Losing Our Way

How worrying too much about winning derailed me — and puts all of us off course

When I was about 12, my hockey team earned a championship. But I didn’t feel like a champ. My team, the Knights, tied for the trophy with our opponent, the Hornets. And I blamed myself for letting a player on the other team score several goals.

So even though we won, in way, I felt like a complete loser.

That game has haunted me for years. In fact, it’s shaped much of my life. It’s not a stretch to say that that championship game derailed me from a healthier, happier path.

I know this sounds melodramatic. But the ripple effects of that day are easier to fathom when you widen the lens and see it in the context of a culture that prizes winning to an unhealthy degree. To the point that worrying too much about winning has put us Americans — and our entire species — off course. Fear of losing has led us to lose our way.

***

I remember being anxious before that Knights-Hornets title game. It was the first time I had played in a championship match, after about 6 seasons of both organized hockey and little league baseball in my Buffalo suburb.

I was a nervous kid by nature, and I had something else to fear that day: my nemesis. The Hornets had a massive player, a kid probably half again as big as the rest of us “Pee Wee” players. Earlier in the season, he’d outplayed me when our respective “C” lines had been on the ice. The C line was the lowest of three skill levels. But I took pride in being the informal leader of our C line. We’d rarely been bested during the regular season, but the Hornets’ c-line Goliath and his crew had outscored us.

Amid my anxiety on the day of the championship, I have a vague memory of not connecting to the ice. Of being in my head, rather than my body, my legs, my feet, my skates. And things quickly went south. Andre-the-Giant-Pee Wee scored a goal against us while I was on the ice. Then another. And another. The more he rose to the occasion, the more I seemed to shrink. I don’t remember many details about the game. What I recall most of my time on the ice was drifting helplessly in the aftermath of one of those goals against us. Out by the blue line of our defensive zone — removed from the action at our net. Barely present.

To this day, it pains me to type that. How could I have let me team down like that?!

And yet, we did not lose.

Going into the final three-minutes, we were behind by two or three goals. And our own star Joey Teresi of the “A” line went to work. The opposite of my absence-on-ice, he was everywhere in that last shift. Somehow he scored enough goals in that crunch time to tie the game!

It felt like a miracle. And we had a chance to win during a “sudden death” overtime period. Whoever scores first wins the championship. We came very close. To make it easier to score during this period, the referees had the goalies come off the ice. And at one point, a Hornet player shoved the puck out of the “crease” in front of their goal with his hand. That calls for a penalty shot. Meaning we would have a one-on-one breakaway chance to score. Although the goalies had been removed, the refs decided the Hornets could put their goalie back in for the penalty shot. Joey Teresi’s brother, Jay, took that penalty shot. He failed to score.

And soon after, the referees declared the game over. We had to leave the ice, because another championship game was scheduled to begin. We tied for the championship.

***

But that tie felt like a loss. A soul-crushing one.

I know it’s not fair to blame myself entirely for the outcome. I was one of five guys on the c-line, plus our goalie. Allowing the Hornet Hulk to score all those goals was a team responsibility. And if anything, we Knights earned a moral victory. We were inches away from scoring when that Hornets player used his hand on the puck. And then it was arguably unfair for the refs to let the Hornets put their goalie back in the net for our penalty shot.

I wonder how I would have felt had we won the game outright. I suspect I would have harbored some guilt and embarrassment for playing poorly in the title game. But those negatives might have been crowded out by the positive rush of winning. Of contributing — over the course of the season at least — to winning. Of being a champion.

Some months ago, I stumbled upon James Michener’s 1976 book, Sports in America, and he provided an answer for what it feels like, what it can mean to an American male to win the big game. Michener played basketball on a small-town high-school team that earned local championships title. And this is how he describes the impact of the victories:

“…in our little world we were champions, and from that simple fact radiated an inner confidence that has never left me. I could never become a bum, because I was a champion. Realizing this, I was able to lift myself onto a level of existence I could not have otherwise attained.”

When I first read that passage a heavy wave of envy and sadness washed over me. Because I never felt like a true champion as a kid or young man. That Knights-Hornets game represented utter failure in my mind. I retreated, rather than rose to the occasion. Choked in the clutch.

Being a “choker” was the ultimate shame for boys in my day. It was worse than a “bum.” And that’s how I defined myself in the wake of the Knights-Hornets game. While Michener radiated inner confidence, I radiated inner doubts that plagued me for years.

The shame of choking in the clutch, of failing my teammates and myself lingered. It was like swerving into a ditch that day. And it has proven hard to climb all the way out. I can trace my life path and recurring pathologies back to the outcome of that game.

***

This may seem absurd on the face of it. I’ve had a “successful” life by most standards. This includes athletics: I made the all-star team twice as a baseball player, played varsity soccer in high school, and led my college intramural teams to championship games in both ultimate Frisbee and hockey. I graduated with honors from Princeton, earned a master’s degree from U.C. Berkeley and have had a fulfilling career as a journalist and writer. I love my wife and have two great kids. Today I am a grateful, mostly happy person.

But as I reflect back on my 50 years — and a 50th birthday is a good prompt for doing so — I can see how not winning that hockey game hurt me. Crimped my choices. Diminished my happiness.

Despite triumphs in sports and other realms, what I remember most are the tribulations. The losses. Like letting Paul Metzloff overtake me my senior of high school to rank as the boy with the best academic record in our class (boys and girls were ranked separately). Those college teams also failed in the final, championship games. I did a better job in those matches than I did against the Hornets. But I couldn’t get over the hump.

And I think these experiences steered me away from taking on challenges. From living a fuller life. I didn’t try out for the J.V. basketball team, even though I loved basketball, played on the freshman team and had a shot at making J.V.

And did that hockey game lead me to take behind-the-scenes leadership positions in life? To serve as class treasurer rather than president? As senior editor rather than editor-in-chief of my college newspaper? As secretary of my newspaper guild, rather than president?

As I grew into my 30s and 40s, friends, college classmates and colleagues rose up the career ladder. Not me. I stepped sideways, remaining an individual contributor at work. For a while I actively sought to become a manager. That resulted in what may be the shortest, thinnest tenure in the history of boss-hood. At Workforce magazine I supervised one person for one single day — the day she was assigned to me was the same day she announced she was leaving.

I don’t think I was the cause of her departure. In fact, colleagues and freelance writers I’ve edited over the years say they like working with me; my current boss calls me the “king of collaboration.” It’s fitting. I do love working collectively with peers. But I’ve shied away from competing for my own “crown.” Fighting for my own corporate fiefdom. And the lack of official status has gnawed at me at times. Several years ago, my uncle noticed that at my age I was “a few years late in getting a promotion.” The comment stung. A stinger ultimately connected to my Hornet rival and a hockey game that hurt my confidence at its core.

***

Part of the pain, I now realize, has to do with the way our culture obsesses over competition. An obsession that may have hit a peak in my youth. This was the mid-late 1970s. A time America felt like it was losing its mojo. It was the end of the post-World War II economic boom. OPEC shocked us with high oil prices. My Great Lakes region, with its auto, steel and other manufacturing industries facing global competition, began to turn into the “rust belt.” What’s more, we had just “lost” the Vietnam war. And Iranian revolutionaries embarrassed us by taking U.S. hostages — we seemed powerless to prevail against the Ayatollah.

I was only dimly aware of how all these forces were shaping my own psyche and the broader culture. But I know that one of the most powerful anthems of my “tween” years was “We Are the Champions,” the Queen song that debuted in 1977. The kids on my street would belt it out, holding hockey sticks as microphone stands. “No time for losers, because we are the champions.”

Our fixation with winning seemed to diminish a bit in the ensuing few decades. But its back. Bigly. Yes, Donald Trump perfectly embodies this obsession with winning. “We’re going to win so much. You’re going to get tired of winning,” he said on the campaign trail.

One explanation for his election victory and devoted following is that many Americans feel like losers in today’s global economy. Not only experiencing job losses, but financial insecurity and inequality within our nation and a sense that the rest of the world is catching up.

Trump appealed to this sentiment explicitly:

“”When we were all younger — many of you are my age and many of you are younger — but when we were all younger we didn’t lose so much, right? We don’t win anymore. As a country, we don’t win.”

But the preoccupation with winning is taking us down a perilous path. Look at the effects of hyper-competition in the national and global arenas. While pitting racial groups against one another within our borders, we are losing our grounding as a democracy and heading toward demagoguery. The opioid crisis — which is devastating communities supportive of Donald Trump — is one sign we need deeper solutions to people’s pain than getting the better of Mexico or China.

Far graver than trying to beat those nations in trade deals, Trump and his bellicose counterpart in North Korea threaten millions of lives with nuclear annihilation. And there’s the slow burn of global warming that is accelerating because we are so focused on selfish gains — material victories of “getting ahead” — over collective stewardship of our planet.

Whether through climate change or nuclear bombs, we seem headed toward victories that will be Pyrrhic — or rather, pyre-ic.

***

But there are hopeful signs.

Author Frederic Laloux believes humanity, over the course of history, has passed through paradigms of impulsive, clannish behavior, through conformist thinking and is on the verge of moving past our current dominant stage focused on achievement. He sees us on the verge of a mindset he and others give the label “teal,” which is characterized by a “taming of the fears of the ego” and a view that life is a journey of unfolding.

In this teal stage, Laloux suggests, there’s a powerful drive to connect, rather than to compete and distinguish ourselves with trophies real and metaphorical. “People operating at this stage often develop a keen sense of how far we have let separation fragment our lives and how much it has cost us.”

There are other indicators that progress, process and solidarity are making headway against a victory-is-everything, pecking-order mentality. The Tough Mudder phenomenon suggests we’re hungry for athletic activities that aren’t just about winning. Tough Mudders are obstacle courses that emphasize participation, teamwork and completion more than individual glory or victory. And yet Tough Mudders have captured the imagination of Americans and people across the globe. Since its first U.S. event in 2010, more than 3 million worldwide have participated in Tough Mudders, making it one of the fastest growing athletic activities.

My son Julius also has taught me hopeful lessons about winning and where we may be heading. I coached his elementary school soccer teams from grades k-5, and our team played for a championship in that final year. This team of 10-year-olds had to win outright in order to earn the championship — unlike in my Knights-Hornets game, a tie would have meant the other team would have outranked us given the league standings. We scored the first goal, and led one-to-zero at the half. But the other team tied us early in the second half. Then Julius scored — a beautiful goal where he persisted after a collision in front of the net and kicked the ball in the net. The last few minutes nearly gave me and all the team parents a heart attack, as the other squad nearly tied us again and again. But we held on and won.

I was beside myself with joy, pride and relief. I choked up while giving Julius his trophy at the ensuing party at a local pizzeria. Here my son had son had surpassed my wildest dreams for his sporting career success. He not only won a championship with his team. But he had scored the winning, “championship” goal! He was future-proofed against winning worries. Vaccinated against claims of choking in the clutch. Immune to all the anxiety that had plagued me from my heartbreaking hockey game.

But I was wrong. Sure, Julius was excited about scoring and winning. But he framed that soccer game in a much different, sobering light. “What I remember is nobody celebrating with me after I scored,” he recalled when I asked him about the meaning of the championship to him. He may be exaggerating his post-goal solitude a bit. But overall he has it right. That team was not one where he had close friends. He was more concerned about social connections — or separations — than reveling in his victory.

***

I personally have made progress on the topic of winning — and made a kind of peace with that long-ago hockey game — on the basketball court.

I’ve played pick-up basketball Sunday nights with the same group of guys for roughly 20 years. And paradoxically, as my consciousness grew about the downsides of hyper-competition, my performance improved. Over the past 10 years or so, I’ve learned about the importance of a “growth” mindset. That is, the importance of believing people can get better at an activity through determined practice. As author Carol Dweck and others have argued, a growth mindset is vital to people taking risks and succeeding in life. I’ve tried to impart that mindset to my son and daughter. But it is the opposite of the “fixed” mindset I learned as a kid — that talent is inherit and immutable. A fixed mindset is why big games like that hockey championship were so nerve-wracking to me. They supposedly showed your true colors.

Along with a new belief in advancement, I added an understanding of “flow.” With the help of a long-standing yoga practice and reading about the secrets of top athletes, I came to realize how crippling it is to constantly fear failure. And how liberating — and effective — it is to let go and just play the game.

A final piece of the puzzle for me has been mortality. Part of how I’ve overcome bouts of anxiety is remembering I will die one day. Dwelling on death may sound morbid and out of place during games of pick-up basketball or Frisbee golf. But it has helped me see how silly it is to waste time worrying about any particular game or play; it has helped me “put fear to the rear” and try my best in any given moment.

These insights culminated in a number of basketball contests where I rose to the occasion and helped my team win. I was “clutch” as my group of five guys won what we called a “dynasty” — winning four games in a row. I hit game-winning shots. I earned a measure of respect from my mates.

***

I love basketball and will always be a fan, but I may have played my last game. And I did so in a way that is a bookend of sorts to that hockey championship match 40 years ago.

This was a couple of months ago. On this particular Sunday, my team had a good night. We won multiple games, including one where I scored the winning basket. In the last game of the night, I was matched up against a long-time basketball friend, Kai. Kai is a grown-up equivalent of the giant Pee Wee Hornet I faced at age 12. Kai isn’t as tall as me, but he’s skilled, thick and strong as an ox. On several plays early in this game, Kai bulled his way to the hoop, overpowering me for close-in baskets.

Ouch. Bruising as much to ego as to body.

But I didn’t let those set-backs sabotage my entire game. Unlike my 12 year old self, I bounced back. I played to my strengths, which are running the court — moving and cutting rather than muscling to the basket. I scored one hoop on a dribbling drive around a defender. And I slashed through the lane for another basket, going by Kai and others on his team. I was in a flow, rather than a fear-of-being-a-loser funk.

Ultimately, we lost the game. And I shoulder some of the blame. I didn’t keep track of the score, and let a good outside shooter take an open three-point shot for the win. But I didn’t beat myself up afterwards. Instead, I felt a sense of equanimity. I’d played well overall, my team had won plenty that night, and I was glad the other team got a taste of victory as well.

These days, basketball takes a steep toll on my back. And I’m not sure I’ll return to the court after my most recent bout of severe stiffness. If that game was my last, I’m glad it unfolded as it did. With a kind of redemption against the “Big Guy.” With some winning and some losing. With an aliveness, with joyful moments and with a desire to prevail tempered by concern for my opponent.

***

And it is this more balanced perspective that I believe we all need.

I’m not saying competition should go away. I wouldn’t want to lose sports and other competitive pursuits completely. Human beings have been playing against each other for all of recorded history. Doing so can be thrilling. Competing with others can push us to new discoveries within ourselves and be central to a healthy economy. But we take competition to extremes. Extremes of violence and ecological destruction.

Extremes where we forget about the fact that human beings also have been drawn to collaborate with each other for eons. We’ve got to remember our pro-social nature. And balance out competition and cooperation. We need to recall that we want to have each around to play together in the first place. The best games are those whose outcomes are in question — where there is drama because the sides are evenly matched. Where the players respect each other, have such fondness for each other that they want to get a beer after the game.

Can we imagine our games more along these lines, where friendship is always first? Or more games that are non-zero-sum, Tough Mudder-type events, where more people or groups of people can succeed? Can we elevate our consciousness to see our worth apart from and beyond wins and losses? To a place where we advance together and no one is left behind?

When we fail to balance rivalry with relationship, we lose our way. As a species and as individuals.

A single hockey game, combined with a winning-crazed culture, put me on a path with a lot of pain.

Looking back at that hockey championship game still hurts. But I can frame it differently now. I can see how I could have played better. Rather than recoil at the setbacks during the game and doubt myself at the deepest level, I could have learned from the goals scored by my colossal counterpart. I could have tried new tactics — as I did recently against Kai — and played my best.

The game’s outcome also looks different to me today. Here were two groups of kids who tried hard and were evenly matched, who both ended up on top. I can see that Pee Wee championship with less shame and with a measure of pride. Far from a loss, the shared success that day is a beacon for finding our way forward.