Tennis stars, Andre Agassi and Steffie Graf have much in common - having been the best in their sport... and hating it. One of the truisms of American culture is that one should be the best one can be, whatever one is doing. Being number one, winning, fulfilling your potential. Or, as the Army posters have said, "Be all that you can be!" The outcome of this is that there is a huge stress on always working to excel, to being Number One. With world soccer recently the focus of the sports world, it is clear that being number one, or, if not the gold, at least the silver or the bronze, is the goal of the most talented and ambitious athletes. Given its centrality in the world these days, it might be seen as poor sportsmanship on my part to point out the downside of this stress on achieving one's full potential, but this is what moves me at the moment.
What is it that I find so dreadful about being one's best? How can I criticize the admonitions and encouragements of teachers and parents to rise to your full potential? Let me count the ways. First, this endeavor to achieve discourages one from admitting weakness, pain, or defeat. Whether on the athletic field, in the classroom, in love or war, no one wants to fail. No one likes a loser! Better to die than to give up.
There are several other very negative consequences of this notion that being number one is the most important thing, (or, as is sometimes said, "the only thing.") First, it directs people in very narrow channels of growth and development. Andre Agassi's book, Open, An Autobiography, describes his upbringing as akin to being a slave laborer in a tennis gulag from early childhood. Life was concentrated on his excelling at tennis. He describes the famed Nick Bollettieri tennis training camp as a prison, in which children are brainwashed into this mentality, physically trained almost beyond endurance, and made to live in meager conditions, where tennis is the only focus. This experience only intensified his hatred of the game. He describes his tennis champion wife, Steffie Graf, as also hating tennis, and when they built their home in Las Vegas, they did not include a tennis court. Their children, a geneticist's dream of pure tennis champions, will only be playing for fun.
Parents are usually the culprits in these enforced regiments in the pursuit of excellence, and often they feel that if they do not begin forming their children into their specialties at a very young age, they are destined to be failures in the competition to make the grade (whatever that ladder is placed.) I once watched a father and a tennis pro hired to train his daughter berate and bully a twelve-year-old girl, for whom the lesson was being given. She was crying and so upset that she couldn't comply with the instructions. Finally in exasperation, I yelled across the courts to the girl, "You can fire him, you know." Of course, the girl could do no such thing, but at least, for a moment, she could recognize that she had more power in the situation than her father or coach might wish to acknowledge. But it is not easy to go against your father, as the famed tennis duo, Venus and Serena Williams might also agree, despite their fame and fortune.
Another terrible outcome of this stress on winning is that it encourages people to cheat and to lie. I won't go into the possibilities for gambling, throwing a game, giving insider tips, and other forms of outright criminality involved in various sports (and of course, other walk of life, from federal judges to investment counselors to executives of large corporations.) One way that is apparently fairly common is to take drugs and other supplements that increase your body size and strength. Recent scandals in various sports, especially baseball, have lead people to realize that it was a way of life to increase your capacities via illegal, and sometimes dangerous, drugs.
The second way of cheating is to lie about your injuries. As one football insider said, "Seeing stars is just part of a well-paying job." Lying about one's headaches, black-outs, and pain is one of the consequences of this system of being at the top of the professional circuit. Few players think ahead until the day when, according to a Philadelphia sports reporter, "you end up slurping soup from a straw." Concussions are now in the focus of sports officials and fans, but little attention is paid to the other physical costs of playing sports. No body wants to investigate the collateral damage our achievers suffer, in football or in other walks of life.
The scenario here is reminiscent of ancient Rome, where the public gladly watched the gladiators compete against each other, as well as against fierce animals. There seems to be no end to the entertainment industry's capacity to incite carnal lust in the name of serving up to the public what it wants to see. Of course, it is also in other entertainment venues that the stakes rise in terms of what it takes to succeed. It is worthwhile pondering what happens to the moral sensibilities of a public that supports the death and destruction that accompany these pursuits of excellence.
One of the best things about getting older is that you wise up to the "game" that has conscripted the younger ones in our midst. At 60 plus, it is possible to admit that one is not the best, is not striving to be the best, and finds it easy to see "best" for the illusory title it is. One can imagine a world that is better off without the struggles and competition to be number one. Joy can be found elsewhere. Appreciating the diversity of beautiful things in the world and the loving nature of friends and family, and of people one doesn't even know is at the heart of it. When you aren't striving to be the best, you can partake of what made playing, yes, PLAYING games so sensually pleasurable. To move one's body in a coordinated manner, to hit a ball, to make a basket, to run as fast as you can, to smell the grass and observe the wonders of nature, or to prance to the cheers of the crowd. In every other "game" of life, one can enjoy the thrill of the encounters, the challenge of the flux, and all the possibilities at your fingertips. You can enjoy being good about as much as being great, and at a far less bitter cost.
So don't expect me to contribute to the next sporting event, watch the car races that are cover-ups for crashes, or feel excited to see 6-year-olds playing tackle football. On the other hand, if children get a kick out of being very good at something, great. I am not against their striving to master their arena of excellence. And I love to see beautiful catches of spiraling passes as much as the next Eagles fan. But what I like best about Donovan McNabb, our quarterback, is that he seems to find the game a lot of fun. He smiles a lot, and sometimes laughs and shakes his head when something goes wrong, especially if the play he called didn't turn out very well. Some fans hate his lightheartedness, but I love it. He remembers it's a game, and games are supposed to be fun.
