On failure in sports

I had a thought recently, and pursued it philosophically. And the essence of the thought was this:

The main reason that sports succeed is because of failure.

Originally my thought was about baseball, and it wasn't original, because someone else (likely several people) pointed out that even the best batters in modern baseball fail approximately 2/3 of the time. I.e., a .333 batting average, which is a hit every three times at bat (roughly), means that the other two at-bats, on average, are a failure. A strikeout, groundout, flyout, doubleplay, foul out, etc.

But thinking more deeply, I contemplated the pitcher. Great pitchers allow few runs, and get lots of strikeouts, but if they did not fail a few times a game, then baseball would be terribly boring, because there would be very few runs scored. If pitchers prevented any runs from scoring or even worse, didn't allow a hit or a batter to reach first base (the requirement for a perfect game), there wouldn't be any point in playing. The offense has to be more successful than the defense, meaning that the defense has to fail, for scoring to happen. You can't have a winner if you don't have a loser.

And the essence of a championship is failure - because only one team succeeded in wdinning all the necessary games. Every other team fell short. Every other team failed.

Thinking defensively, the same goes for hockey or soccer. Even if goalies are successful more than 90% of the time (in the case of hockey) or maybe even higher for soccer (though there are fewer shots on goal in soccer, so actual save percentages could be lower), if they don't fail or apparently fail at least a few times, there would be very little fun, i.e. scoring. Soccer is frequently criticized because defensive failures are so rare, and tie games more common, but that makes the success -- the defeat of the defense -- even more to be celebrated.

Cricket is a contrast. Cricket has lots of scoring; the odds are loaded against the defense. In cricket, the most notable failure is that of the offense, the batsman -- edging to be caught out, letting the wicket get hit by the bowled ball, or a few other modes of being called out. Basketball is similar - more commonly teams lose because they don't score enough points, rather than playing poor defense (though it's obvious teams can lose because of poor defense).

While pursuing this line of thought, I thought about the Buffalo Bills football team. No other team has been to the Super Bowl more often (they went four straight times) and yet never won it. All of the other teams each year that they went would have liked to be them -- to be in the Super Bowl, but those teams failed earlier. The Bills failed at the end of the season (and notably in their first time there, a failed field goal attempt at the end was the cause of their loss).

Jana Novotna failed the first time she was in a Wimbledon final. She had the chance to win it in 1993 and spectacularly met with sporting disaster. She cried when getting the runner-up trophy. She wasn't thinking about how few women ever played in a Wimbledon final, only that she lost -- to Steffi Graf, whose talent and skill and determination caused many other players to fail in Grand Slam finals! To her credit, Novotna persevered and came back and won Wimbledon (even after losing the previous year in another final), her only Grand Slam championship, and that success was enough to overcome the bitter failure she had experienced earlier. She retired soon after. And yet she even says that her failure was a very important event, if not the most important event, in her athletic career.

Why think like this? Making an Olympic medal final in track and field is a huge success, but there will only be one gold medalist -- all the other athletes will fail to win. Much has been written about being fourth, just out of the medals in gold-silver-bronze sports, and now athletes that finish in that unenviable position can wonder for years what they could have done better to get that esteemed award. Being so remarkable an athlete that one was able to finish fourth in the championship final should be celebrated as such -- and yet both the athletes themselves and the fans of the sport can view such a tremendous accomplishment as a FAILURE. Is that fair?

Of course it isn't. It is the nature of sport. The negative image of the thrill of victory is the agony of defeat. Winning stirs our emotions. So does losing. Losing valiantly can be as stirring as winning gallantly, sometimes even more so. So though I will wish that every athlete and team can succeed and win, I know to appreciate those on the losing side as well -- because that's what happens to a lot more athletes than winning.

It's not the triumph, but the struggle -- as first voiced by Baron Pierre de Coubertin.

It is the struggle that makes us appreciate the difficulty of the triumph -- Oakden Wolf.