Battles on the Hardwood....

I hate (add in a few expletives) losing. I know everyone says that, as if anyone would ever say they enjoy the experience of losing. Not a memory most people look back fondly upon. I don’t even like writing about losing, I’ve been known to avoid phone calls after losses, I refuse to learn how to say the word in Greek.

When I was younger I was consumed by losses. I would feel overwhelmed by the pain, practically hyperventilating from disappointment in the locker room or crying myself to sleep. I wish I were exaggerating. I’d sit staring at the court after everyone had left, when all the lights were out, wondering what went wrong, how I could have allowed my team to throw away success. Sometimes I’d do wind sprints or shooting drills in the dark, my own version of self-flagellation for the basketball Gods. Sometimes I’d look out among the corn fields of Iowa as my dad drove in silence, lost in a whirlwind of rage and sadness; stunned by my own inability to swim out of the blackness of despair.

I do realize that none of this really sounds healthy.

I think the thing that has always bothered me about losing is that I’ve always known winning was about strength of will. And I knew that while God didn’t make me tall or make me jump, I’d been blessed with will in spades. I’d always felt that was my job on every team and if it came down to that being the reason for a loss then it was put squarely on my shoulders. Some player’s role is to rebound, some to play defense, some to score; mine is to pump the fire of victory through a team made up of some people that care as much as me, and many that don’t. That’s the responsibility that I signed up for and if I could feel proud of my contributions when we won, I’d better be ready to bear it when we lost.

I understand now that sports are nothing if not an exercise in warfare. We literally have to convince ourselves that games are life and death; that the court is in fact a battlefield where we hope to claim victory over the corpses of our opponent. We get to feign conflict, without the real physical ramifications of war. On the one hand we have to treat games with the seriousness of battle, on the other we have to realize that they are only important because we make them that way.

When I really think about it, I’ve often marveled at my ability to make sports important. Because intellectually I know that in the grand scheme of things, they are not. At least my parents seem to think I have talents outside the basketball arena, yet it’s been my choice to commit myself to improvement within it. I’ve had to trick myself in some ways, find challenges beyond the physical, and it’s only in the last few years that I have been able to understand why I’ve chosen to pursue the path of self-improvement through a game.

But sometimes I wonder what the hell I am doing with my life. Take last week for example. We lost at home by three then by fifteen on the road. One starter went down with an ankle sprain in the first game; a second one was quarantined because of a fever and swine flu scare. One evening practice consisted of me, sick with a cold virus, and my coach locked in the video room watching game film for two hours. The next day a two-hour bus ride was spent watching the same game film with my team, reigniting the disgust I felt at myself. I was hating life.

I was completely wrapped up in the disappointment of failure; while one side of my brain worked on ‘perspective’, the other was grieving as if the battle had really consumed lives.

I mean really?

But ultimately, this trickery of the mind, the importance places on a game that could just as easily mean nothing is essential. Why else would we sweat and toil and lose sleep if the whole point of playing was just to show up?

So when losses hurt and I hate my life, my profession, the manufactured importance of a single game, I remind myself of the alternative: living a passionless life, a safe existence, where one never feels the sting of losses or the thrill of victory. So my consolation lies not only in time and perspective but also in the understanding that I made a decision to care, to give myself to something. And it’s a decision I would never second guess, on the court or off; a decision to play so hard to win that it hurts so bad to lose.