In sports, winners get the glory; what happens to everyone else?
On Oct. 3, 1951, a pitcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers named Ralph Branca gave up a home run to Bobby Thomson of the New York Giants that clinched the National League pennant. At that moment Branca became a loser, an epic failure, defined forever by one pitch that sailed into the left-field stands of the Polo Grounds — and into baseball folklore. After the game, writes Joshua Prager, the hapless hurler slumped on “a wooden clubhouse step, crying into folded arms. ‘Why me?’ Branca muttered to himself. ‘Why me? Why me?’ “
That plaintive question echoes through “Losers: Dispatches From the Other Side of the Scoreboard,” 22 essays by different writers who try to describe and define athletic adversity. Calling themselves “seasoned losers,” editors Mary Pilon and Louisa Thomas are certainly correct when they write that “losing reveals something raw about what it means to be human.” And in sports, failure is a universal experience. Even the best baseball batters fail to get hits 7 out of 10 times. Of the 68 college basketball teams in the annual NCAA tournament, 67 end their season without a championship. As the editors put it, “This book is for the losers, which is to say, for all of us.”
As in any collection, these stories can be very uneven. One about a soccer match between Greece and the Ivory Coast borders on gibberish for all but the most die-hard fans. Another piece, a self-indulgent narrative about an abusive marriage, with a glancing reference to horse racing, could be chopped in half. But many others are insightful and point to a critical fact: The focus on failure starts with an obsession with winning, an obsession that can bleed easily into sickness. One of the most famous quotes in sports, often attributed incorrectly to football coach Vince Lombardi, says it all: “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.”
Sailor Kevin Hall captures that emotion well: “My survival had depended for so long on winning an Olympic medal. Or, rather, my survival hinged on my relationship to the story that a medal would fix, heal, validate, complete me. A medal would show everyone how worthy I was. ... A medal would allow me to love myself.” But Hall, like Branca, failed in the clutch. “At the Athens games, I finished eleventh of twenty-five of the best sailors in the world, and I was ashamed,” he writes. “Shame. Shame. Shame. Shame.”
Boxer Floyd Patterson, who did win the heavyweight championship, was infected with that same toxic trauma. If you lose a fight, he told writer Gay Talese, “all you want then is a hatch door in the middle of the ring — a hatch door that will open and let you fall through and land in your dressing room instead of having to get out of the ring and face those people.” In fact, Patterson would bring a small attache case with him to every fight containing false whiskers and a mustache, so he could slip out of the arena unnoticed if he lost.
Some athletes fail because there is one rival — just one — who is simply better than they are. Jeremy Taiwo was a worldclass decathlete, a competition that requires excellence in 10 different events, from pole vaulting and discus throwing to a variety of runs. But he had to compete against Ashton Eaton, “the greatest decathlete the world has ever seen, the most dominant of all time.” Yes, Taiwo notes, Eaton “showed me the standard to beat and pushed me to work harder every day.” But no matter what he did, it was never quite good enough. “To the day he retired, I never once beat him in a full decathlon,” Taiwo admits. “It was maddening to finish so close to the top — again and again.”
Sports is not just about individuals but about teams and cities. Baseball fans know well “the Curse of the Bambino” visited on the Boston Red Sox for the rest of the 20th century after their feckless owner sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees in 1919. But even a rabid rooter like this reviewer did not know about “the Curse of Chico Ruiz,” an undistinguished infielder for the Cincinnati Reds who haunted the Philadelphia Phillies.
On Sept. 20, 1964, the Phillies led the National League by 6½ games with 12 to go, and they were so confident of victory they printed World Series tickets. The next night, the Phils and Reds were locked in a tied game, with Ruiz on third. For some crazy reason, he tried to steal home. For some crazier reason, the pitch went wild and Ruiz scored the winning run. “From then on, the team was a parable of horribles,” writes James Andrew Miller, and the Phils never made it to the Series. Years later, Miller saw one of those unused Series tickets on sale at a fundraiser and had to buy it, a cardboard testament to a lesson etched in stone: “Do not count those mother-clucking chickens before they hatch.”
My favorite story in this book, however, is not about losing — or winning. In March 1981, American runner Dick Beardsley was competing in the London Marathon and running neck and neck with Inge Simonsen of Norway. As the miles went by, “each runner threw surges at each other to see if he could break the other,” writes Andrew Lehren. “Nothing worked.” Somehow, they decided that winning was not “the only thing,” that they would cross the finish line together. “We didn’t even look at each other,” Beardsley wrote later. “We grabbed each other’s hands and up they came.” In doing so, they offered a profound answer to “Why me?,” Branca’s anguished lament of 69 years ago: “Why not us?”