Watching the film Hoosiers (1986) this week, a film about a basketball team in a small Indiana town, I couldn't help but wonder if the movie would have had the same impact if the team had lost the State Championship game instead. This contemplation made me think of a similar film called Coach Carter (2005), in which the basketball team loses in the final seconds of their final game. Coach Carter, just like Hoosiers, experienced critical acclaim despite the fact that the team lost their final game. This makes it obvious to me that it is the pursuit of aretê, or excellence as Reid explains, that makes this possible. It also proves Reid's point. The audiences of both of these films recognize this pursuit and the pursuit itself is relevant whether it be a 'win' or a 'loss' on paper.
All my life I have been told by numerous coaches that the only way to approach a loss is to learn from it. To take that even further, I have won a multitude of tennis matches by suffering from one specific loss, multiple times. Let me explain. When I was 12 years old, I was playing in the biggest State tournament of the year in Murfreesboro, TN, on the campus of MTSU. I was up in the match 6-0, 5-0. For those of you who aren't savvy with the rules of tennis, this is basically the most you can be up in in a tennis match other than actually winning it. I won every game of the first set and the second set, and was one more game away from winning the match. It was the first round of the tournament, and the tournament was on a bigger scale than anything I had played up until that point. It would have been my biggest win ever. I was nervous. Much to my devastation, I lost the match because of these nerves. Let me put this in perspective - to this very day, I have never heard of someone being that far up in a tennis match and eventually losing. It's like being up by 20 points in the final minute of a basketball game, but still finding a way to lose. Yet, because of that loss, I learned something very valuable. I was able to recognize what happened and learned how to battle those nerves and overcome them. I went on a tear after that, winning more matches than I ever imagined. Looking back on that moment, I now categorize what was then devastating as a Win. It wasn't a win on paper, but it was a "moral win" in Reid's terms. There are "moral wins" scattered throughout my tennis 'career', if you will, that were losses on paper. While those are losses on paper, they cultivated many more wins down the road.
To get back to Hoosiers, there was a specific scene that stuck me the hardest. It is right before the State Championship game and Coach Norman Dale brings his team out on the court that they will be competing their final game. He instructs them to measure the court from the free-throw line to the baseline and then from the floor to the rim of the goal. After, he points out that they are the same exact dimensions of the court that they practice on back home. Whether or not my father got the idea from Hoosiers or simply thought of it on his own, I had a similar conversation with him before a match I played out of town when I was 16. Like Coach Norman Dale, he also pointed out that the dimensions of the court were the exact same as every other tennis court that I have ever played. My point is that I agree with Heather Reid's text, that "the real goal of sport in education hasn't changed in 2.500 years".
"In examining the philosophical question 'What is winning?' we learn that winning may be everything, but every victory is not not necessarily winning."
By applying the logic that my father instilled in me with the dimensions of a tennis court, I have been able to apply that to all kinds of facets of my life. When giving a speech (something I dislike very much), I often think of the fact that the room is the same as any other room that I've previously given a speech. By doing this, I am able to realize that I made it through those speeches and that I'll make it through the next one. By applying the knowledge that I obtained by losing that seemingly devastating tennis match when I was 12, I have been able to overcome my nerves more often than not ever since. It is the pursuit of aretê that is the real victory and it is films like Hoosiers that make this pursuit obvious. Tennis, for me, was always about education. It was always about getting a college scholarship so that I could obtain higher education. My father made that clear to me from the beginning. Once I made it to college I realized that it was not only about achieving scholarship, but also about learning many life lessons along the way.
"Schools are in the business of educating their students and athletics can be an integral part of that mission - so long as they retain a considered perspective on sport, education, and the meaning of victory." - Heather Reid
Your anecdote made me recall the point in Reid's article about one of points of sports was to promote discipline and self-knowledge. The lack of control over your nerves illustrated that you had not yet mastered discipline, but you gained that from the sport which in turned helped improve your arete. You also became more aware of yourself which helped to find points of improvement.
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