By Geoff Carter
Illustration by Michel DiMilo
The NFL playoffs. The NCAA College Football playoffs. The Rose Bowl, the Sugar Bowl, the Cotton Bowl. The start of NCAA Men and Women’s Basketball conference play. The NBA All-star game. This list doesn’t even include hockey. college volleyball, or the multitude of world soccer leagues. Not to mention fantasy leagues, NASCAR, office pools, and betting. There is literally something for everyone—and then some—in the wide world of sports.
Sports—and not just baseball—is more than the national pastime. It’s the national obsession. And the national cash cow. Tickets, broadcast and streaming rights, merchandising, video game licensing, and betting bring in billions of dollars. It’s incredibly successful, which is part of its appeal. After all, everybody loves a winner and there is no more clear-cut definition of a winner than the final score of a game—and the profit line of a league, a mega-millionaire owner or the multi-million-dollar salary of a Lebron James or a Dax Preston or a Christian Yelich. After all, this is America, where capitalism is king.
But that is only part of the spectator sports appeal. There are dozens of compelling narratives surrounding sports. Look at stories like Fear Strikes Out, Hoosiers, A League of Their Own, Million Dollar Baby, or Raging Bull—and dozens more. Themes like the underdog story (Hoosiers), a protagonist overcoming adversity (Fear Strikes Out), the rags to riches tale (Somebody Up There Likes Me), or the hero with feet of clay narrative (Raging Bull) resonate with audiences because they reflect the human condition—inside or outside sports. It is no coincidence that many sports films are based on real-life athletes or occurrences.
Sports is a microcosm of life—at least this American life. It is full of clear-cut winners and losers—both on the field and off—where success is measured by statistics and bank accounts. While sub-narratives about the human struggles of players and coaches abound in sports narratives, they are secondary to winning. The most important element of sports is success, winning; not fair play, not sacrifice, not collegiality, and not teamwork. These qualities are given a lot of lip service to be sure, but the bottom line in this business is winning. We might empathize with the struggles of Coach Dale and the Hickory Huskers in Hoosiers, but their struggles would have been meaningless had they not beaten the odds. If there’s any doubt about that, ask yourself who was the runner-up in the last World Series or Super Bowl, or NCAA Final Four. The struggles that an athlete or a coach or a team overcomes only matter if they are winners. Even the admirable characters in a feel-good story like Ted Lasso is measured against a won-loss record.
While this evaluation may seem a little harsh, it is the norm, and it is at the heart of the appeal of spectator sports. Nothing is more important than winning and losing. And this sentiment is becoming more and more pronounced in the American sensibility—and its discourse.
Donald Trump was recently elected to his second term as president. This is a man whose main qualification are his—arguable—success as a businessman and his manufactured celebrity status. He brands himself as successful businessman, a winner, and a millionaire. Besides his previous (and incompetent) tenure as president, he has no experience (and seemingly no interest) in public service. It could be argued his first presidential term had very little to do with public service. After all, this was the man who initially denied there was a pandemic, downplayed its danger, and finally, after finally acknowledging it, told his citizens to drink bleach to kill the virus.
But Mr. Trump has done it again. He somehow convinced a significant portion the American public that he was a winner, that he should be the leader of our country—and the free world. And yet he has the gall to have called veterans who sacrificed their lives “suckers and losers”.
Now, after he won his second term, Donald Trump has surrounded himself with a cadre of billionaire donors. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and many others have come to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring. These “winners” might be very good at ruthlessly earning money, but they are not the sort of people who should govern the people. Most of them come from places that do not refledct the lives of an average American. Donald Trump has probably never shopped, made a bed, helped a child with a school project, or had to balance a household budget. Because he’s a winner. The same is probably true of Bezos and Musk. Because they’re winners.
The truth is we are using the wrong metric to measure success. We cannot use the sports model to measure the value of a leader. If winning means being rich, ruthless, and successful, then we are not addressing the needs of most Americans, people who love their country, people that Trump has branded as “suckers and losers”.
A true winner is a champion of human values, and we have just lost a great one. Jimmy Carter passed away last week at the age of one hundred. He was not a rich man, although he could have been. He was wealthy in many other ways. He worked tirelessly for world peace, for the poor, and for the oppressed. Like so many underappreciated heroes who never entered or did not linger in the winners’ circle, he is what we should truly hold up as a hero—a winner.
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