Sports are comforting because we keep score, not because players are perfect

I have often noted in this blog the abundance of "bad" news out there. In fact, most news you will encounter today will be negative in some way. 

I listened to a recent church sermon about how harmful perfectionism can be to our self-esteem and our spiritual health and everyone will immediately agree with that sentiment... before returning to the battle to be perfect in some area or for some project.

This past weekend included high stakes basketball games, the Super Bowl, and the Winter Olympics, not to mention all sorts of other contests all across the world and one thing that makes sports riveting is that most contests result in a winner (and a loser).

Athletics always involves a lack of perfection -- even the best quarterbacks throw errant passes and even the finest skier miss gates -- but the good news is that sports offers those clear winners. It may not have been perfect, but the LA Rams are THE world champs. Olympic bobsledders MIGHT have gone a tenth of second faster, but the fastest time gets the Gold. 

I was judging a national high school editorial writing contest last week and I was asked to choose first, second, and third plus a handful of honorable mentions. I thought the editorial I chose as the winner was clearly better than the runners-up but I would never claim that it was "perfect." In fact, it's possible that some elements of the winning piece impressed me so much that I was willing to overlook some clunky transitions or some unconvincing support for its claims. 

Suffice it to say that it was "the best" among the entries, just as the eventual 3A girls basketball team that wins the state tournament will be "the best" despite enduring turnovers and missed shots and assignments. The team that scores the most points wins and takes home the trophy. 

The previous year's champs may have been far better as a team by almost any measure, but sports offers the sort of clear "winner" that most of life does not. 

For instance, can we even imagine what "winning" over the pandemic would look like? Is the very word "winning" unsuitable when over 900,000 Americans have died from the virus? Most of us are resigned to an uneasy truce in the war against the virus, much as we have long done with the flu.

But history does record "winners" of wars, though we could philosophically claim that no one wins when thousands die in the contest.

One could argue that more damaging to most people is the yearning to "win, whatever the cost" rather than perfectionism. 

Perfection is the sort of desire that Plato was talking about when he argued that perfection DOES exist but only in an idealistic sense and that all of creation is striving to return to or otherwise reach that "perfect Form."

Some top athletes are driven to shave just a few more tenths of a second from their times or increase their shooting percentage by a point or two. I'm not sure that is what drives them crazy. 

But a person who is driven by wanting to be recognized as #1 or the world champ or the gold medalist or the highest paid or the most admired... THAT can and does make people nutty.