Kenny Moore relayed the story of his post-race encounter with his friend Steve Prefontaine at the 1972 Olympics. Pre lifted him up, saying “Kenny, you have got to be proud! Out of all the billions of people in the world you were fourth.” While Kenny was running the marathon, he missed Steve’s 5000 Meter final, so he asked Steve about his own race. To which the brash young runner replied “I got fucking fourth, man. It’s the worst place you can ever finish.”
It’s all about perspective. I’ve tried cheering Teddy up by reshaping his defeat into an appreciation of a silver medal performance in our game of Go Fish. But he’s more like Pre, or pre-growth Ricky Bobby (“If you aint first, you’re last!”). I’ve added playing cards to the growing list of things we cannot play together anymore, along with Chess, Checkers, Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit. War has never been so ugly as our games, outside of maybe Gaza. Thumb wrestling, arm wrestling and sumo wrestling have all been outlawed in our household. For the record, I totally crushed him at sumo. Sorry? Boy was the boy sorry when I beat him at that game too.
My son is a sore loser. And by sore, I mean that he absolutely loses his mind whenever he is not the winner, his screams of impotent rage soaring to sonic levels that cause the dog to cover her ears. I can appreciate ambition and a goal of success. But come on kid, it’s just a game! It’s not like we’re playing Squid Game. Maybe I shouldn’t have taken all of his tooth fairy money when teaching him Texas Hold ‘Em, but I eventually gave it back after his mom yelled at me.
Some people are tired of all the winning. Teddy is not one of them. If he loses to me at anything, he instantly calls it out as unfair, rigged, demanding recounts, and pressing his claim to anyone and everyone. The boy’s too proud to accept defeat. But when he rallied other proud boys to storm our house, I knew it had gone too far. Threatening to hang me over a game of hangman? Total overreaction.
So I did some research.
Ashok Alexander wrote “The Art of Losing”, a short book that preaches that losing makes us stronger. I replaced our nighttime reads of Roald Dahl with AA’s TAOL. Did it work? No, but it helped put the kids to sleep more quickly. The underlying message of the book is that losing builds character, like Rocky, back when he was simply a lovable Philly loser. Or Wiley E. Coyote, who never gives up, despite suffering injuries that would have left any lesser coyote as carrion. Those are not examples from Ashok’s book. I just think my references are more relatable. Alexander’s book was boring and offered nothing enlightening, sticking to trite obvious tropes. I’ve found deeper observations while navel-gazing, which usually produces lint at best. Fortune cookies impart more wisdom than this weak excuse for a college thesis. I will not go so far as to call the author a loser, but I also wouldn’t credit him as an artist either. I suspect (without proof) that AA used an early version of AI to spew out unoriginal content that suckers like me paid $2.99 for on Amazon, just so I could have a more professional way of telling Teddy to chill the f*#& out.
Maybe “How to Be Perfect” could solve his problems. This philosophical examination by Michael Schur, creator of The Good Place, might have aimed a little too high, a la Icarus. Instead of teaching Teddy flawlessness, he now has an innate fear of problematic trolleys. The world would be a better place if we eliminated the blood on the tracks of those death machines. “Try again. Fail again. Fail better” was the most apt takeaway from this book, but it was itself a referenced quote by Sam Beckett, who I presume is some kind of amalgam of Sam Malone and John Becker. Ted Danson is awesome. Regardless, Teddy is not ready or willing to appreciate the great philosophers when all he cares about is beating me. Kant can’t help.
I sought the wisdom of yet a third voice by sampling the less than subtle “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck” by Mark Manson. This book spoke to me! But it sounded like one of my profane sisters speaking, so I didn’t want to listen. MM had a worthwhile logic about not taking everything too seriously, so you can focus on the things that should be taken seriously, but he buried the lede in an attempt to seem edgy by dropping more F-bombs than Eddie Murphy in his standup heyday. Since my son grabs the highlighter when his kids’ books drop the A word, this book clearly would not work. Do the recently reworded Roald Dahl books remove the reference to an ass? I don’t think Teddy was scarred for life from hearing a bad word, but he also wasn’t helped by Manson’s missive. My own existential ennui ended my reading of this one.
Self-help books are no help for the hopeless. Or is it no hope for the helpless? I think it was Tom Brady or maybe Trump who said that “Cheating is much better than skill. Great skill improves your chances. Great cheating guarantees victory, which is why it is called cheating.” [Editor’s note, it was actually a line in Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway].
A sad man once sang “Soy, un perdedor. I’m a loser, baby, so why don’t you kill me?” before striking Mellow Gold. Fortunately, he chose not to hang himself with a guitar string at this low point. A wiser woman and former disco queen from Brooklyn said it better: “Sometimes when you win, you really lose, and sometimes when you lose, you really win, and sometimes when you win or lose, you actually tie, and sometimes when you tie, you actually win or lose. Winning or losing is all one organic mechanism, from which one extracts what one needs.” I think that was the only line from White Men Can’t Jump that I was able to extract for Teddy, without risking the expletives of Mark Manson and myriad Yo Mamma jokes.
At what age are you supposed to let your kids win? I say they need to outright earn the W. It won’t take long for Teddy or Catherine to surpass me in athletic prowess. Catherine recently told me that she’s faster than me because she’s four and fast, while I’m old and slow. I’m falling apart faster than Humpty Dumpty, without anyone or their horses trying to put me back together again. Until then, suck it up, Teddy boy!
Traipse Reports - Trips and Races 