When my kids were young, we’d play a lot of games. It might be a card game or a board game, but one thing remained consistent – I never let my kids win. If they earned the victory, good for them; otherwise, I never intentionally made a move that would hurt me just so they could have the satisfaction of beating their old man.
Part of that is my philosophy of making sure they understand that life will not just hand you wins, but that you have to earn them. I’m nowhere near an “everyone gets a ribbon” kind of guy. But the other part of this is that I am and always have been very competitive.
Jayna and I would play checkers a lot when she was starting school. She never won, but would come close occasionally. One day she told me she wanted to learn to play chess. I told her she needed to beat me in checkers before she could advance to that type of game. And in time, she did triumph. She put me in a spot where, no matter where I moved, she would be able to perform a triple jump and take me out.
This was inevitable. There was no way that, as she got older and wiser, I would continue to win all the time. Okay, fine. Now it was time to learn chess. I taught her the basics, where particular pieces could move, and we commenced battle.
And she won. On her first time ever playing. I couldn’t believe it. After a couple years of never beating me in checkers, she comes out firing and knocks me down in chess? I was both proud of my daughter and frustrated with my level of play.
This is my competitive fire. Being competitive can be both good and bad. I love sports because of the competition. Games I enjoy don’t end in ties very often (unless it’s a Vikings-Packers game), so there is almost always a clear-cut winner. I don’t like being on the losing end of anything, but I have come to realize that, as the saying goes, you can’t win them all.
I know that I’ve mellowed a bit with age. I recall losing a Tecmo Bowl video game in college and being so upset that I kicked my chair. Um, younger me, that wasn’t that big a deal. Dealing with losing is a big part of maturity when it comes to competition.
I’m sure that if you watched me coach a basketball game when I first started back in the 90s compared to when I last blew a whistle a few years ago, you’d see a big difference. I was still very much into every part of the game, but I had learned to deal with things better when they didn’t go our way, be it bad gameplay, mental mistakes, or poor officiating.
I think this happens with a lot of people. Many of us, as we grow older, learn not to sweat the small stuff. I’ve made coaching mistakes that cost my teams games at times, but I’ve gotten a lot better at handling that. If Jayna can beat me at chess, I need to find a way to improve my game. That’s really a key to competition – learning how to grow and get better if you don’t like the end result.
I was thinking about this recently as I watched a wrestling meet. I observed a coach just berate one of his wrestlers, standing on the edge of the mat and tearing him apart. It got so bad that the official had a conversation with the coach.
Okay, sometimes you need to get after an athlete if they’re not doing things the right way. That’s not always a favored course of action, but in the heat of battle, it’s necessary to make adjustments and show the player how to change it up. However, I didn’t see this coach do this to any of his other wrestlers.
Then I looked in the program. Huh, same last name for the coach and the wrestler. Got it, coach’s son. And then I watched the coach do the exact same thing to his kid in the next match against a different team. Okay, this is a problem.
As a parent, you often are competitive when you watch your child compete, even if it’s in a spelling bee. We’d all like to see our kids succeed, both individually and with teams. But sometimes we have to scale back during the course of an individual event and realize that, while we can want our kid to win, so do the parents of the other team. And we don’t all get our way.
When I officiate, I think the same thing. My job is to call a fair game; both sides would like to win. And then you hear the people in the stands who couldn’t tell you the finer points of over and back but call out every possible infraction, both real and imagined, just in case I missed them. I’d like to tell some of them to dial it back, but (usually) bite my tongue. I get the competitiveness, but I also know that when I’m just a spectator, that’s exactly my job – to watch and cheer. And that’s it. I try to keep my questioning of calls under my breath.
My kids are both in sports. They are also in other extracurriculars like Knowledge Bowl. I hope they have success. I love to watch them win. But I’ve learned better how to watch when they don’t win. I need to keep getting better at that. And I still need to get better when I don’t win because it’s my kids who beat me!
Word of the Week: This week’s word is duomachy, which means a fight between two people, as in, “The wrestling match devolved into a duomachy, with both athletes throwing punches, resulting in no winner because of a double forfeit.” Impress your friends and confuse your enemies!