'Losing Isn't Everything': New book shows other side of championships
The Chicago Cubs and their fans are bathing in the warm glow of well-deserved victory right now, and will be for quite some time. Winning the first world championship in more than a century will do that for you. But what about the other team in the World Series? How will history recall the Cleveland Indians, and how will the players deal with the fact that victory was within their grasp but they couldn’t close the deal?
Every winner’s story is the same, but every loser suffers alone, and in often heartbreaking ways. That’s the premise of “Losing Isn’t Everything,” a new collection of interviews by Fox Sports’ Curt Menefee and former Yahoo Sports editor Michael Arkush. Over the course of 15 chapters, the duo interviewed some of the most notable “losers” in sports history, seeking to determine how exactly they fell short, how they handled their pain in the immediate aftermath of the loss, and how they’re doing today.
There’s Craig Ehlo, who had to watch helplessly as Michael Jordan nailed The Shot over him (hello again, Cleveland). There’s Lindsey Jacobellis, who was en route to a gold medal in snowboarding in the 2006 Winter Olympics when she decided to get cute on the final jump and wiped out trying a stunt. There’s Mary Decker, who saw her long-delayed shot at Olympic glory vanish when she got tangled up in the legs of a fellow runner at the 1984 Olympics. There’s Calvin Schiraldi, who threw a pitch that became a slow roller up the line to a guy by the name of Bill Buckner…
Every athlete – heck, everyone on earth – loses far more often than they win. The difference between us and, say, a Jean Van De Velde is, when we lose a pickup basketball game or a hand of poker, it’s generally not in front of millions of people. It’s not while we’re carrying the hopes and dreams of an entire city on our back. It’s not something that will define us for the rest of our lives, where people will stop us in airports and Starbucks and say, “Hey, aren’t you the one who…?”
So how do those who have failed on sports’ grandest stages handle defeat? In so many different ways. Some shunned their sport forever. Some turned to drugs or alcohol, trying to blot out the memories of what was and the thoughts of what could have been. And a very few got right back on the horse and, like Olympian Dan Jansen, who slipped and fell while speedskating in the 1988 Olympics, came back and won that elusive championship after all.
All of them have lessons to teach us, lessons more important than the inspiration they might have provided with a championship. Consider these lines from Jean Van De Velde, who had the 1999 British Open won before collapsing on the final hole: “At least I feel like I touched [fans], whether it’s a positive way or negative way,” he told Menefee. “It’s nice to see that you trigger a reaction in somebody. Why do we play sport? Why do we watch sport? For the emotion that is conveyed to you, or just for the sake of it? You want those who actually play the game, whatever kind of game, to trigger joy or pain in you.”
“Show me a good loser,” Vince Lombardi said, “and I’ll show you a loser.” That’s a simplistic, borderline ignorant philosophy (although it is worth noting that Lombardi did win five championships). As “Losing Isn’t Everything” shows, winning shows us how we’d like to be known, but losing shows us who we really are. That’s valuable knowledge indeed.
“Losing Isn’t Everything” is on sale now.
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Jay Busbee is a writer for Yahoo Sports and the author of EARNHARDT NATION, on sale now at Amazon or wherever books are sold. Contact him at jay.busbee@yahoo.com or find him on Twitter or on Facebook.
