“Who’s Winning?” Said the Martian to the Frisbeetarian: Competition

“Then there is Houston basketball coach Greg Wise whose high-school team at one point in the season was ranked first in the nation. Leading 100 to 12 at the half in one game with no ‘mercy rule,’ Wise ordered his team to press to the final buzzer because a win was not enough. He wanted humiliation.”—Dr. Skip Eisiminger

Skip the B.S.

By Dr. Skip Eisiminger

1. “I don’t like beating strangers, nor do I like to lose, so I Frisbee with our son, and as we toss, we schmooze.”—The Wordspinner

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—1 December 2020—Willie Nelson, the songwriter and singer, is reported to have said, “The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.” From Nelson’s mellow perspective, what’s the point of competing for “worms” when “cheese” is on the breakfast menu? In the first place, an ample but perhaps less attractive supply of “worms” awaits the less competitive, and second, that ambitious “mouse” who beat his peers suffered a broken neck.

If I compete anymore, it’s against myself. If I win, I celebrate myself. If I lose, I’ve lost to myself, but my personal best still stands tall. Either way, gold or silver, I’m a winner. In fact, one study of Olympic medalists showed that while gold recipients are happiest (no surprise there), winners of the bronze are happier than the silvers. The reason appears to be that bronze winners are happy to have eked out any medal at all, while the “silvers” are fixated on how little separated them from the lucrative endorsements that often accompany the gold. Thus, “second” to the “silvers” is just another term for “loser.” 

Perhaps no one competed more ferociously with himself and others than Ernest Hemingway. In his letters to family and friends, he boasts of killing a shark with his tommy gun and 122 enemy soldiers in various combat zones (difficult to verify), out-boxing the biggest man on the island of Bimini, and having sex three times on his 50th birthday (equally hard to verify). After all his moral calculations, Hemingway declared himself a winner because he felt good about his conquests.

II. “If losing’s the toothpick in the wedding cake and winning’s the icing, I’ll have the steak.”—The Wordspinner

Though I did not know my wife, Ingrid, in high school, I know enough to say that she thrived on athletic competition while I wilted. When Ingrid had a field-hockey game, she tells me that she woke early and eager for the competition. Often when her team from Helmstedt met their biggest rival in Wolfsburg, about 25 miles to the north, the team would gather at the TSV gym, so they could ride their bikes (there were no team buses) to their rival’s home field. Following a 60-minute game, the girls would wash their faces, put their street clothes back on, and pedal 25 miles home. Though there were no showers, and Ingrid often rode in high heels, her wave of adrenaline did not subside until she collapsed in her bed.

By contrast, when I had a track meet, I woke with a knot in my stomach, ate a very light breakfast because I knew it often would be coming back up, and dragged myself to school. Later in the afternoon, as our bus neared our rival’s track, I felt my adrenaline draining into the ether and my legs turning to rubber, not the springy, surgical stuff, but the aging-mattress stuff. The result was, I never equaled my best times or heights in competition.

The US Army did its best to instill in me the spirit of the bayonet, but I had to feign the ardor my sergeants expected of me when I was stabbing that straw dummy. It took a major effort on my part to keep from laughing. Eventually, I did develop a taste for athletic competition when I was invited to join a faculty volleyball team, the Senile Setters. We played among ourselves in an off-campus barn for most of the year and then entered the university’s intramural tournament where we faced graduates and undergraduates. The students spiked savagely, but we were better at dinking (short, low shots off the fingertips that sailed just over the net). In the rough-and-tumble days before everyone got a trophy, we occasionally won a t-shirt. The hardest thing about competitive play for most of us was not calling net violations on ourselves as we did when we played without a referee.

III. “Some have asked me why I don’t run for fun—so somewhere, sometime, I can beat someone.”—The Wordspinner

Competition has been known to turn husbands into strangers to their wives. Many years ago, while working one summer in Harvard’s Widener Library, a colleague of mine and his wife went to a rare-book auction. John already had one of the finest collections of Hawthorniana in the country, so he promised Margie that he just wanted “to see what’s on the auctioneer’s bloc. If anything comes up that I’d like,” he said, “I’m not going to pay more than $200 for it.” When the opening bid of $250 was announced for a not-terribly-rare edition of The House of Seven Gables, neither John nor anyone else took the bait, and Margie relaxed. But when the opening price was reduced to $150, John could not resist, and the winner ended up paying $350 for this “rare” book lacking a dust cover. A victim of “competition fever,” John spent several nights repenting on the couch.

A touch of this “fever” might have helped Bernard Tomic in the opening round at Wimbledon in 2019. After the Australian lost in three lackluster sets, tournament officials fined him the full amount of his prize money, $56,500. Officials said Tomic had not met the “required professional standard,” and fans felt rightfully cheated. In other words, he didn’t try hard enough. At his press conference, Tomic admitted, “I just played terrible,” but he had no apologies for his doormat performance.

Competition at every level, on the field and off, twists people in ways no one can foresee. In 2010, an Alabama football fan poisoned two cherished oaks at Auburn’s Toomer’s Corner after the Tide’s loss to the Tigers. Harvey Updyke, a retired Texas State trooper with a son named “Bear,” boasted of killing the trees to the host of a sports-radio talk show, spent 70 days in prison for his crime, and was ordered to pay $800,000 to make amends. Updyke died in 2020 having paid only $6,900 toward fulfilling his debt to society. But the story does not end there: after Auburn beat LSU in 2016, an LSU fan burned Updyke’s replacement trees.

IV. “A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kickboxing.”—Emo Philips

Jerry Faulkner, a friend, teammate, and former assistant basketball coach at Clemson, left here to coach at Charlotte Latin High School before retiring. Knowing of our friendship, my daughter clipped a newspaper article about our former neighbor and sent it to me with this sentence underlined: “Not one Charlotte Latin boys’ basketball player [who has played under Coach Faulkner] has drawn a technical foul in seven years.” To place that in perspective, consider that the year before Jerry retired, the North Carolina High School Athletic Association reported that 353 coaches and players were not only given technicals but were ejected from a game. The reasons ranged from showing gross disrespect to biting.

Rick Reilly, who has written for several sports publications, loves the taste of competition when properly seasoned as much as I do. In 2009, writing in ESPN: The Magazine, Reilly wrote of Matt Steven, a blind high-school basketballer from Upper Darby, Pennsylvania. Before a tournament in 2009, Matt’s brother, the team’s coach, asked his team, the opposition teams, and the tournament’s officials if Matt could take all his team’s free throws. Remarkably, everyone agreed. In the second game of the tournament, for only the second game of his life, with ten seconds on the clock and his team trailing by one point, Matt, who was 0 for 6 that day, stepped to the line and sank two free throws to win the game.

Then there is Houston basketball coach Greg Wise whose high-school team at one point in the season was ranked first in the nation. Leading 100 to 12 at the half in one game with no “mercy rule,” Wise ordered his team to press to the final buzzer because a win was not enough. He wanted humiliation.  

Finally, there’s the pee-wee soccer game that Brian Doyle describes in One Last River of Song. Without a word to the coaches, parents, or officials, the girls on both sides stopped competing for the ball and met at midfield after one of them had discovered a praying mantis in the grass. As she gently carried the insect to the woods beyond the sidelines, one of her teammates explained: “It’s her home, and she was here first.”

It was something like that the night the German and British Armies agreed to suspend hostilities and celebrate Christmas in 1914.

To order copies of Skip Eisiminger’s Letters to the Grandchildren (Clemson University Digital Press), click on the book cover below or contact: Center for Electronic and Digital Publishing, Strode Tower, Box 340522, Clemson SC 29634-0522. For Wordspinner: Mind-Boggling Games for Word Lovers, click on the book cover.