webmail.cp.savourthememories.co.uk

Memories to Savour, Blog 5 - December 2012

Good old Mr Kipling

 

I'm a loser
And I'm not what I appear to be
(Lennon & McCartney 1964)

 

A message to all sport haters. This is not simply a Blog about sport. It is about life itself and what is written below is just an appropriate introduction. But wow, this is some symmetry!! Three twenty sixes; simply irresistible.

 

Record football defeat in England

                                    F.A. Cup: Preston North End 26 – Hyde 0                   1887

Test Cricket lowest ever score

                                    New Zealand 26 all out v England                                 1955

Michael J Hodkinson Tennis record in Dordogne League for Issigeac 2^nd Team

                                    Singles matches:  Played 26.  Lost 26.                          2010 - 2012

 

Loser is of course the antonym of winner and there is no doubt that as words go, it is most unattractive. Pronounced ‘looooozer’, it is favoured by those who inhabit football terraces and is used by teenagers in particular to indicate something quite derogatory about a member of their peer group. Even mature adults are not averse to hurling the insult. Beggars with dogs sitting in the high street, those who struggle to make and keep friends, under-achievers generally; all of these can become labeled with this particular epithet.

Unless you are betting against yourself to lose (as a number of sports persons actually have – didn’t you Bruce Grobbelaar?*), I find it difficult to envisage anyone entering anything even slightly competitive with the intention to suffer defeat. Alright, maybe parents playing games with their young children might lose on purpose as a form of encouragement to disillusioned off-spring, but I have also read autobiographies of famous people who claim that their ‘old man’ would do anything to win at all costs; even when playing Snap. Very character building; obviously successful on occasions.

Winning and losing is not confined to the sporting arena. You can be involved in an interview process at work and lose out. A position comes up at the level above your current one. You and a colleague apply and catastrophe strikes; you finish second. Even more common is the focus of the 1964 Beatles song. John (he was the composer although it is accredited to Lennon & McCartney) was writing about a love lost. ‘She was a girl in a million, my friend’, but there was to be no happy ending. Lennon’s reaction was to ‘laugh and act like a clown’, but this was just a front he fabricated to hide the tears; to hide the fact that he was ‘a loser’. Incidentally, some music critics have remarked that this was possibly the first time that there was depth to their compositions; a moving out of their ‘you know I love you / I want to hold your hand’ period. This was hello real world, good bye fantasy world, focusing on the hypocrisy of putting on a brave face when your world is crumbling about your shoulders.

Of course to be a loser, you first of all must compete. You cannot finish last in a race that you do not enter. You cannot be rebuffed by someone you fancy or be ditched by the love of your life if you have made no effort to woo him/her in the first place. Alfred Lord Tennyson’s famous line….

'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all’ ....

may have become one of life’s greatest clichés, but those words from 1850 are still true today. In an age where instant millionaires are created every week, Dale Winton’s ‘you have to be in it to win it’ may lack the poetic genius of Lord Alfred, but the messages have striking similarities.

So it would appear that losing would not be high upon anyone’s wish list for Christmas, but I believe that to compete and lose is preferable to sitting on the side lines, safe and secure from the potential humiliation which defeat can bring. When Hyde FC travelled by train to Preston in 1887, they probably knew that they had no chance. It was the year before the Football League commenced, but North End were already beginning to look like the top club in the country. In the following season they became the first (and only) side to win every game played, winning the league and FA Cup in the process. Those amateur footballers from south-east of Manchester (incidentally a town made infamous recently by Dr Death himself, Harold Shipman) could well have been excused for refusing to board the train at Victoria Station and walking home. They did however manfully turn up to witness their own execution. I am certain that they did not enjoy the experience but history tells us that they tried their hardest and shook their opponents’ hands at the end of ninety minutes.

For a society which denigrates losing, we certainly go to massive lengths to experience it. With possibly fourteen million lottery tickets being sold every week, almost a quarter of the population of the United Kingdom must be well-used to sighing deeply before slowly tearing up the ticket. But a lottery set-back is impersonal, whereas even a game of darts in front of half a dozen beer guzzlers in your local can be extremely embarrassing. There you are, double twenty to win and you completely miss the board. Equally we will all have memories of eyeing up someone we found extremely fanciable, plucking up courage for an age before approaching to effect an introduction. In my day, I was likely to receive a polite brush off, but I suspect words like ‘shove off, I’m drinking my Bacardi Breezer’ may now be the order of the day in certain circles. Either way it is a dent to the ego and can seriously affect your confidence level the next time.

Modern-day motivational speakers will doubtlessly carry ‘there are no prizes for coming second’ in their box of incantations. Very true (apart from Olympic silver medals) and it will no doubt fire up the recipients of such rhetoric. However it has a downside. It increases a fear of losing, induces a state of nervousness, indecision often rules big time. Failure knocks confidence, success doubtlessly enhances it, but you cannot have winners without losers. They are a part of life’s massive supporting cast, but are essential to society.

As educators as well as coaches of young footballers, we always believed that it was important to teach youngsters to win and lose in a sporting manner. We followed the same mantra at all times. ‘Go out there, relax, enjoy yourselves and try your hardest to win. When it is all over, irrespective of the result, you congratulate your opponent. Only once back in the dressing room do you let your emotions flow. There you can cry your eyes out or shout, sing and dance as much as you want.’ John Lennon would have called that hypocritical but I believe that a certain old poet would have nodded in approval.

In his immortal 1895 poem “If” (recently voted the best poem in the English language), Rudyard Kipling’s advice to all competitors, whether winners and losers was.....

if you can meet with triumph and disaster

And treat those two imposters just the same;

The great man, using the language of the day, concluded with ‘you will be a man my son’.

The Victorians of course were short on political correctness, but even if the twenty-first century translation may read ‘you will be an adult my child’, the point is still made. Only a few can win, so why get your knickers in a twist if you come second or even last. Someone has to and jolly well done for trying. As a fully paid up member of the ‘Honourable Union of Runners Ups’, I am asked why I continue to play a game where it is evident that my opponents are fitter, stronger, younger and (being French) have been coached in the correct techniques from a young age. I suppose I love to play more than I dislike losing. I try my hardest each time I go on to the court and I genuinely feel quite miserable for a couple of hours after the game.  But I do feel some pride about still going out to compete at my age and the bottom line answer is that I still enjoy it.

So, if you want a new year’s resolution and there is something you really would like to do, something you would like to try and achieve, try this one for size. Take a tiny risk or two in 2013, feel good about being competitive, grab the chance to show what you can do, take the bull by the horns, get off your bum, sod the result and give it a go. Even though ultimately ‘yours may not be the earth and everything in it’, you will feel a bloody lot better about yourself. On a good day you may just be able to join in with The Pogues’ Shane McGowan when, in his lament to Christmases past in the Big Apple, he sings........    

Got on a lucky one
Came in at ten to one.

Have a wonderful Christmas.

Michael J Hodkinson

*Grobbelaar was eventually found not guilty of match fixing after two juries were unable to reach a verdict. Damages of £85,000 were awarded against The Sun newspaper, but on appeal The House of Lords decreed that although no verdict had been returned, there was adequate evidence of dishonesty for the damages to be reduced to £1. The Liverpool goalkeeper had also to pay The Sun’s costs of £500,000, thus bankrupting the Zimbabwean.