to Ottumwa’s victories over Keokuk and Mount Pleasant. The Bulldogs’ loss adds weight to Bradley’s point about the value of losses.
Today, the sport’s culture, and American culture in general, has been inundated with a win-at-all costs mentality that has produced its share of negative consequences. How many sports figures – Mark McGuire, Sammy Sosa, Melky Cabrera, Joe Paterno, Barry Bonds, Mark Mangino – have been ushered down from the sanitized slopes of Olympus because they had too deeply internalized this mentality?
Yet, in the name of celebrating the successful, we continue to treat sports athletes as if they are gods worthy of hero worship. Given the attention thrown at these athletes and coaches, why are we surprised that some of them think they are above the law? And what becomes of these people when their skills begin to erode? Do we boo them for no longer being the production machines they used to be?
To measure a person’s worth by his or her athletic ability is a shallow form of ethics worthy of the medieval era. Yet, from high school to professional sports, a person’s popularity often ebbs and flows based on one’s athletic prowess. Fans often boo those who don’t produce and fawn over those who do without caring one iota about the people that lie beneath the talent or lack thereof.
This “winning is everything” phenomenon raises an important question: Why would athletes not cheat when their entire self-definition is based on their ability to produce in their given sport? Furthermore, shouldn’t athletes be measured by their personal values first and their athletic achievements second no matter how talented or not talented they may be?
Ottumwa’s season-opening loss proves why there is much more to sports than winning. The sooner the sports world embraces this, the better.
Got a sports challenge for Courier sports writer Andy Heintz? He can be reached at aheintz@kc.rr.com.
Sports
September 7, 2012
HEINTZ: Ottumwa football and the value of losing
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