Fear’s Veil: Decoding the Leadership Mystique

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“You’re getting a detention for that,” were the scariest words we could hear between fifth grade and eighth grade. To avoid hearing that from a teacher, the principle, or any of the other authority figures who stalked the halls of my school, I walked straight lines, stood as straight as I could, and I didn’t respond to neighbors who whispered something funny that required a rejoinder. We were not only scared, we were terrified to the point of anxiety attacks when the teacher would give us the pre-detention eyeball. 

A detention required us to spend one half-hour after school. Thirty minutes. You might think that serving a mere thirty minutes after school would lead an overwhelming majority of us to think, “Hey, that wasn’t so bad after all.” No, it was so terrifying that some of us had nightmares about being caught in the act, the teacher writing out the detention, and the din of silence that followed with everyone staring, looking away, and staring again. Thinking back, it’s almost funny to think how powerful the culture of fear was, but we all knew it, and we all participated in it in our own individual ways. 

The tradition of forcing a student to stay after school, as a punishment for bad behavior was not new, or unique, to us. This punishment has probably been handed out for hundreds of years, the world over. It was also not unusual for us to fear getting in trouble in grade school, nor was it unprecedented that the kids in my grade school were absolutely terrified. This article isn’t about the silly effort of trying to suggest that our experience in grade school was worse than yours, better, or any different. We’re far more interested in the culture of fear that some institutions, such as my grade school, instituted to modify behavior.    

As scary as our principal was, and Mary Jane Meyer (aka Mrs. Meyer) was as scary, and as angry, as any individual I’ve met in all the decades sense. You might suggest that she thought she had to be to keep the hundreds of grade-school-aged kids in line.

“And if you just happened to catch her tending to her garden on some sunny day, she was probably a sweet, elderly woman.”

I just can’t picture it. I can’t picture her being gracious, warm, or even smiling. I’m sure she was quite pleasant to certain people, but I can’t picture it, and I don’t think any of my fellow students who attended this grade school during her reign of terror could either.  

Mrs. Meyer provided us a more tangible fear of God, and she was the wizard behind the curtain who orchestrated the culture of fear we knew. If we messed around in class, our teacher might scold us. If that wasn’t enough, she could threaten and/or give us a detention. That was enough for an overwhelming majority of us, but there were a few, and aren’t there always a few, for whom that wasn’t enough. For them, there was the ever-present threat of being sent to Mrs. Meyer’s office. That was enough for just about everyone else.

As scary as she was, however, Mrs. Meyer couldn’t have created the level of fear we knew on her own. She delegated much of the responsibility to her teachers, but they couldn’t have terrified us to the degree that some of us had anxiety issues, and others had such horrible nightmares they couldn’t sleep at night. For that level of fear, the institution needed compliance, our compliance. It needed our participation, and our promulgation of the culture that suggested that getting a detention was the most awful thing that could ever happened to a human being. No matter what they did to establish this climate, it wouldn’t have been half as effective as it was if we didn’t participate and fortify it. We did that to ourselves.   

“Did you hear that Gretchen and Marla got detentions?” someone would say in conspiratorial whisper.

“No way! For what?” No matter what the conspiratorial whisperer said there, the gossip mill spun the threads out to ultimately characterize the alleged perpetrator as the most horrible person of the day, and they often had a difficult time recovering their reputation in the aftermath.

When we approached one of the pariahs to get their perspective on what happened, they usually broke down like a politician in the midst of a career-ending scandal. Some tried to maintain a strong façade, but most couldn’t. Their defense usually devolved to those scared, uncontrollable tears. We empathized, because we knew firsthand the idea that nothing this bad had ever happened to them before.

It was our fault that she felt that way, because when she’d walk down the aisle to receive her detention, she felt our eyes on her, and she heard our whispers. The minute she turned around, we’d turn away and go silent. When it came to defending herself against the mob, she’s lie, obfuscate, try to shift the blame, and try anything and everything she could to salvage her reputation. We empathized here too, because what else are you going to do? 

We did more damage to her than the teacher, the principal, or any of our other authority figures could to demonize her, the detention of the day. We did it to ourselves. We policed our own and promulgated the culture of fear that surrounded the detention.

The idea that we cultivated their culture of fear wasn’t apparent to me in the moment, of course, because I was too young to grasp such complicated concepts, but it was crystallized in the form of a transfer student named Billy Kifferly. I knew Billy Kifferly before he transferred to our school, he was a friend of a friend, so when he got a detention I was the emissary sent to find out what happened, and how he entered into our dominion of the damned.

I asked him about it in the most empathetic manner a ten-year-old could. “… And it’s fine if you don’t want to tell me …” I added. I was fully prepared for his tears and/or the anguish that followed, and I had my shoulder all ready for him to cry on.

Not only did Billy not cry, or show any signs of fear of remorse, he told me all of the damning details of his detention, as if … as if they didn’t really matter. He didn’t try to wriggle out of it, or spread the blame. He said, “I did it. It was all my fault and all that, but it’s a half hour, so, big deal, right? I could do that standing on my head.”

That put me back a step. I couldn’t understand how he could be so blasé about it. As his only friend and confidant, I wanted to say, ‘Billy, you don’t understand,’ but Billy’s reaction to it informed me that there was something larger going on here that I didn’t understand. I didn’t get the fact that he was more accustomed to getting in trouble, or failing to meet the standards. He just got expelled from his prior school, so on that scale, a detention, or a half-hour after school, was nothing to him. I also didn’t understand that I was not only a part of the institutional culture of fear, but a promulgator of it

“It’s just a half-hour,” he said, and he was right, but ‘It’s so much more than that’ I wanted to say. I couldn’t back that up though, because I was too young to understand the nature of authority, rebellion, and Billy’s far too mature definition of the system-is-a-farce reaction. I knew Billy was the rebel, on some complicated level, I knew I’d become the standard bearer for the status quo if I said anything further.  

By not fearing the institutional hierarchy, and the elements that propped it up, Billy essentially informed me that the whole system was a farce. “Why should I fear spending a half-hour after school so much?” was essentially what he said. I thought of instructing him in our ways, but I was too young to understand the nature of our ways, and I was also far too immature to understand that we weren’t just ceding to authority, we were contributing to it.  

***

We can now all laugh at this kid, I call me, now. We’re sophisticated adults now with a more sophisticated understanding of authority, rebellion, and the balance of the two that forms a foundation that helps maintain a system, but when we look back at our naïve, immature understandings of an authoritarian world, we laugh. While we’re laughing, we should also take a look at how we sophisticated adults not only cede authority to authority figures in our lives now, we contribute to the underpinnings of their authority?

We call certain individuals in our culture authoritative experts, and we allow them to dictate their facts and opinions in a manner that changes the direction of our lives. “Why?” we ask rhetorically, “because they are more informed.” Are they? “Sure, they use the scientific method to arrive at dispassionate theories based on empirical data.” We learn from their research that there is “there is no conclusive evidence” for what we see and hear. How can that be? “After exhaustive research, the team at (fill in the blank) has determined that there is no conclusive evidence to suggest that’s true.” We learn to accept what they say, until we develop a level of faith in their point of view, their expertise, and their authority on the issue. We learn to accept their values through their lens. Are they right? “They’re experts, what are you asking here?”

Analysts call the dynamic of subjects contributing to expert analysis and authoritative dictates the leadership mystique. We now have unspoken requirements of our leaders to which they must adhere. We require them to exhibit, display, and provide some semblance of leadership qualities to fortify the facade. What are these requirements? They vary, but anyone who knows anything about icebergs knows that 90% of an iceberg is underwater. It could be argued that we create 90% of the foundation of leadership mystique for us, and we contribute to it in our interactions with other, fellow subjects.

We see this at play in the workplace when someone everyone considered an oaf yesterday, receives a prominent promotion today, and we agree to their leadership qualities tomorrow, characteristics that we never saw previously. Our authority figures obviously saw something special in them, and that’s enough for us, for some of us, and the onus is on us to help others see, accept, and promulgate their authority tomorrow.

Coupled with our concessions and contributions to authority figures and their rules and punishments, is the inherent recognition that even if we disagree with all of the above, we can’t choose our leaders. We are subjects who are subjected to those who make the rules, and we don’t even know who to blame when those rules prove silly. We blame our supervisor for imposing a rule passed down by a manager; we blame the policeman for carrying out a silly law passed down by a state legislator or federal official. We blame the person who is in our face, enforcing the rules, because most of us don’t dig through the layers to find the person who is to blame for drawing up the rules/laws, and those who pass them. 

The United States citizen lives in a Representative Republic that permits us to choose those we deem our authority figures. Yet, how many of us choose a representative of what we want to be as opposed to who we are. An overwhelming majority of us live within our means, and we’re quiet, unassuming types. We’re more like the character actor who quietly assumes the characteristics necessary for a role, but we prefer to vote charismatic game show hosts types into office. That guy looks like someone who would be fun to hang around. If that’s our choice for a leader in a Representative Republic, who are we? Who do we deify and assign leadership qualities to satisfy our role in the leadership mystique? How many of us assign such qualities to the manager of our local Wendy’s? We don’t, we hold them accountable for producing an inferior product.

Most of us don’t condemn representatives we charge with voting the way we would or the manner in which they spend our money. We direct our ire at those who don’t pay enough in taxes instead. We police our own. The governments can levy fines, put liens on our property, and take away our freedom if they determine that we didn’t pay enough taxes, but they cannot convince us to condemn our neighbor as a pariah for not paying what we deem enough. That’s our job, and we relish it.    

This article is not about the rebels or the figures of authority in our lives, though those would be interesting pieces. It’s about us, and our amenable and compliant ways of helping authority figures establish and maintain a level of authority in our lives. It’s about ceding elements of our lives to authoritative experts who sit behind a type writer telling us how to live our lives, raise our children, and go silent when they need us to just be quiet. 

In grade school, we were little kids who were easy to manipulate and cajole into carrying out institutional planks, but how many adults aid in the culture of fear of government edicts on paying “enough” taxes? We’re not half as concerned when our government officials spend our money in foolish ways, as we are the CEO of a company not paying what we deem enough in taxes. We not only cede authority to government officials. We contribute to it by condemning our neighbor for not paying enough.

As someone who has been on both sides of the paradigm, on a very, very minor scale, one thing I recognized when given an relatively insignificant level of authority was that my level of authority was not recognized or appreciated by my fellow authoritative figures. As a huge Letterman fan in the 80s, I’ve always found some inspiration in his idea that he was a bit of a joke. You can be king of the world, and he was in his own little way, but you’re still that goofy kid from the Midwest who had some really stupid notions about the world. His influence led me to consider myself a bit of a joke, and I saw the joke in everyone around me too, especially those in leadership positions. Everyone enjoys hearing that what they’re doing is important and substantial, and they don’t mind laughing at themselves, but they do no enjoy hearing that they’re kind of a joke too. When I learned to control my comedic impulses, and I ceded to their authority, they began to appreciate and contribute to my comparatively meager mystique. 

“It’s called reciprocity,” a friend of mine said, “I scratch your back, you feed my need!”

It was the Best of Times … In Entertainment

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“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.” –Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities 

It’s the human condition to believe we live in the best of times and the worst. Psychologists have terms for various strains of bias that inform our opinions, and Dickens’ famous line encompasses them all. I’m biased, you’re biased, and the whole damned system is biased, but this particular article focuses most on what could be called a recency bias. Our recency bias causes us to believe that recent events are weightier, more relevant, and the only era to consider. The recency bias in this article comes with one asterisk, we welcome anyone to challenge the totality of the information within. 

A qualifier such as that one satisfies most, but there are always some, who interrupt your little presentation with, “Yeah, but aren’t you biased?” and they say it with one of those grins that suggest they caught you with the accusation that you might be biased. To which I say, “Well, you caught me, but I did say that at the very beginning. Check the minutes of your transcript of our little conversation in this bistro.” So, rather than try to qualify every single nugget of what I’m about to write, go ahead and place a parenthetical “back to top” at the beginning, or the end, of each statement if that’s what you need to do to assure yourself that I admit to having a mean case of recency bias.

If you’re going to challenge my recency bias, however, I ask you to name an era of entertainment that matches the total output from the 1970’s to the 1990’s. We’re talking top-notch, quantity of quality, from the era of your argument to mine. Everyone has their opinion, of course, and some say that some of the artists were overhyped by the marketing teams spending huge dollars to see to it that their artist made it to the A-List. This happened frequently during this thirty-year chunk of time, as the individual eras therein were chock full of money to be spent in all avenues of entertainment, but with the advantage of hindsight, we can weed through the A-List to ferret out the true artists from the pretenders. Even after doing this, the A-List from this thirty-year era is still daunting. 

We all go through this thirty-year era and parse out which was better than the other, but taken together as a whole, I believe the total number of quality-to-great movies, the sheer breadth of music, and comedy from the era between 1970 and 1999, will not only go down as the greatest era of entertainment in the United States, but most future eras won’t even try to compete. They’ll just go retro, and try to buy the catalogs of the artists from the era, from whomever owns it “now”, to pursue ways to use it and re-use it, market it, and merchandise it in the future. Some might include the 1960’s in some of those entertainment venues, and others will include the 2000 to 2010 era, but after watching, reading, and listening to just about everything from those eras, everything in the 60’s now seems to prelude be this thirty-year peak, in retrospect, and just about everything that followed seemed to be trailing off.

There are exceptions to the rule, of course, as there are always going to be exceptions to every rule. There will always be a couple great movies in any given year, a few great albums here and there, and future comedians who deliver exceptional material. If you lived through this era though, you knew to expect that an exceptional artist would deliver something exceptional in any given month. It was, at times, tough to keep up. While reading this, I’m sure you thought of some exceptions, you think your favorite music artists from the 60s was exceptional, and others thought of their favorite movie from the 00s, and you probably think I’m leaving some critical artists off this list. The point is we could asterisk every era with exceptions, but the general point remains.

The 1990’s were the first era in which I had any real disposable income of my own, and I almost went broke numerous times, trying to rent every movie that had ever been made, listen to every album of music ever created, and I stayed up late to listen to every comedian the late-night talk shows invited on. The reader might consider it a bold statement to say I knew everything vital and important to come from this thirty-year peak, or they might consider it a little sad that I devoted so much of my free time and disposable income to this pursuit, but few who know me would challenge my knowledge of the mostly inconsequential information from the field of entertainment that occurred during this era. 

The 1970-1999 era was the best of times for those who wanted free time, disposable income, and free space of the mind to consider artistic endeavors. Depending on their political orientation, some politically biased writers might consider specific eras, in this thirty-year chunk of time, the worst of times, depending on the party in power at the time. In my humble opinion, as one who lived it, lived through it, and now looks back with a wistful eye at the glorious times we all had, that’s a big ball of nonsense. It’s a feeble attempt to rewrite history through a politically biased lens, and I write that asking the reader to consider that when one goes down the list of parties in power, over the course of this thirty-year chunk of time, it’s mostly even.    

Unless you consider The Cold War with Russia an actual war, the 70’s were the first era that was largely free of war. The Vietnam War ended in 1975, and that was preceded by the Korean War, and WWII. Except for a few skirmishes here and there, the era between 1975 and 2001 was largely free of war. Except for a few moments here and there, America experienced such a great era of stability and prosperity for thirty years that we had so much free time that we didn’t know what to do with ourselves, so we invented scandals, controversies, and fears of the future for mostly entertainment purposes. We also had massive amounts of disposable income and free space of the mind to focus on artistic endeavors. As much as we hate to admit it now, in a historical perspective, we lived and still live, in the best of times. 

There were so many factions and fractions in movies, music, TV, and books for the average consumer to consider, and yet we all agreed on most topics. A walk through the A-List contributors in the early 70’s, in music and the movies, is so daunting that I won’t even try to list them. The list in the 80’s and 90’s not only continued this legacy, but these eras may have topped the 70’s by sheer volume. Before we move on, think about that A-List for just a second. How many different, varied, and talented artists littered that A-List compendium. We usually try to shorten that list a little, just for sake of conversation, but the A-List of that era is so long that we feel a need to limit entrants just so we can have a decent conversation on that topic just to avoid putting our listeners to sleep. Think about the great directors, and how many movies they released during this thirty-year chunk of time. Think about all of the various musicians, and all of their various templates. We could devote this entire article to the Billboard Top 100, the Top of the Pops, or any of the other publications and venues that tried to top one another with the A-list artists they featured. Now, think of the magazines, both mass market and more niche ones, that tried to cover the A-Lists of music, the movies, books, and entertainment in general.

As one who wasn’t exclusively ensnared by A-list celebrities, and rock stars, I often found myself enjoying the entertainment put out by those others might call the B-List artists, C-Lists, and D-lists, and in that endeavor, I found an exciting new release almost weekly. As I wrote, I almost went broke numerous times trying to keep up, stay hip, and know every reference point, joke, and conversation topic people were having. Some call these conversations “water cooler” conversations, the coffee shop, or the break area. Whatever the case was, I was one of those who had to know, and there were so many movies, so much music, and so many great books and comedians to know about, for someone who had to know, that no past era compares when it comes to pure output and I dare say no future era will even try to compete. If you love music, movies, books, and comedy it was the greatest era in human existence to be alive.  

My nephews, some thirty years my junior, insist that the 80s were greatest musical era ever created, and they don’t even bother trying to defend “their” era. They have no allegiance to it in anyway. They state that the 80s were the greatest era of music as if it’s not only a fact, but a fait accompli that’s not even worth arguing. They don’t list one particular artist as the game-changing artist, as many of us will, but they do try to compile a list of influential artists that I considered quite daunting, and they insist no other era can compete. Even though I had nothing to do with the music in this era in anyway, I took some pride looking back and hearing an outsider consider this era I lived through the greatest era ever. Due probably to my age, more than anything else, I’m more of a 90s guy, and being a 90s guy, I always considered the 80s a silly era of music, until my nephews put their  spin on it. I also write all of this with the asterisk pointed to the notion that proponents of any era between the 60s and the 00s have valid arguments for “their” era.

My rhetorical question, sent out to the ether, is will future inhabitants in the United States be having arguments over the specific eras of this thirty-year chunk of time for the next 60 to 70 years? Will there be a “rock revival” in 2050 that puts the 80s music to shame? Will there be a return-to-roots revival in the movie industry that puts the sheer output of the movies from the 70s in the dustbin? Some argue that with the proliferation of streaming services and the various outlets on the internet, Americans will never collectively agree on great artistic outputs ever again. They argue that there’s just so much to choose from that it inhibits the idea of a Michael Jackson, a Star Wars, or even a more recent release like the book The Da Vinci Code from ever rocking our world in quite the same manner. These arguments discount the genius effect, of course, as every era has their own geniuses. The question I have, and it seeks to be as objective as possible for someone obviously imbued with a whole bunch of biases, is will those future geniuses ever be able to take future generations to the point that they can finally put 1970 to 1999 to rest, or will 2070 America still be arguing the relative merits of Michael Jackson vs. Madonna; Spielberg vs. Lucas vs. Coppola; Seinfeld vs. Leno; and Chevy Chase vs. Steve Martin vs. Bill Murray?   

One of the primary reasons there might never be an era that tops these eras is the topic no common fan wants to talk about but they are know: money. There was so much money to be had in movies and music that the executives and their boardrooms didn’t mind pouring money into their marketing department, because they knew they’d get it back. They didn’t always get it back, of course, but how many guys with nothing but a guitar strapped to their back receive the kind of funding and support they may have made twenty years ago? How many “good looking waiters who can act” is a movie studio going to bank on if a majority of the money they see is from the comparatively flat streaming services? The amount of money that man may have made for himself and those who supported his rise, just isn’t there anymore, not like it was between 1970 and 1999.    

There will always be exceptions to the rule, as I wrote, and there will always be exceptional exceptions, but the sheer output from so many different, varied artists, from so many different corners of the country, that occurred in those thirty years, will probably never be matched in my humble opinion, an opinion obviously derived from a recency bias.    

When Kids Lose in Sports

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We all know the scene in our favorite baseball movie involving young kids. The kids, in an early scene, just got slaughtered by the other team. They’re sad and dejected in that all-hope-is-lost way.“We stink coach,” one of the players says after the coach, tries to give them a pep talk. They’re not only sad and dejected, they’re dirtied up to presumably show their effort. “C’mon guys,” our star of the movie, the coach says. “We can turn this around. It is just one game.” The coach might use some quote from Vince Lombardi or Winston Churchill to inspire them, but the groaning kids tell him, and us, that it’s no use. We all know the coach will find some way to save the team in the movie, but I’m here to tell you that that scene of the sad, dirty, dejected players does not happen, at least among the 5-8-year-old range kids I know. The kids on my son’s baseball team might want to win, because who doesn’t, but they’re not as wrecked by failing to do so as the kids are in those movies are. 

These movie depictions are so ingrained, in those of us who love those movies, that when our child leaves a humiliating loss smiling, laughing and joking with their friends, we’re not only embarrassed, we think it’s not right. We consider it an aberration, and we start apologizing to fellow parents for their enthusiasm. “That’s not how I raised my son.” 

During the game, the kids enjoy hitting a ball, catching a ball, and, depending on the sport, kicking it. They enjoy all the running around and playing with their friends or other kids their age, almost as if it’s a coincidence that they all decided to get together to play a game on this day. It’s almost as if their parents decided that instead of letting them play in the backyard, they signed everyone up to let them play here. They might want to win, in the manner we all want to win a game, but in my experience, they don’t understand the difference between those who can and those who can’t, and to be brutally honest, they don’t care.

In soccer, we’ve all witnessed that kid, driving headlong down the middle of the field with the ball. The crowd is ushering him on, and he loves the adulation. You can see it in this kid’s face, in that fleeting moment, he doesn’t want to be anywhere else in the world but here, with this ball, driving toward a goal. It’s a proud, expectant smile that says, ‘Yes, I am this good.’ A defender moves in and steals the ball. To our consternation, our proud, smiling kid allows that kid to take the ball, as if to say, “Oh, you want it now? Ok, well, enjoy.” It’s almost as if the kid’s principles of competitive instincts clash with the principles of sharing we’ve taught them in that moment.  

The kids enjoy running around, and they all think they’re the fastest players out there when they decide to turn it on. They care about running fast, because that might be the one area where they develop and appreciate their own hierarchy, free from parental influence. Learning how to use that ability and display it on the field is another big thing for them, but they’re not overly concerned in how it might translate to wins and losses in competition. 

We care, the parents and coaches care, and to some degree it is about us. It’s about our super-secret, unspoken comparative competition about who is a better parent. It’s about my kid can catch, yours can’t. One plus one equals I’m a better parent than you, because I’ve spent more hours in the backyard with him. Most parents aren’t like this, to be fair, they just cheer their kid on, and they’re often just happen to be there.

One quick observation here, the kids who are often the best on the field often come from one of two types of parents, those who care too much about their kid displaying athletic prowess and those who are almost embarrassed by it. I’ve seen the latter on multiple occasions, parents who are almost embarrassed that their kids are so good. They want their kids to pass the ball more often to share the glory and spread it around, and their kids succeed almost in spite of their parents. If their kid manages to score all nine of his teams’ goals, we might congratulate his dad on his son’s display of athletic prowess. “I know. Thanks, but I wish he would pass the ball more often.” Before we can ask why, and right before his kid stands before the goal line, he screams out, “Pass. PASS IT! Gosh, dang it!” I don’t understand that mentality, but I consider it the equivalent of watching stock you own rise to embarrassingly high levels and shouting, “Go down!” at your computer screen, because you’re embarrassed by your newfound wealth.

The full impact of parents watching their kids play sports didn’t fully hit me, until I watched a micro soccer game involving kids significantly younger than mine. A part of me knew it was kind of silly to get so into a game involving humans who just learned how to walk about 1,000 days ago, but I obviously couldn’t shake the sports’ spectator viewpoint I gained watching adults play for decades. I didn’t gain proper perspective on this, until I saw those parents scream their heads off when five-year-olds kick the ball. 

The parents I watched that day were not competitively angry or anything unruly, but there was a whole lot of excessive cheering going on. They were cheering support for their kid, and their kid’s team. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but they were screaming their heads off. That was me, I thought. I might not have been going crazy, screaming my head off, outwardly. Inwardly, I considered it the most crucial battle since the last Peloponnesian War. Every individual battle was a testament to my training with my kid. I all but scored my son’s level of awareness, and when he scored seven goals in one micro-soccer game it was not only a testament to his character but our work together off the field. 

When they lose, especially when it’s a blowout, we parents don’t care for their post-game smiles. We don’t want to see them dejected, and we’ll “It is just a game Bruno” them in the aftermath, but we don’t want to see them smile, laugh, or enjoy playing with their friends either, and it just rubs us the wrong way when they run with excitement to the concession stand with their post-game food tickets.

We have a post-game tradition. The parents all get together to help the coach fund food tickets. The coach hands these food tickets out to the kids after the game, win or lose. The kids have the ability to take that legal tender (legal within the confines of the complex) to exchange these tickets for whatever concession products they desire. They have the non-parental approved power to purchase whatever they want. It’s a small amount of power, relatively speaking, but it’s all theirs.

At the end of the game, it’s that power and the concession stand yummies that excite them. We watch them crowd around the coach, hopping up and down (whether they won or lost) to they get their ticket. Then they run, faster than they ever did in the game, to the concession stand. They love it when they pick that one concession stand item that makes everyone else jealous, and they love it when everyone picks that item after them. That’s power, that’s the meaning of life for them up until age eight. They don’t understand the complexities winning and losing should have on their psyche. They don’t understand that they’re supposed to be dour, sullen, or in grief after a loss, and no one on their team, or the other team, does either. That’s a large addendum to this analysis. If they were smiling, happy, and loving life regardless what the scoreboard read, and their peers weren’t, the embarrassed parent might might have a case that they’re not a good teammate, but their teammates are smiling and laughing just as hard as them after a particularly embarrassing loss too. Their parents are the sad, sullen and down. Is there a lesson here that our kids can teach us about the importance of winning and losing, no, they’re just kids who enjoy the little things in life. 

I understand why the TV writers and movie makers want to depict kids as sad, dirty, and dejected after a loss. They want the arc. They want those kids to eventually overcome and eventually learn the glory of winning at the end, so they need to depict them as dejected in the beginning. If they depicted the reality that kids don’t care one way or another, from the first game to the last, it might be more realistic, but the writers fear that we would not care about their story either. In my experience, they don’t care either way, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

The asterisk that parents would inject into this argument is that they care. I care, you care, we all care. We care about his emotional and physical well-being, his happiness, his ability to get along with his peers, his grades, and his ability to display athletic ability, in that order. But, as my son once said, “You care, there’s no doubt about that, but some of the times you care a little too much.” I don’t care if his team wins or loses, or at least that’s not my primary concern. I’m concerned that he plays to the best of ability, and I do account for some of the limits of his ability. I also care about the lessons he can learn from sports, and I pounce on those little moments that provide lessons I think he can use.  

“As with anything else in life, you are going to make mistakes in sports,” I say, “Learn from them, and if you are going to succeed in anything, you have to have a short-term memory.” When he has played to the best of his ability, and his team still loses, I tell him, “You can only control what you can control,” and I say that so often that he says it with me, mocking me in a lighthearted manner. I often follow that up with a story about how I went three-for-three in a softball game, and I didn’t commit any errors, and we still lost. I tell him how my teammates mocked me for being okay with the loss, and how I responded, “Hey, if you guys were as demanding as I am, with your individual performance, we probably would’ve won.” I then turn to my son and repeat, “You can only control what you can control.” To my mind, these aren’t just lessons in sport, they’re life lessons he can use in any arena in life.  

Kids between ages five to eight generally don’t care about winning, or sports in general, near as much as we, or the kids in movies we’ve watched. As hard as that is for we adults to grasp, it’s natural. We care though, and some of us think some of it is about the lessons sports provide. Others care about that super-secret, unspoken comparative competition about who is a better parent? Most of us truly care about our kids, but we’ve all seen those parents who care so much that they’ve accidentally, somewhere along the way, crossed a line into caring so much that they’ve ruined sports for their kids. If you’ve ever seen parents go crazy watching micro soccer, aged 5-6-years old, go nuts on their kids, and you’re wondering if sports has become so important to you that you’ve accidentally crossed that line and taken all the fun out of sport for him. Watch him. Watch him when he doesn’t know you’re looking. If he plays sports on his own time, with no encouragement on your part, and he appears to still loves athletic competition, and all of the particulars in between, you’re in the clear, but we need to always keep these concerns in mind.