When winners end up losers

JOSEPH N. BELL

There has been some interesting back-and-forth in the Pilot as a

result of Lolita Harper’s column taking a tough line on the necessity

of fostering a strong competitive edge in our young people since that

is what drives the world they’ll inhabit as adults. I have been

careful not to challenge Lolita out of concern that she might want to

settle the issue in a boxing ring. But I haven’t the strength of will

to resist this one.

My problem with arguments like this is that they tend -- as do

most of our social, political, and religious differences -- to be

debated from the extremities. Thus, in the competition issue, we have

the-only-thing- that-counts-is-winning believers up against

the-main-satisfaction- should-come-from-enjoyment- of-participation

group. And I find myself in the gray area in between. Always the

relativist.

I grew up in a time and place and environment where competition

pervaded virtually everything I did. Inside my home, I was competing

with my brother. Outside, my friends and I pushed snow off driveways

to play tough alley basketball in Midwestern winters. We played poker

for money that was exceedingly hard to come by in junior high school

in the Great Depression. We suffered the agony and exaltation of

making and being cut from varsity high school athletic teams. We

competed, no holds barred, for the new girl in school, and for

membership in fraternities and sororities. The carrot, always, was

winning.

In those days, our parents mostly stayed out of such matters -- an

attitude we encouraged. So we had to perceive for ourselves the

directions competition sometimes took us -- as, for example, the

basketball coach who led us to a state championship but also taught

his players how to push off the shoulders of opponents in rebounding

when the referee’s view was blocked.

My first real awareness of the destructive possibilities of

unchecked competition came at the Navy’s World War II Iowa Pre-Flight

School. There, former heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney had

designed a three-month program for a staff of professional athletes

and high-powered coaches to turn a bunch of soft college kids into

cool killers.

Professional boxers, for example, would take us on individually

and knock us around if they thought we were dogging it. And we would

be driven to competitive acts of violence against a friend to prevent

suffering an even worse fate ourselves.

This brought about two results both unexpected and unwelcome to

the officers running this program. First, far too many prospective

Navy pilots were being injured badly enough to delay or even

eliminate their flight training. And, second, we evolved a whole

series of gambits to beat this system. I could make the case that

I’ve found this skill even more effective than competitive passion in

our current society.

For example, one of the sadistic delights dreamed up for us at

Pre-Flight was a game called pushball, in which a huge inflated ball

was placed in the center of a football field, and two teams on

opposite sides of the ball tried to push it across the opponent’s

goal line. The only way this could be accomplished was to go around

the ball and knock the other team members down and often out. After

weeks of this mayhem, cadets got together and decided to stay on our

own side of the ball and push the next time we were exposed to this

game.

What we didn’t know was that Tunney was coming to observe on that

day, and the pushball coach turned apoplectic when we didn’t maim one

another. He finally became so abusive that Tunney ordered him into

the game -- a rare opportunity we didn’t miss to redress our

grievances against him.

For a year after I got my wings, I was assigned duty as a flight

instructor for aviation cadets who would kill -- and sometimes did --

to get their own wings. There, competitive fire needed to be

controlled more than fostered.

I learned that although the goal was always the same -- to send

each pilot out with the skills and mental attitude to do his job and

hopefully save his life -- the teaching techniques needed to be

different with each individual. We weren’t drill sergeants. We were

working one-on-one with 18-year-olds whose confidence might be shaken

by a hard line or whose arrogance might get them into serious trouble

if nurtured by a soft line.

Twenty-one years of teaching potential writers at UC Irvine many

years later underscored those same lessons. Many of my students who

had been told how good they were in high school had to face a new set

of realities. Others full of insecurities at lack of recognition had

to be encouraged. The competitive edge cut both ways.

I’m not at all sure I did well in this area by my own three

children. The competitiveness I wallowed in as a child I passed along

to them -- sometimes, I expect, excessively. This was a constant

question for me when I played games with them while they were growing

up.

Mostly, my only concession to them was to play at their current

level of competence. At that level, I played to win. My reasoning was

that when they beat me -- and they did as they got more proficient --

they would have the satisfaction of knowing I didn’t tank the game.

I’m not sure I’d take that hard a line with them today, although I

didn’t mellow much with my grandchildren, either. The uncertainty of

what I did or didn’t teach them about competitiveness has often left

me wondering if Walt Disney tried to beat his kids at Monopoly when

they were growing up.

I’ll have to admit that the behavior of a lot of parents at youth

athletic events these days and the bluster coming daily out of

Washington are pushing me away from the-only-bottom- line-is-winning

place I have always mostly embraced.

I’m reminded of a brief stint as the coach of a Costa Mesa Boy’s

Club basketball team. My fifth-graders were not very good, with one

exception: a flashy young athlete who was clearly going to shine at

whatever high school he attended.

He had one major flaw: Whenever he got the ball, he headed

straight for the basket. So his teammates spent most of their time

playing defense and standing around. I told him I would have to take

him out if he refused to draw his teammates into the game. He refused

numerous times, and I took him out numerous times. Meanwhile, his

parents sat directly behind me, talking loudly about what a lousy

coach I was.

We could have won a lot more often than we did had I allowed him

to run his one-man show. But sometime the price of winning turns

winners into losers.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.