(Rough Draft) How We View Failure and Success In Sports

Easily the most dominant college basketball coach of all time, and one of the most respected figures in sports in general, John Wooden knows what success in sports means. In a TED talk in 2001, he said that success is simply “Peace of mind attained only through self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do the best of which you’re capable.” With someone who embodied winning like John Wooden did, one might expect that his definition of success wouldn’t leave so much room for losing or  the common concept of “failure.” In fact he directly contradicted the general idea of what it means to be successful in sports later in the same speech: “Never mention winning. My idea is that you can lose when you outscore somebody in a game, and you can win when you’re outscored.” Basically, Wooden is saying that success is not determined by the result, but rather by the effort and character demonstrated by the players involved. As much as we’d all love to believe in Wooden’s noble concept of success and failure, would sports be as enthralling if this is how most participants felt?

When we idolize athletes, we often build them up to be idealized, superhuman figures of extraordinary accomplishment. Think Michael Jordan, who went a perfect 6 for 6 in the NBA Finals -- a fact which to many makes him the greatest basketball player, and greatest competitor, of all time. Long before he was the G.O.A.T Jordan was famously cut from his high school basketball team. His story is not meant to serve as an example that even players who are cut from their high school teams can have professional careers of spectacular greatness, but rather a narrative that informs us that failure is necessary to build towards success. Jordan once remarked on the relationship between failure and success by saying, “I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed” (Michael Jordan Commercial “Failure”). Failure was his avenue to success -- without the pain of failure he would not have been able to accomplish what he did. Basketball immortalized Michael Jordan, but his embrace of failure humanized him: fans can aspire to his success and can strongly relate to the imperfection he demonstrated along the way. My personal experience with this kind of relationship between fan and player happened during the defining moment of my life as a sports fan.

As the final seconds ticked off the clock in Game Six of the 2011 NBA Finals, Dirk Nowitzki leapt over the courtside security barriers and ran into the locker room tunnel, his hands clasping the top of his head, the classic posture of someone in utter disbelief. As he pulled his jersey up to cover his face it was as if the moment was so overwhelming for him that he needed to experience it out of the public eye. He had accomplished the extremely rare feat of changing the entire narrative of his career at 34, in the twilight of his prime. Up until that championship, Dirk and the Dallas Mavericks -- my favorite player and team my entire life -- were defined by their catastrophic failures in the past. When Dirk came into the league in 1998 he immediately struggled. He was labeled too physically and mentally soft to survive in the gritty NBA. The narrative around the league said that he was just another white guy from Europe who had no business being in a league with the more athletic and talented American players. If social media or the twenty-four hour sports-news cycle had existed in that abysmal rookie year, Dirk would have been crushed and labeled an absolute bust. Even without that level of scrutiny he has admitted that he struggled with self-doubt and he strongly considered returning to Germany humiliated.

Even after Dirk fought through his immense rookie-year struggles and became a superstar he would still have to overcome monumental failures on the NBA’s biggest stage: the playoffs. It is in the playoffs that NBA stars shape their legacies and the legacy Dirk created for himself from 2001-2010 was almost entirely embarrassing. There was his disastrous first trip to the Finals in 2006 against the Miami Heat, in which the Mavs took a 2-0 lead before losing four straight games. But that would not even be his greatest failure in the playoffs. That dubious honor would go to the first round exit to the “We Believe” Warriors the very next year. During the regular season Dirk and the Mavs had looked like a team possessed, dominating on their way to a league best 67-15 record and out to prove that their collapse in the Finals was not to be repeated. Dirk earned the only MVP trophy of his career that year, but the Mavs became the first number-one seed to lose to a number-eight seed in a seven-game series and permanently erased their regular season success from the public consciousness. It was painful to watch the MVP trophy presentation take place in the second round, as Dirk had the humiliating task of pretending that he was proud of that season despite the way it had ended. It should’ve been a happy memory for me to see my favorite player finally recognized as the best player in the NBA, but instead I couldn’t help but feel sympathetic to the regret that was so evident in his face on that podium.

When Dirk finally redeemed himself by defeating LeBron James and the extremely talented Miami Heat in 2011, it felt personal. I see myself in Dirk Nowitzki. I also often feel out of place, like he felt his rookie year. I also deal with crushing self-doubt, as he did after his disastrous losses in ‘06 and ‘07. Even his goofy, awkward personality and playing style have always reminded me of myself. When I was a freshman in high school on the basketball team, the upperclassmen also saw the similarities between me and Dirk -- tall, skinny, white guy who only shoots jumpshots -- and without knowing that he was my favorite player they gave me his name as a nickname. To this day a lot of people from high school call me Dirk -- even people who don’t know who Dirk Nowitzki is. Seeing myself in Dirk meant that when I saw him in that locker room tunnel, shaking with immense relief and pained joy, it stuck with me even though I was only twelve years old. That image continues to serve as inspiration for me to not fear or be discouraged by my own failures but rather to embrace and learn from them. The quotes from Michael Jordan can sometimes feel like platitudes, because well, he’s Michael Jordan. His success far outweighed his failures and I didn’t personally grow up watching him play live. But Dirk’s experience: that I feel a genuine connection to. I revere him because after he failed so often and so spectacularly, he didn’t take the easy way out the way LeBron James and Kevin Durant did, by teaming up with superstars to win a championship. Dirk did it the hard way. I continue to chase the sensation that he felt in that tunnel, when after years of perseverance all the frustration and pain of failure could be let go, because he had finally achieved his ultimate goal. In the article “The Unique Neurology of the Sports Fan’s Brain,” social psychologist Daniel Wann is cited as maintaining that what is fundamental to fans’ sense of fulfillment from sport isn’t winning or losing but rather the human bonds, the sense of belonging, that sport forms. I would agree with the slight qualification that I think it is in fact sharing the pain of losing and the joy of winning that forges those bonds. Dirk still would’ve been my favorite player even if he hadn’t won the championship in 2011, but my connection to him was infinitely strengthened by sharing that transformative experience and all the experiences of failure before.

While fans can find failure to be endearing and relatable, at some point it comes down to the simple fact that we watch sports expecting our favorite players and teams to succeed. In sports, we demand success, even though the simple reality is that only one team can win the championship in any given year. Our often absurd demand for success is perfectly captured in this quote from a college basketball coach explaining in a recent survey why Jordan is greater than LeBron: “The object of the game is to win. That’s why we keep score. I’d rather go to a surgeon whose operated six successful heart surgeries and no one dies as opposed to a guy that’s failed six times” (cbssports.com). For this coach and many others, sports remove the uncertainty between success and failure that exists in real life: in sports, you either win or you lose. It’s that simple. That lowered sense of ambiguity is one of the appeals of sports. In the NBA for example, a star player’s greatness is almost always defined by if he wins a championship ring, and by how many rings he wins. For a lot of fans the debate between the relative greatness of Michael Jordan and LeBron James is decided by simple math: 6 (Jordan’s rings) is greater than 3 (LeBron’s rings) and 100% (Jordan was 6 for 6 in the Finals) is greater than 33% (LeBron is 3 for 9). Success isn’t nearly so easy to measure in non-athletic careers or in real life in general: for some it is measured by what college you attend, how much money you make, the family you build, the vacations you are able to take, etc. Are you a success if you do well in one of these areas but not in others? Who gets to decide whether you have failed: you, or the world? How do you know when you’ve succeeded? Life isn’t in the business of handing out championship rings or inducting you into the Hall of Fame in order to let you know.

There is some ambiguity in sports, of course. LeBron fans point out that LeBron has made it to the Finals three more times, so should he be punished simply because he made it further into the playoffs process before failing? Jordan fans can come back with the widely-held opinion that the Eastern Conference has been much less competitive during LeBron’s career so making the Finals wasn’t as much of an accomplishment as it was for Jordan. Uncertainty also exists in the question regarding the extent to which responsibility for a win or loss falls on LeBron or Jordan individually rather than upon their teams as a whole. LeBron did carry some especially weak teams to the Finals, so when they eventually failed was it his fault or the fault of his supporting cast? If we give LeBron individual responsibility for the success isn’t it only fair to give him individual responsibility for the failure? When differentiating between these two icons it seems logical to consider the competition they faced in their respective opponents in the Finals. Would Jordan’s Bulls have been able to beat the dynastic San Antonio Spurs or Golden State Warriors? Maybe not. But would LeBron have won against Magic Johnson’s Lakers or the pick-and-roll gods Karl Malone and John Stockton of the Utah Jazz? Who’s to say? Without this ambiguity, we wouldn’t be able to have the debates that in part make sports fandom so passionate and fun. But even with that certain amount of ambiguity, when you ask an NBA fan, pundit, or former player who they think is greater, Jordan or LeBron, they’ll usually give you a definitive answer that should inform you how they ultimately view success.

When I look back on my time on the high school basketball team, there’s one game that stands out. It was sophomore year against on the road against our rivals, the Morro Bay Pirates and it was at once my best and worst game of my career. I scored 29 points and made 9 three-pointers; I felt like I couldn’t miss all night, and as a basketball player there isn’t a better feeling than that. It felt like I was floating. When I was fouled on a three-pointer with just a couple seconds remaining our team down two, I confident that I was going to win the game for my team. But then I missed the first one. That’s ok, I can still make the next two and at least get us to overtime. I spun the ball and then dribbled it three times, the same routine I used for every free throw I’d ever taken, in games and in hours of practice. Then I did the unthinkable. I missed again. Now I had no choice but to miss the final free-throw on purpose and hope we could get the rebound and get one last shot up. We didn’t. After the game I couldn’t look my teammates in the eye. It hurt too much to have let them down like that against our rival. But was that game a failure for me? On the surface the answer is easy: we lost. And yet, if it weren’t for my 29 points there wouldn’t have been a chance for our team to win the game at the end. I had given that game my all and played without fear of failure, but if I played to the best of my abilities I would’ve made those final three free-throws. I strongly sympathize with Dirk standing on that podium in ‘07 as he accepted the MVP trophy after already being eliminated in part because of the way I feel about this game. I am ultimately proud -- making 9 three-pointers in one game is something that very few basketball players achieve -- even with the pain and regret that I wasn’t able to deliver for my friends and teammates. I gain some satisfaction that I succeeded through my performance even though the score said otherwise. That moment, and my basketball career as a whole, are a bittersweet mixture of failure and success that I can draw on to fuel me to achieve my goals in life, knowing that the iconic athletes I admire drew on their failures to achieve their own.

Michael Jordan Commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuXZFQKKF7A

John Wooden TED Talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/john_wooden_on_the_difference_between_winning_and_success/transcript?referrer=playlist-calling_all_sports_fans

CBS Sports MJ/LeBron Survey: https://www.cbssports.com/college-basketball/news/candid-coaches-whos-the-real-goat-michael-jordan-or-lebron-james/