Competing with the Law of Averages: Winning and Losing

Skip the B.S.

By Skip Eisiminger

“Win or lose, the king and his pawns retire to the same box.”—Iraqi proverb

“Second place is the silver bruise.”—The Wordspinner 

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—3/26/12—Like everyone else, I come from a mixed clan of winners and losers, but perhaps no one in the family understood defeat better than my father-in-law.

After school and a cabinet-making apprenticeship, Otto joined the German Air Force because it was the only job he could find at the nadir of the Great Depression. Fortunately for him, the Luftwaffe had many wood-and-fabric biplanes in need of repair. Inflation had destroyed his widowed mother’s meager savings, and she was still mourning the deaths of her precious triplets.

War broke out in 1939 but, in early 1941, Otto was predicting it would all be over in another year. Then, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, and all bets were off. After the plane he was navigating was shot down by the Soviets, Otto, lucky to be alive, faced the task of finding a way home. In heavy snow, he and some friends found an abandoned Polish hearse, repaired it, and fled to Germany before the Russians could overtake them. Once home, he was reassigned to the Zeppelin factory near the Swiss border, but he wasn’t there more than a few months before he was captured by French partisans.

Otto and hundreds like him were marched several hundred miles to begin rebuilding a country his cohorts on the western front had leveled. Marching out into a forest near Bordeaux almost every day for two and a half years, he endured cruel epithets and dodged stones thrown by French youth.

In the woods, he labored as an “underdog”—he clambered into a pit and operated the lower half of an eight-foot-long handsaw. His job was to rip oak and beech logs into planks that were shipped around the country. With sawdust filling his lungs for up to ten hours a day and his body a knotted ache, he understood the pain of losing a war.

As chance would have it, my father and the men in his combat engineer battalion were moving simultaneously, if in the opposite direction.

They had landed in the north of France in January of 1945 and, with hundreds of thousands of their fellows, they pushed east across the Rhine and on toward the Elbe River, where the war concluded. Dad celebrated V-E Day by leaving his men in the village of Ohof with several cases of wine and driving down to the French Riviera. His path and Otto’s may very well have crossed on that trip. Once there, Dad had a few drinks and volunteered for the war in the Pacific. He realized that if Hitler had won the war, he might well have been ripping 20-foot logs with a handsaw.

While training in England before shipping out to France, two of Dad’s men raped a pregnant woman. After the two were tried, convicted, and hanged by British authorities, Dad assembled his men and, standing on the hood of his jeep, said that he would not tolerate any similar behavior even in a soon-to-be-defeated nation like Germany. “We will fight like dogs if necessary,” he said, “but we will not swagger if we win.”

Fifteen years later, I enlisted in the army and “fought” for three years in the Cold War, gathering electronic intelligence crossing the East German border. Eavesdropping on the Russians, however, gave me the chance to meet the woman I would marry and raise two children with. The victory my wife and I celebrated when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 was muted—we watched it on television here in the States. Meanwhile, Otto had been dead for two years, and my father was playing golf in Florida.

Ingrid and I toasted each other and went to bed. Both of us understood that the match-up of capitalism and communism was, in the words of sportswriter Jim Murray, as “one-sided as a crop-dusting.” While Americans and Europeans had been enjoying electric washers and dryers since the 1950s, the Russians were still using wooden washboards. It really was no contest.

Whether it’s a war or a youth soccer game, winning and losing have a way of bringing out the worst in people, as Otto and my father saw firsthand.

I recall the disappointment of finishing second in a city-wide softball tournament. In the championship game, I went hitless and committed an error at first base. When the game ended, I left the bench and headed for the parking lot, but our captain, who’d grounded weakly to the pitcher to end the game, picked up the second-place trophy from a table behind the backstop and threw it against a large pine. Like the sword in the stone, the tiny metal bat lodged so deeply in the tree that no one could extract it.

Said our outraged captain, “Second place is first loser.” Many of us, including myself, had forgotten that there were 20 teams in the tournament when it began, but the broken trophy shamed us all.

Wise parents like my father and father-in-law allow their children the experience of losing to avoid scenes like the trophy smashing, but some of us learn that lesson better than others, and they become the models for those who follow.

In 1940, Cornell University’s football team voted to forfeit a game it had won on the field, 7-3, against conference-rival Dartmouth. While watching the game film a day later, the Cornell coaches and players realized that they had been granted a fifth down in the final chaotic series of the game, which led to its lone touchdown. Cornell took a vote and forfeited. Dartmouth accepted the offer, and the record book shows that it won the game, 3-0. That game has always exemplified sportsmanship to me but, unless I miss my guess, some fanatics are still seething in Ithaca (http://alumni.dartmouth.edu/events/dartmouthnight-homecoming/VideoTheInfamous5thDownGame).

On the field of combat, many think the “poor sportsmanship” exhibited by the Germans after the Franco-Prussian War, and the western allies after World War One, led directly to World War Two. Rubbing German faces in the blood and mud of the Somme by extracting the equivalent of 100,000 tons of gold in reparations merely made Hitler’s rise easier.

Following World War Two, the Marshall Plan was an encouraging sign that “we had learned how to win.” George Marshall understood that, as long as a loser is writhing in the ditch under the winner’s boot, he’s still your enemy, and both are miserable.

War and sport have always made for uneasy analogies, but compare Cornell’s principled response above to John Heisman’s win-at-any-cost philosophy.

In 1916, with Heisman’s team leading 126-0, the Georgia Tech coach told his players at halftime, “You’re doing all right, Team. We’re ahead. But you just can’t tell what those Cumberland University players have up their sleeves. They may spring a surprise. Be alert, Men. Hit ‘em clean, but hit ‘em hard.” The Tech players responded and won 222-0.

One can only hope that Heisman had his tongue in his cheek, and his players were deaf to irony. At any rate, Tech and Cumberland have never met again on the gridiron.

The proper way to win and the acceptance of defeat are lessons I fear will be lost on 3,000 children enrolled in the Gloucester Dragons Recreational Soccer League in Ottawa.

In 2010, the league’s twelve-person board of directors ruled that any team that won by five goals would be declared the loser. Many Canadian youth leagues have “mercy rules,” and many award trophies to all participants, but none except Gloucester turns the victor into the loser. Of course, no one wants to see four-year-olds losing by a wide margin, but there are many ways to avoid that: a goalie might be pulled, the defense might shift to the offense, or a couple of players could be benched. Declaring that a winner is the loser, however, teaches children on the losing side that they don’t have to play their best to win. If they are down by five, there’s little incentive to score, because a goal means a loss. Meanwhile, if the stronger side is leading 4-0, they have little choice but to play a humiliating game of “keep-away.”

Like Otto and my father, I no longer have to prove myself on the field of dreams or combat. I have often had a sleepless night after a loss in softball or volleyball, but I never liked beating anyone, either. I felt uncomfortable when I saw the long faces of those I had helped to defeat.

If I compete today, it’s with myself. That way, if I “win,” I celebrate myself; if I “lose,” I vow to do better. Win or lose, I don’t get too high or too low.