When I was a little kid, I couldn’t stand to lose.  If losing was inevitable, I would take my bat and ball and go home.  Crying all the way.  By the time I got to high school, I didn’t cry as much, but I was still a fanatic about winning.  I believed if you treated winning as a life or death struggle, you would seldom lose.  I still believe there is a modicum of truth in that statement.

In high school, I played basketball with the same intensity as I played football.  An albino kid from up state was trying to go by me on a fast break.  I tried to plant a block.  But as he slipped by me, I slipped my hip into him.  My attitude was, if you don’t know how to fall, you have no business on the floor.  Well, he didn’t know how to fall and we had to delay the game until he woke up.  By the time he woke up, I was on the bench.  It was the only time my dad ever told me that what I had done was bad.  I was stunned.  My best supporter.  It was bad enough being booed by my home town crowd.

Today, I still try to win.  I want to win very much, but I try to do it without making an ass out of myself.  This is quite an improvement over high school.

When I was appointed as Chief Counsel at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), I discovered that we had a softball team.  The Chief Counsel’s Office would play against other NHTSA teams, Rulemaking or Plans and Policy or Research and Development.  The second game I played, I almost got in a fight with one of the players from Plans and Policy.  We made up the next day, but I felt terrible.  Here I was, a high level government official and acting like a jerk.

I had a meeting the next afternoon with all my teammates (they all worked for me).  I told them I had some good news and some bad news.  I told them the good news was that as people got older, they relaxed and were not as intense as they were when they were young.  The bad news was that I had already passed through that stage and what they saw yesterday was the more relaxed, less intense guy.  Some of them shuddered.

I apologized and told them it wouldn’t happen again.  My new mantra was, if you can keep from getting hurt and not show your ass, then, by all means, win.  I have had good luck with this new approach.

Now days, in some leagues for younger kids, they don’t keep score.  Of course, the little kids do keep score.  They just have to figure it out in their heads.  Who are these characters who have decided its bad to keep score.  I don’t believe losing teams will be scarred for life.  I’ll bet the people who decided not to keep score lost a lot of games when they were kids.

Vince Lombardi wanted his team to win, and they usually did.  But somehow it has become politically incorrect to say the most important thing for this team to do is to win.  Everyone knows it is important.  Coaches get fired when their teams don’t win.

Coaches now say, “I just want my boys to go out and have fun.”  Go out and have fun?  How do you go out and have fun?  If you get your butt kicked, is that fun?  What if you outplay the other team, but they get all the breaks and beat you?  Is that fun?  Can you think of any scenario where you lose the game, but you have fun?  I’ll tell you what I think.  I think “having fun” is a code word for “winning.”

Picture this.  A team just lost a heart breaker, but some of the guys are joking around in the locker room.  Having fun!  The coach comes in and says, “What’s going on?”  The players say, “Coach, we’re just having fun.”  Then the coach says, “Of course, what was I thinking?  Please have some fun.  Don’t mind me.  I’m just going into my office and cut my wrists.”