In sports, they often say that you can’t win ‘em all — and the Wisconsin Badgers football team proved that correct by losing the Big Ten Championship game on Saturday night, 27-21.
They had won all of their previous games during the regular season and came into the contest as the only undefeated team in the major conferences.
But if your only goal as a football team is to win a national championship, you’re bound to be disappointed. After all, there are 130 schools in the NCAA Division I Bowl Series Subdivision, meaning that all these teams are theoretically eligible to play for the national title. A 1-in-130 chance is not great odds.
So, an undefeated regular season capped off with a sixth place ranking (and by a trip to the Orange Bowl, where they’ll face Miami Dec. 30) will still go down as one of the Badgers’ best seasons ever. But a lot of people in Madison are disappointed that they fell just short of getting into the national championship playoff. In fact, a lot of folks I know are distraught.
But it seems to me that one of the things we need in this country right now is a lot more appreciation for falling just short, or even for mediocrity and futility as long as the effort is an honest one.
We’re a nation led by a crass real estate developer who doesn’t like people he defines as “losers,” which turns out to be just about everyone who isn’t related to him. And this includes men like Sen. John McCain, who spent years in a North Vietnamese POW camp while Trump dodged the draft by whining about his bad feet.
It’s a good thing to encourage strong effort, but it seems in recent decades our country has given rise to a culture of heated competition over everything. Even cooking, which used to be just a simple, relaxing pleasure, is now a competition charged with tension as Iron Chefs scramble to create brilliant meals against the clock and each other.
I even once judged a cocktail contest, which was organized around Iron Chef lines. Here’s a bottle of Scotch, people! In 10 minutes show us what you can do with it! (The only proper thing to do with a bottle of Scotch and 10 minutes is to pour two fingers of it into a nice heavy glass and drink half of it.)
In some aspects of life, competition is a fine thing. In the marketplace, it can produce better products and services and, in sports, it can make for more finely tuned athletes.
But in art? Does anybody really think, for example, that Oscars go to the best film or best actors, directors and technicians? Can you really say that one picture is the best of a year? Does the whole concept of ranking one against another make any sense at all in that context?
And even in academics, what is the point of a class ranking, exactly? Of course, grades matter and some students work harder and are smarter than others, but how can you compare one to another in a numerical ranking system? In a class of 1,000 students, is there really any difference between being first in your class and being tenth?
America today is a place where competition is honored beyond its capacity to produce honest results in most walks of life and where winners are venerated without much concern for how they win. Pretending to be a student while actually being an athlete? We’ll help you maintain the ruse as long as you win. Using performance-enhancing drugs? We’ll care when you get caught. Needed the Russians to help you win a close election? Fine as long as you stick it to the liberals and cut your donors’ taxes even more.
We live in a society so saturated with competition and with so much emphasis on winning above all else that it encourages cutting ethical corners and elevates the kind of sharp-elbowed personalities that ultimately delivered Donald Trump to the White House.
If a culture that can produce something so twisted as a President Trump doesn’t give us reason to rethink our values, I’m not sure what will. Maybe we should try to re-emphasize the value of cooperation and play down competition a little bit. Maybe we should stop dividing the world into winners and losers so much and start to emphasize the value of pride in our work and in making a solid effort over the final score.
The Badgers lost a football game. It’s not the end of the world. Winning isn’t everything.
