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SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT


“It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game. That’s the ethic I was raised with. And by that I mean if you give your all and still lose, you can walk away with your head up knowing you did your best.”

That’s Pete Winslow talking, Winnie to his friends, and the oldest of the three sucking down beers at their local sports emporium. He’s feeling a little smug, thinking he has the moral high ground in this conversation.

“Yeah that’s the best all right” pipes in Eddie Dey, the group’s youngest, “the best way to win diddly squat.” There’s a lot more to winning than just giving your all. There’s psyching your opponent, working the refs, seeing what you can get away with and, you know, finding an edge and working it. If you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’ is how I look at it.”

Winnie is horror stricken. He’s never heard anything like that before. He says, “That’s not an ethic that’s…that’s…whatever is the opposite of an ethic!” He’s befuddled, at a loss for words. He looks across the table for support from Frank Means, the third member of the group, “What do you think Frank?” he asks. “Can he be right?”

Frank Means is in the middle, age-wise. The three are a sixty something, a forty something and a twenty something. Three generations who as neighbors became friends playing H-o-r-s-e and shooting hoops in Frank’s driveway. “You’re both right” he says. “I believe in playing fair, but winning is the most important thing.”

“How does that make Eddie right?” Winnie asks, looking confused.

“Well, sometimes your opponent makes the rules. If he’s grabbing, holding, stepping on your feet or whatever, and he’s getting away with it, then you better do the same or you’ll get your lunch handed to you. Fair is fair and like I said, it’s all about winning.”

There’s a sudden burst of noise in the room and all three look up at the television nearest them to see what’s going on in the ballgame.

Winnie though, is only half engaged. His eyes are on the screen, but his mind is still churning over what he has just heard. It’s not about the winning, he thinks, it’s about the playing. Well sure you’re trying to win, that’s why they keep score, but if you have to cheat to do it, what’s the point? Yeah, I know, the point is you win. Well it’s not worth it to me. He remembers another axiom from his childhood: winners never cheat and cheaters never win. Right, he thinks, tell it to these guys.
Winnie is a self described lifelong athlete and sports nut. Not big enough or good enough for anything professional, he still loved to play and was never without a game. Hoops and hockey, softball, tennis or ping pong, you name it, Winnie had given it a go. Now at sixty-two and nearing retirement as a divisional manager with a national sporting goods chain, his passion is golf. Cheating at golf is unthinkable to him and yet, while reading a biography of Michael Jordon, he had learned that Michael was not above throwing a ball out of a sand trap if no one could see him. How did this shift to winning at any cost occur? Could it all be traced to Vince Lombardi’s declaration “that winning isn’t everything it’s the ONLY thing”? He turns back to his companions and says, “Let me ask you something. How about fighting?”

Eddie and Frank both shoot back “What do you mean?”

“Well in my day, if you somehow came to blows with another guy, you know, pissed him off or something, you duked it out fair and square. If you knocked the guy down, you stepped back and let him get up, so you could knock him down again. Fight ended when you or he couldn’t go on; kind of like professional boxing in that way. There were unspoken rules. Things you could do and things you couldn’t do. Certainly, you never hit a man when he was down.”

Eddie was looking at him like he had gone round the bend, lost his mind, was doing the Alzheimer’s shuffle. But then Eddie was twenty-four. He had grown up a poor kid in an upscale suburb. His parents had put together enough money to buy a house there, but they really couldn’t afford the lifestyle. Eddie learned the only way to shut up the merciless taunting of his peers was to whip their asses at whatever sport they were playing on any given day. Cheating to him was not an edge or an advantage, it was part of the rules as he saw them. If that’s what it took to get his buddies off his back about his cheap sneakers or his off brand jeans, then so be it. He feels the same way now about life in general: whatever it takes to get ahead and stay ahead, he’s down with it. He WON’T be poor again. Before he can respond, however, Frank chimes in.

“If you knock the man down, you keep him down. Hell, if he gets up he might knock you down and he might not be as gentlemanly about allowing you back on your feet. You’ve got to keep him down, sit on him, punch him, whatever it takes to make him quit.”

Frank teaches English at a nearby junior college. He sees both Winnie and Eddie’s point of view. He is forty six and has witnessed the change in student’s attitudes over the years. He would like to side with Winnie, thinks that’s the way things should be, that’s the way, in fact, his father had taught him, but he knows the era of the gentleman, if it ever truly existed, is over. The world in general was now a harsher place and required harsher measures. He would never advise his students to be like Eddie, however, whose philosophy he thought too cold, too cutthroat, but he also couldn’t blame him. Nor would he suggest Winnie’s ethics. That would only serve to handicap his students in today’s more difficult cultural climate. Some sort of balance between the two schools of thought seemed the right place to be, the right tact to take, but defining that place was proving difficult. The best he could come up with was situational ethics and he was offering, “Of course it depends on the situation…” when Eddie cut in.

“If you knock him down, you kick him, you knee him, you beat him up so badly that he will never mess with you again. Otherwise, even if you win, he’ll be thinking of revenge and you will have to go through the whole thing again. And boxing Winnie, boxing is over. It’s Ultimate Fighting now and the Octagon rules. You watch a few of their fights and you’ll see guys doing exactly what I just described. I guarantee if there were no referees, there would be no rematches. Guys would be beat up way too badly to come back for more.”

Just as Eddie makes this point a girls softball team comes whooping and shouting into the bar and the conversation quickly changes to men’s other favorite topic, the ladies. Sports and ethics are put on the back burner for another time.

When the game on the tube comes to an end, the three drink up and head for home, their disagreement unresolved, all but forgotten. And it’s no matter, really. Not one of them could change the opinion of the other two. Their opinions were, after all, their truth, their reality, their strategy for life. Their opinions defined who they were.


Doc Walton June, 2008