I never really got the hang of being a good loser
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- January 8, 2018
- 1392
The first and only time, prior to that snowball fight in the Dillon-Alumni courtyard, that I had been angry enough to punch someone had been six years earlier. It was the fall of 1968, and I had just about had enough. I was 13 years old.
Back in my little town, it was a common thing for kids to get together and play games: baseball in the summer, basketball in the winter and football in the fall. These pursuits were utterly unspoiled by parental supervision.
Sure, there were organized sports programs, leagues that had lasted for decades, replete with well-meaning coaches and volunteers. They were, for the most part, disciplined exercises rooted in the all-American virtues of sportsmanship, hard work, clean play and being a good winner. Or a good loser.
I never really got the hang of the latter. It didn’t matter whether it was a grammar-school spelling bee or a nasty game of “touch” football in some friend’s back yard. If they’re keeping score, or so my logic went, the object is to win.
And that’s the great — or awful — thing about winning. You can get addicted to it, so so easily. But like any drug, the high soon wears off, and all that’s left is the next competition, the next available opportunity to pursue the fix.
So as I read and re-read the first part of this column, it occurred to me (and not for the last time, I’m sure) that there’s something inside me that hates losing. And as faithful readers might attest, “hate” is a word I seldom use. It is, to quote my brother, far too much work.
So I don’t hate disco or Nixon or the designated hitter, an unholy trinity if there ever was one. It’s more like, “OK, it happened. I get it. Let’s just file it under the heading of Stuff I Can’t Stand.
Just leave hate out of it. Sounds good in theory. But my life is no more theoretical than yours.
So there I was, playing my usual position of split end in another long series of after-Catholic-school football games. They tended to rotate around the neighborhood, never lasting more than two straight afternoons because parents tended to blanch at the sight of a dozen or more kids beating the holy heck out of each other for hours on end.
To us, it was fun. To them, I guess it was mayhem. You say violence. I hear violins.
I flanked out to the right, opposite a sixth-grader who’d been grabbing my T-shirt and tripping me all afternoon, a fairly typical tactic, one that I’d used years earlier on older kids myself.
But this time, as I faked an inside post and broke free on a flag pattern, he went too far, just tackling me in the mud and gloating. As the pass — perfect as I remember — sailed over my head, I got up, stood over him and pulled him to his feet. Then I punched him in the mouth.
He tried to fight back, but I was older, smarter and angrier. The fight lasted two more punches: one of his and the last of mine. No one intervened. They just let it run its course, and then, as if nothing had happened, we resumed the game. No muss. No fuss.
Flash forward to the winter of 1974, a scant six years later. I’m a freshman at Notre Dame, fresh off a first-semester academic disaster that saw me earn a whopping 2.75 GPA, a number that not only embarrassed me, but also disappointed my parents, not that they ever mentioned it over Christmas break.
But I knew I had to do not only better, but also much better in the classroom that semester.
To make the dean’s list, I needed to earn a 3.4, and I was determined to do just that. That was the game, and I intended to win. I vowed to myself, “Nothing but the books and acing your tests.” Then it started snowing.
Guys from both dorms emptied into the courtyard, and we faced off, separated by a slash of a sidewalk that divided us. We Dillon freshmen were sent up front first — cannon fodder — and that was as it had always been, or so we were told.
But it was dark, and the blizzard made it hard to see more than a few feet in front of you. And peripheral vision? You could forget that. Which is how, amid the chaos of the front lines as both sides formed snowballs around a core of ice, I got blindsided.
And I thought, “Hmm, my right eye is gone.”
Ordinarily this would have scared me, but there really wasn’t time to be frightened. It wasn’t until a fellow Dillonite pulled me out of the fray that I noticed I couldn’t see out of that eye. It had swollen shut.
Awkwardly I stumbled out of the courtyard of battle and into the relative calm of the South Quad, where I made it to the bookstore parking lot, where I went down to a knee and tried to stay calm.
It was precisely then that another student happened upon me. He pulled me up and removed my gloved hand from my eye. He studied it, asked me a question or two and led me to the infirmary.
“The Dillon-Alumni snowball fight, right?” he asked on the way.
I nodded numbly, realizing the melting snow wasn’t blood.
“You gotta be from Dillon,” he said, laughing aloud. “You guys never quit.”
Turned out he was related to Notre Dame’s legendary football coach, Ara Parseghian, who had won the national championship on New Year’s Eve just a few weeks before.
That semester I earned a 3.5 GPA and made the dean’s list for the first of what would be six straight appearances. As I’ve said, winning gets to be a habit, one of the best.
Mike Dewey can be reached at CarolinamikeD@aol.com or at 6211 Cardinal Drive, New Bern, NC 28560. He invites you to join the fun on his Facebook page.