The Ambiguity of Failure and its Role in the Road to Success

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 became the G.O.A.T (“greatest of all time”) to many fans, Jordan was famously cut from his high school basketball team. His story does not really serve as an example that even players who are cut from their high school teams can have professional careers of spectacular greatness, but rather as a narrative that informs us that failure is necessary to build towards success. Jordan once remarked on the relationship between failure and success in an iconic commercial by saying, “I’ve missed more than 9,000 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.” 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 -- in players like Jordan we see both who we are and who we want to be. 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. 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. Dirk has admitted that he struggled with crushing self-doubt and that he strongly considered returning to Germany during his rookie year.

After Dirk fought through his immense rookie-year struggles and became a superstar he still had 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 tragically 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 his greatest failure in the playoffs would be the first round exit to the “We Believe” Warriors the very next year. Dirk earned the only MVP trophy of his career in 2007 and the Mavs looked dominant with a league best 67-15 record, but then they became the first number-one seed to lose to a number-eight seed in a seven-game series. 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 share the sense of regret that was so evident in his face as he was presented the MVP trophy after being eliminated. As unreasonable as it may be, MVPs are forgotten in the NBA -- any NBA fan can immediately name how many rings Jordan has, few remember how many MVPs he was awarded.

When Dirk finally redeemed himself by defeating LeBron James and the historically talented Miami Heat in 2011, it felt personal. I have always seen 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. In the Washington Post article “The psychology of why sports fans see their teams as extensions of themselves,” Eric Simons maintains that “A sports team is an expression of a fan’s sense of self [. . .] In all kinds of ways, a fan mirrors the feelings, actions and even hormones of the players. Self-esteem rides on the outcome of the game and the image of the franchise.” This rings true to my relationship with Dirk and the Mavericks. As a fan, I shared the painful shame of the losses in ‘06 and ‘07 and I shared the joyous pride of the championship ‘11. When I saw Dirk in that locker room tunnel, not only did I share his relief and his joy, I saw myself.

The image of Dirk’s final triumph 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. 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. Instead of running away from failure, Dirk did it the hard way, and in doing so personally inspired me to never pursue success any other 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.

While fans can find failure to be compellingly relatable and necessary, at some point it comes down to the simple fact that we watch sports expecting our favorite players and teams to eventually succeed. In sports, we demand success, even though the reality is that only one team can win the championship in any given year. 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). There is some ambiguity of course -- otherwise the debate would be over rather than never-ending -- but it doesn’t come close to matching the ambiguity with which we view success in life. Success in life can be 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.

Easily the most dominant college basketball coach of all time, and one of the most respected figures in sports in general, John Wooden knew what it means to succeed in sports -- that’s what makes his unorthodox perspective on success and failure so unexpected. 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 -- the common definition 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. Wooden’s noble definition of success may not suit the “play to win” realm of sports but his definition could serve as a satisfying answer to what it means to succeed in life. Once again, this is an example of sports working to reduce the ambiguity of failure, but in a different way. Rather than taking the traditional route and making success determined by scoreboards and rings, Wooden makes it about living up to a certain ideal -- to simply give our best in every endeavor.

When I look back on my time on the high school basketball team, there’s one game that stands out. It was sophomore year 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 was confident that I was going to win the game for my team. But then I missed the first one. I thought, “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 strongly sympathize with Dirk standing on that podium in ‘07 as he accepted the MVP trophy 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 by giving everything in my performance even though the score said otherwise; reflecting on this game has brought me closer to understanding Wooden’s perspective on success. That performance 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 success.

Works Cited

Air Jordan. Failure. Youtube, 1997, www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuXZFQKKF7A.

Simons, Eric. “The Psychology of Why Sports Fans See Their Teams as Extensions of Themselves.” The Washington Post, 30 Jan. 2015, bcourses.berkeley.edu/courses/1473769/files/73514379?module_item_id=15628676.

Wooden, John. “‘The Difference between Winning and Succeeding.’” TED: Ideas Worth Spreading, Sapling Foundation, Feb. 2001, www.ted.com/talks/john_wooden_on_the_difference_between_winning_and_success/transcript?referrer=playlist-calling_all_sports_fans.