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Wednesday, Oct 07th 2009
Late last night, the Detroit Tigers suffered a heartbreaking loss in what ESPN is calling an “instant classic.” Immediately after the game, a good friend (and diehard Tigers fan) sent an email talking about what he told his heartbroken young daughter. Here’s what he said: “'Well, there's a little 9 year old girl in Minnesota who's dancing with her daddy right now.’ Of course I then added, ‘but I wish she was feeling bad right now and you and I were dancing.’”
I kinda like that answer. It acknowledges the joy of others, but also doesn’t deny that you really, really wanted to win. It might beat my proposed response, which would be, “Hopefully we’ll crush them next year.” Perhaps this is a question for the all-knowing One Cent and Two Cent, but I struggle with balance. I don’t want my kids to react with too much drama to life’s inevitable losses and setbacks, but at the same time I don’t want to breed a stoicism or passivity that is comfortable with losses. I want them to have a competitive spirit, but I don’t want them to believe that “winning is everything.”
Winning is fun. Just ask Conan. But losing is part of life. All in all, if I’m going to err, I want to err on the side of a competitive spirit, not on the side of passivity. But then again, I’m a litigator. And I’m not very nice (just ask Nancy). So perhaps I’m not the best parental role model.
David French
David French is a Harvard educated lawyer, writer, and soldier. His next book, about his year spent in Iraq, comes out on July 4, 2011. Connect with him on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/DavidAustinFrench and follow him on Twitter at https://twitter.com/davidafrench.
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