You’re the best of the best, and yet you are awful: coping with losing.
Entering professional sports, you probably don’t have a great deal of experience with losing. After all, you have professional athlete–level talent. That’s enough to raise any middle school or high school team to championship caliber. You probably spent your entire high school career running up a 30-2 record against various tiny Quaker academies and poorly funded teams from Indian reservations. And I’m sure your college’s athletic department went to great lengths to make sure that your team had a “great season”: scheduling any number of lower division opponents, playing 80 percent of your games at home, playing in some bowl game that was the football equivalent of the participant ribbon they hand out at a swim meet, etc.
As a matter of fact, the entire idea of losing is slowly being phased out of amateur sports altogether. That’s why the Olympics includes fencing, a sport that consists of nothing but losers (Fact: Eighty percent of all fencers are former Dungeons & Dragons players who took up the sport specifically to imagine themselves as dragon slayers). The idea is that sports should be a place where kids revel in the joy of participation and learn to appreciate the bonds created through shared team goals. This is a lame, stupid idea. When mankind is eventually destroyed by Google’s mechanical spiders in late 2039, this will be one of the reasons why we submitted so quickly.
The result of turning youth sports into a suffocatingly nurturing environment is that professional sports have become the last bastion of pure losing in America. It’s a delicious irony, especially if you’re some asshole who listens to NPR. You’re a world-class athlete who has reached the very upper echelon of your chosen field. Yet, now that you have arrived there, you find yourself playing for the Orioles. God can be so cruel sometimes.
It is often said that losing begets losing. Once you lose multiple games, the dreaded “losing mentality” can seep in, marked by varying symptoms such as indifference, lethargy, testiness, and, of course, impotence. Breaking out of this cycle won’t be easy, but I’m going to show you how. After all, I was a loser for thirty years. I’ve never won a fistfight. I didn’t kiss a girl until I was nineteen. And I was caught masturbating while watching The Price Is Right by my roommate’s girlfriend freshman year. But look at me now! I’m a published author! Just like Hitler!
1. Know That It’s Not Your Fault. Remember: you win as a team, you lose as a team. Which means that all of your teammates are at fault. This isn’t finger-pointing, so much as finger-sweeping. There’s plenty of blame to go around, so why not blame everyone else equally? Whatever you do, don’t blame yourself. That can lead to introspection, and introspection is the sworn enemy of the professional athlete. Sure, you could have done better. But what about Tommy? And Ricky? They’re the ones who really fucked up.
2. Switch Things Up. Pro athletes are notoriously obsessive compulsive superstitious folk. If you find yourself mired in a five-game losing streak, it should be clear to you by now that the soul patch has to go. You must do something else that will act as an effective placebo to distract your overly delicate psyche. Here are some notable historic slump busters that famous athletes adopted to help their teams get back on track.
? 1936: Joe Louis begins each fight by kissing a small marmoset, wins heavyweight title
? 1951: Ben Hogan switches to masturbating with overhand “claw” grip, wins two majors
? 1956: Mickey Mantle changes pregame shooters from single malt to blend, wins Triple Crown
? 1975: Pittsburgh Steelers hire new “team pharmacist” Jorge Tarasco
? 1986: Keith Hernandez puts away “No Fat Chicks” T-shirt, wears “Yes, Fat Chicks” T-shirt for a week
? 1988: Pedro Cerrano tells Jobu to go fuck himself, Cleveland wins pennant
? 1990: All NHL teams decide to begin growing playoff beards every year. Every Stanley Cup playoff game since has resulted in a tie.
? 1999: After being swept by the Spurs, Shaquille O’Neal decides to try caring. Three Laker titles follow shortly thereafter.
? 2008: Eli Manning moves from diapers to training pants, Giants win Super Bowl XLII.
3. Find a Rallying Point. You need something that will bring your team closer together, usually through some sort of media-generated controversy. For instance, you could murder a longshoreman. Nothing creates an “us against the world” mentality quite like that.
4. Wait. Don’t worry. You’ll play some other team that’s having an off night eventually. And when that happens, you’ll end up winning by default. And nothing increases a team’s confidence quite like that. Who knows, you may win enough games this way to make the playoffs.
Deeply Penetrating the Numbers
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