Sports serve a skewed life view

Reconciling the lessons learned in team sports with real world
experience has been my pet project ever since I was, like, 5.

Theoretically, playing American Youth Soccer Organization soccer
is supposed to initiate us to functioning within a group, thus
preparing us for society. We learn self-improvement, how to work in
a team, perseverance, etcetera, etcetera.

Yet there is another view that broadly says generic sports
analogies are inapplicable to real life.

According to this view, what makes one successful in the sports
plane is not the same as what makes one a good human being. Picture
me doing a motion with my hands running on parallel horizontal
tracks to illustrate how life and sports are on different planes.
They, like my hands, just don’t intersect.

According to this view, the ball hogs in Little League grow up
to be the varsity starters in high school and the jerks in the
boardroom.

Take Olympic Bronze medalist/NCAA water polo champion Natalie
Golda. She’s an awesome athlete, but she don’t share
her Teddy Grahams with nobody, dawg.

I can’t clearly delineate the different views, but perhaps
a couple of emblematic individuals will help the reader.

On one end of the spectrum is my high school
health/driver’s ed. teacher (who also doubled as the football
offensive line coach). We watched the movie “Rudy” in
his class and then had to answer some questions about it. My
favorite question, to paraphrase, was: “In the movie, the
term “˜heart’ was used. What does “˜heart’
mean to you, and how has it helped you overcome adversity in your
life?”

I remember that day clearly, because that’s the day I
discovered irony. I’m not sure if it made me buy his argument
that sports mimics life, though.

On the other end is UCLA alum Kyle Arneson. His notable quote
is, “The thing you want the most is the thing that the most
undeserving person in the world will attain and that person will
not be you.”

Arneson now works in the real world and doesn’t see a
connection to sports in it. Playground kickball doesn’t
prepare you for the real world … unless you’re the
ball.

Arneson is just one step up from a temp and spends his day
finding absurd Web sites and instant messaging friends. He dies
just a little bit more on the inside every day.

In summary, you’re either a believer or a skeptic in the
life/sports analogies. I think of myself as a
“skeliever” who feels this cluster bomb called life
isn’t like a sport ““ it is a sport.

My all-time favorite Mexican soap opera, “Juego de la
Vida,” (“The Game of Life”) was about a group of
ridiculously fly teenage girls starting a soccer team at their
Mexico City high school.

Over the course of the season, they learned the rules of soccer,
love and, most importantly, friendship. It was kind of like Josie
and the Pussycats where you substitute “soccer team”
for “music band” and “Mexico City high
school” for “tour bus.” Those spunky girls taught
me that there are two kinds of people in the game of life:
spectators and participants. What you get out of it is what you put
into it.

In sports, as in life, you work to turn your greatest weakness
into your greatest strength. In ancient Greece, Demosthenes
overcame a speech impediment to become one of Athens’ great
orators. Similarly, Michael Jordan was legendary for taking the
off-season as a time to work on the weakest part of his game until
it became an asset. That’s why people call Michael Jordan the
Demosthenes of basketball.

Conversely, your greatest strength can be your greatest
weakness.

Case in point – Kobe Bryant. His fierce independence sowed the
seeds for both his success and his downfall.

In conclusion, to succeed in life as in sports, one must
understand the dualities.

And be surrounded by ridiculously fly Mexican high school
girls.

My life isn’t like sports. It’s a “Parker
Lewis Can’t Lose” episode. E-mail the day you
discovered irony to [email protected].