Category: sports

Evel Knievel in The Man who Sold the World

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Evel Knievel was so cool that he could wear a cape, and no one would question why a grow man was wearing a cape. He was so cool that it just seemed right on him. There was a time when Evel Knievel ruled the world, ok maybe not the world, but he definitely ruled the United States for what some say was about nine years, between the late 60s to mid-70s. He had his own toys, his likeness was on lunch boxes, T-shirts, and I even saw an Evel Knievel pinball machine one time in an arcade. I couldn’t play the pinball machine, of course, because the wait time was far too long for me, but it was fun to watch it. We all had our favorite comic book heroes, athletes, and other assorted entertainers, but there was only one “real” man who could wear a cape in public without anyone asking, “What the hell is going on here?”

Evel Knievel could jump anything and everything we could dream up and never fail. All right, he failed … a lot, but we didn’t care about all that back then. We wanted to see him do what he did “better than anyone else ever has or ever will”, and we pretended to be him when riding our bikes. Robert Craig Knievel probably wouldn’t have listed this in the greatest of achievements in his life, but it was huge in our world. The list of characters we pretended to be was about as exclusive as lists can be. We bestowed this honor on The Six-Million Dollar Man, members of the rock group KISS, and various other mythological creatures we call superheroes, but Evel was a superhero to us. 

Thus, it would’ve stunned us to learn that when the history of motorcycle stuntmen was eventually written, Evel Knievel wasn’t even the best motorcycle stuntman in his own family. His son Robbie Knievel proved smarter, more technical, and more prolific than his celebrated father. (Evel committed to 75 ramp-to-ramp jumps while his son engaged in 340, nearly five times more than his beloved father.) Robbie, it could be argued, even created a better name Kaptain Knievel. How cool is that? The name Kaptain Knievel rolls off the tongue with such ease that I’m surprised Andrew Wood didn’t write a Kaptain Knievel song for his band Mother Love Bone. Kaptain Knievel could’ve and probably should’ve been more famous than his father, Evel Knievel, so why wasn’t he?  

Timing: Evel Caught Lightning in a Bottle

I was not a viable lifeform when Elvis rocked our world, and I was not here for Beatlemania, but I saw, firsthand, the hysteria that was Evel Knievel. The guy hit the scene like a comet in the 70s, a red-white-and-blue blur of bravado that turned him into a myth before I even learned how to tie my own shoes. When my friends and I were old enough to hero-worship, we had Evel’s iconic imagery all over our world, from posters on our wall, lunchboxes we took to school, and T-Shirts on our torso. Evel just owned a once-in-a-lifetime sweet spot in time that no one, not even his own son, could duplicate, no matter how much higher or farther he flew. Before he died, this son, Robbie Knievel, Kaptain Knievel, ended up not only continuing the Knievel legacy, he topped it by all measures, but he could never match the fever-pitch frenzy, and the hysteria, that surrounded Evel Knievel. No one could. It was a very special window in time, and unlike some icons who shied away from the spotlight with something called humility, Evel reveled in his moment in the sun.  

It was not mandatory that every kid in this era have an Evel action-figure, but those who didn’t received that “You don’t know what you’re missing” look, even from the nice kids. Mr. Rogers, from Mister Rogers Neighborhood, would never allow his network to commodify his product in this manner, because he didn’t want kids who couldn’t afford those products to feel ostracized. Evel had no such concerns, as his spangled merch flooded every store in the 70s.

I had three different Evel Knievel action-figures–same figure, different outfits—I didn’t care. I had to have them all. Then, we found out that the Evel Empire produced a windup, energizer accessory. If you were a kid during this era, you probably still owe your parents an apology for all the whining and badgering you did as Christmas day approached, because you were probably as awful to them as I was to mine. When Santa Claus ended up fulfilling my only wish, I wound ‘er up and let ‘er go, and when I was done, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t experience a level of euphoria equal to, or greater than that moment if I lived to be 100-years-old. Decades later, I tried passing those feelings of euphoria onto my nephew with an exact replica of this Evel figure and its windup energizer accessory, he broke it within a week. Weeks after that Christmas, I found this toy I once cherished on the top shelf of toys of his closet to gather dust with the toys he would never play with again. The idea that my nephew had no regard for this toy stunned me. I knew he never heard of Evel Knievel, but I thought it was a standalone, great toy. I was wrong. The euphoria I experienced playing with this toy, at his age, was obviously based on the mythology, iconography, and the hype and hysteria of all things Evel in the 70s.  

The Media: Evel Owned the Airwaves

There was a time when one individual could rule the airwaves, and Evel Knievel did. It was so far back that it almost seems quaint now before cable, YouTube, VCRs, DVRs, and the internet or streaming services. There were only three channels, and they didn’t repeat broadcasts, or if they did, we usually had to wait months for the rerun. If we missed one of his appearances, pre-jump interviews, and the events themselves, we were just out. “You missed it?” our friends asked. “How could you just miss it? I was counting the days till it happened.”

“I forgot. I was out playing or something, and I just, just forgot,” I said to my never-ending shame. It was one of those situations where our friends could recount what happened for us, but it wasn’t the same, and we had this idea that this might mark us for the rest of our lives. 

Robbie, bless him, hit his stride when cable and the internet fractured the game. Sure, he got some TV love—his Grand Canyon leap was aired live after all—but Evel’s regular-network spectacles had a bigger and rarer feel that had that must-see-TV feel, long before the networks coined the phrase. Robbie could share his feats online, but that magic of “counting the days till it happened” were long gone.

Evel Knievel Was Larger Than Life

Back before the internet and 24-hour news shows, we didn’t know everything, all of the time. We didn’t know the negatives about our heroes. We had our naysayers of course, but we could dismiss their ideas as speculative, because they didn’t really know what they were talking about either. We couldn’t pull up a device and search for all nuggets on Evel Knievel to find everything we wanted to know about him. If I ran into him at the supermarket, I wouldn’t have known it was him, because I didn’t even know what he looked like. I figured he probably looked as good as Superman with Batman’s aura of cool. We filled in the blanks of what we didn’t know with what we wanted to think, and we decided to make him god-like. Kaptain Robbie probably ended up pulling off more dangerous stunts, and if we gauged them by qualitative and quantifiable measures, he was probably the better of the two motorcycle daredevils, but Evel was there first. He also pioneered the iconic image of guts and glory in a way that led to a cultural impact that penetrated the zeitgeist in a way no one, not even his son, could.   

Evel was also a Mess

I was a kid during Evel Knievel’s prime, so I didn’t know all the ins and outs of what Evel did, and I was too young to analyze why he had such historical allure. He wasn’t really human to me. He was an action-figure to me, a symbol for everything I wanted to be, but he was no more real or unreal than Batman—an action figure, literally and figuratively. Yet, this obviously wasn’t reason he was so famous among adults. Why did they love him to the point that every source of media had to have some attachment to him in some way if they hoped to compete in the era’s landscape? He crashed. A lot. “You know what I was really good at,” Evel told his cousin, and U.S. Congressman, Pat Williams. “You know what I was bad at was the landing. It was the bad landings. That’s what brought the crowds out. Nobody wants to see me die, but they don’t want to miss it when I do.”

As evidence of that, Evel Knievel’s most iconic video is that of his failed jump at Caesar’s Palace. After he narrowly missed hitting the landing ramp square, he bounced up and over his bike. When he hit his head, he appeared to narrowly avoid life-altering impact, but when his lower back and hindquarters slammed into the ground, the audience at-home could almost feel the hollow thud that must’ve screamed in Evel’s ears. When he rolled about four times, it didn’t look real. He looked like a ragdoll or one of those crash test dummies that we watch react to impact with an emotional distance, because they’re not alive. Anyone who has ever crashed on a bike, in a car, or on a bigwheel knows some small, not even worth discussing level of comparable pain that teaches us the golden rule of crashing: If you’re going to crash, try your best to avoid landing on concrete, because it hurts like the dickens. 

Why did adults of this era watch? Why do non-fans watch NASCAR, hockey, and why do we slowdown for a wreck on the interstate. Adults presumably turned up at the shows and tuned into the broadcasts that carried these performances, because they wanted to be there if someone was going to die that day. 

Whereas the son, Kaptain Knievel, achieved twenty different records, Evel racked up twenty major crashes, and his own Guinness Book of World Records’ record 433 broken bones. 433! Yes, Biology enthusiasts, we only have 206 bones in our body, and no he didn’t have more than double the number of bones the rest of us have. If you’re going to attempt to break Evel’s current record, you’re probably going to have to break the same bones multiple times. Kaptain Knievel decided he didn’t want to go the course of his father, so he chose a Honda CR500, a much lighter bike than Evel’s Harley-Davidson XR-750, and Kaptain Robbie analyzed his jumps and made sure he would succeed. He did succeed far more often than his famous father, but the adult audience probably grew so accustomed to his success that they kind of got used to it in a way that bored them a little.

“I’m not going to watch,” my aunt said before one of the airings of Evel’s jumps, “because I’m not going to contribute to that man’s desire to kill himself, because he will die. You know that don’t you? That fool is going to get himself killed.” 

My aunt was right, of course, as Evel wasn’t very good at what he did. Kaptain Knievel had some crashes too, but they paled in comparison to the severity of Evel’s. When Evel crashed, we felt bad for him, we thought of his family and other loved ones, and some of us even cried a little. We did it, because we cared, and we enjoyed caring, because we didn’t want to see this beloved man get hurt again. Robbie never built that reservoir of love and concern, because he rarely failed, and when he did, he didn’t get hurt as severely, and we viewed him as nothing more than a guy who used a motorcycle to jump over stuff. 

The most memorable jump Evel Knievel performed, for me, was the January 31, 1977 jump at the Chicago International Ampitheatre. This scheduled event suggested that Evel was going to jump over a number of sharks, SHARKS! This event just happened to coincide with the aftermath of the first true summer blockbuster, Jaws. Jaws was a movie so horrific and scary that no one I knew was allowed to see it, but as you can guess that verboten nature led us to talk about it endlessly. We all knew someone who knew someone who saw it, and we recounted for our friends what actually happened in that movie. Thus, when we learned that our superhero was going to test the meddle of the world’s most fearsome maneater, we kind of worried: 

“What if he misses?” we asked one another, in the midst of the hysteria. “What if a shark jumps out of the water, as he’s flying overhead? They do that. No seriously, I’ve heard that they do that.” None of us knew that sharks are actually relatively cautious predators, and the reason their predatory behavior involves them circling unknown prey is that they’re trying to determine if they’re going to get hurt in the process. They know that even a small, relatively innocuous injury can damage their predatory skills and could lead to their premature death. If Evel splashed into the tank, in other words, the sharks that weren’t hit on impact, probably would’ve swam as far away from the point of impact as possible. We didn’t know any of that. We thought they were the impulsive killing machines depicted in Jaws. I later learned Evel’s jump ended in disaster during a rehearsal, and he retired from major jumps shortly afterward, but none of that mattered to me as I was all hyped up on everything Evel. 

We loved to ride bikes in the wayback when kids did things outside, and every kid I knew pretended to be Evel Knievel for just a moment when we took rocks and put plywood on them and “jumped” from one board to another. When we did this often enough, even in our Evel Knievel mindsets, it could get a little boring after a while. To try to match the intensity of our hero, we did everything we could to make our jump more dangerous. We increased the angle of the board, had our friends lay between the two boards, and any and every stupid thing we could think up to make it a little more dangerous. We wanted someone, somewhere to say, “You are crazy!” No one ever said that in an advisory manner, in my memory, it was always said with a tinge of excitement, as in ‘He’s crazy, but I think he’s going to do it.’ I still remember the time I broke Steve’s record on the block for longest jump, but even though it ended with a me-bike-me-bike roll up crash, I still beat it. Was it worth it, if you asked short-term me, I probably would’ve said no, as there was a lot of memorable pain, but when the theys on the block were still talking about it, months later, it felt worth it. They talked about the painful crash of course, and they laughed when they did, but they always mentioned that it set the record for the block.

We unwittingly answered the question why Evel Knievel was more popular and still is more famous than his son Robbie. Evel was either so stubborn, or so crazy, that he didn’t want to do things the way they should’ve been done. He performed with a “my way or the highway” that usually led to him waking up in a hospital. Evel Knievel did succeed on occasion, and we shouldn’t forget that, but when he did, it was almost a relief to see that he didn’t get hurt in the process. Robbie Knievel was so good at what he did, presumably learning from his father’s mistakes, that when he completed a jump, it eventually became less of a daredevil feat and more of a guy jumping over stuff with a motorized vehicle. There was no drama to it, and it lacked the “Is he going to die today?” had-to-be-there-if-he-did status that his father’s jumps did.     

Was Michael Jordan the GOAT?

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“If you think Michael Jordan is the greatest NBA player of all time, by far, you’re probably between the ages of 40-60,” blared one reddit commenter.  

Some call it recency bias, but seeing as how Jordan took his Bulls’ jersey off for the final time 25 years ago, we could say that the recency bias exists in the pro-Kobe, pro-LeBron arguments. I’d call the pro-Jordan argument a generational bias. The generational bias suggests that everything that happened before and after my prime is not as great as it was during this relative window. With all these biases rolling around in everyone’s, it’s almost impossible to arrive at a final objective answer.

Some might also argue that the most instrumental bias in such arguments is the emotional bias. Those of the 40-60 demographic cheered harder for and against Jordan than later generations did Kobe and LeBron. That’s an almost impossible argument to debate, of course, as it’s all relative, but we do have statistics to argue and counter. That’s still impossible to argue, as Mark Twain once said, “There’s lies, damned lies and statistics.” It’s true, both teams can argue their statistics in the Jordan v LeBron argument, but there are stats and there are advanced metrics. Before we get into that argument, however, we must discount longevity, games started and played, and minutes, as LeBron entered the NBA straight out of high school, and Jordan played three years in college. Longevity and games played are valuable stats in our determination, but LeBron never retired, and Jordan did three times. LeBron obviously wins all of these categories.  

The advanced stats dig deep into actual games played, and they include value over replacement statistics, player efficiency rating, and fifteen other advanced statistics of the players’ respective careers that favor Michael Jordan 9-6, by category, in the regular season and LeBron James wins these metrics 9-8 in the postseason metrics. LeBron beats Jordan by a substantial number in win share, or the total number of wins contributed by a player, in both regular season and playoffs, which is surprising, but Jordan barely beats him in a majority of the regular season categories. It’s also surprising to see that the deep metrics in the postseason favor LeBron, as I would’ve guessed that would’ve been flipped. Big Game Mike, to my mind, took his game up to stratospheric, untouchable levels in the postseason. LeBron was better. If postseason is far more important than regular season stats, and an overwhelming number of people agree this is the case, LeBron actually has a slight advantage in most cases against Jordan.

Another publication used a more comprehensive approach, regular season and postseason combined, with advanced stats compiled by various publication. Their categorical verdict: dead even.

In the Clutch

Whenever Kobe or LeBron missed, and misses, a clutch playoff shot, some of us hit that “He’s not Jordan!” button. We don’t even consider that a bias at this point. It happened. We don’t remember Jordan ever missing a clutch playoff shot, but we do remember the many misses by Kobe and LeBron. The Bleacher Report developed a very simple formula for a definition of clutch shots in the playoffs. “Playoff games only (no regular season), go ahead or game-tying shot attempts (free throws, turnovers, and the like were ignored, [and the shot attempt had to occur in the]) final 24 seconds or he fourth quarter or overtime.” Within the constraints of this definition of playoff clutch shots, Jordan, they found, was 9-18 in clutch, playoff attempts, for “an astounding” 50% clip. LeBron is 7-16 for a 43.8% rate. (Not Jordan, but it was a lot closer than some of us remember.) Kobe was 7-25 for a 28% (or 5-17 for a 29.4% in the chart they provided).     

Player Makes Attempts FG%
Michael Jordan 9 18 50
LeBron James 7 16 43.8
Kevin Durant 5 12 41.7
Dirk Nowitzki 5 12 41.7
Kobe Bryant 5 17 29.4

Microsoft’s Co-Pilot program lists the following clutch field goal percentages for NBA greats in the playoffs. Jordan 45%, Kobe 41%, Bird 40%, Lillard 42%, Wade 42%, and Horry, LeBron, Magic were all at 40%. So, although, Jordan leads the pack, it’s not by as much as the 40-60 aged demographic remembers. 

One contrarian argument I read online, states that the disparity between the elite talent and average player the 90s and the 2020s, favors the 2020s. They argue that the worst teams of the 90s were far worse than the worst teams of the 2020s. They argue that “There’s no question that the average player is more skilled today than in the 90’s.” They also write that The Chicago Bulls were able to achieve total dominance of the regular season thanks to expansion and a difference in defense rules. Another decent argument I’ve heard is that no one in the NBA, prior to Mike, had the marketing and promotion packages that he would receive.

In terms of marketing alone, I won’t even hear arguments about Bill Russell, Wilt, Kareem, or Dr. J. The only NBA marketing argument that comes close to that which Jordan received was Bird v Magic. If Bird v Magic saved the NBA, on a national level, however, Michael Jordan took it to the worldwide stage. Larry Bird was allergic to the press, and he only gave interviews begrudgingly, so that leaves the media-friendly smile and laughter of Magic Johnson. He was a hero to many, but his media attention paled in comparison to the worldwide, superstar treatment afforded Jordan. Kobe and LeBron later had a taste of it, of course, as they were the best players of their era, but they could never escape the cloud of “the chosen one”. The implicit statement is that Kobe and LeBron may have been as good, or better, than Jordan, but the 40-60 demo wouldn’t allow anyone to flirt with that notion. As a person who doesn’t follow the intricacies of the league, I must concede to the argument that part of Jordan’s impenetrable image as the GOAT revolves around how much the media adored him. The only marketing push that could come close to Michael Jordan was that of the “King of pop” Michael Jackson.

The Competition

To get to the core of this particular argument, we must dismiss the regular season records and the stats they achieved against average players. Even playoff teams have average, role players in every lineup, but if we were to stack the elite teams of each era against each other, let’s go seven deep on the various rosters, how would the late-80s, 90s Bulls, Pistons, Knicks, Jazz, Rockets, Sonics, do against the 2000s Spurs, the Shaq, Kobe Lakers, or the 2010s Warriors, Heat, Celtics and Lakers?

If we could somehow move the Jordans’ Bulls forward a decade or three, how do they fare against the elite teams of latter decades? First question, whose rules do they play under? Does Jordan operate better or worse in the wide-open rules of latter decades, or did the Warriors play an almost indefensible offense at their peak? On the flips side, if we could move the elite modern teams back, under the rules of yesteryear and Detroit’s “Jordan Rules” become “Kobe Rules” or “LeBron Rules”, do they overcome them in the manner Jordan eventually did? Would Tim Duncan, Ginobili, and Parker survive against Pat Riley’s brutal lane enforcement rules carried out by Charles Oakley, Anthony Mason and Xavier McDaniels? Do Jordan and the Bulls 4-2 Shaq and Kobe in championship series? If Jordan and LeBron play in the same era, does Jordan kill LeBron’s legacy the way he did so many others? As with just about every sport, it’s almost impossible to compare eras. The game changes, evolves, and adapts with rule changes. The brutal nature of the game in which no one was allowed a layup, became a wide-open, almost 3-point dependent game.

Focusing on the elite level alone, one reddit writer submits that: “There’s no evidence to support [the idea] that the [elite] players from the 90s are any better or worse than the [elite] players of today. In 632 games, Jordan never lost three games in a row, went 27-1 in playoff series [during that span], won three consecutive championships twice, 10 scoring titles, nine 1st-team all-defense awards. Led the league in steals 3 times, was the first player to ever record 200 steals and 100 blocks in one season and he did it twice [This stat, some would argue is timeless]. Won 14 MVPs (6 Finals, 5 regular seasons, 3 All Star game) plus 2 dunk contest championships. [He] was outscored once in 37 playoff series (in 1985 Terry Cummings outscored MJ by 1 point in the first-round series, 118-117), and [he] is 1st all-time in the number of times a player averaged 40 or more points in a playoff series. He did it 5 times and there’s a 4-way tie for 2nd place who have all done it [once]. [Jordan] also has outscored 982 out of 983 total opponents in career head2head match ups. (Alan Iverson being the only player ever by avg 27.1ppg in 7 games vs MJ who avg 24.4ppg). And this was all in 12 full regular seasons and 13 playoff appearances (15 active seasons). It’s basketballs greatest resume by a mile and those who weren’t there to see it do not want to believe it so, that’s why the 90s era gets no respect.”

The reddit user ends with a compelling argument. Most of the argument centers on the idea that we, the 40-60 demo, suffer from a number of biases, but the same could be said of those in the generation where Michael Jordan officially became a grandfather. If all you know of Michael Jordan are the YouTube videos, the “If I could be like Mike” commercials, the idea that Jordan was the GOAT might sound like “The Three Stooges were the greatest comedians of all time” or “The Andy Griffith Show was a greater sitcom than Seinfeld” arguments did to us. Unlike Curly or Barney Fife, most of Jordan’s exploits occurred between the highlights, on nights when it seemed like he couldn’t seem to miss midrange shots that only counted for two points. These weren’t the dramatic shots that we see on YouTube, but they don’t show what those in the 40-60 demo know.

The 90s Knicks

The best team the Bulls beat during this era would have to be the New York Knicks. Those Knicks 90s rosters may have been the best assemblage of NBA talent to never win an NBA Championship Ring. During Patrick Ewing’s run with the Knicks, they had John Starks, Charles Oakley, Anthony Mason, Xavier McDaniel, Greg Anthony, Gerald Wilkins, Derek Harper, Doc Rivers, Charles Smith, Mo Cheeks, Bill Cartwright, Bernard King, Hubert Davis, and the later rosters included Larry Johnson, Allan Houston, Marcus Camby, Anthony Bowie, and Latrell Sprewell, and they never won a ring.  

Jordan and the Knicks faced each other five times, in this era of their respective primes, and Jordan and the Bulls went 5-0 in those matchups. If the reader doesn’t consider that record eye-popping, go read Blood in the Garden to get a grasp on how talented those Knicks’ teams were.

Jordan retired (the first time) to play baseball? and Ewing and the Knicks lost to Hakeem Olajuwon’s Rockets then Reggie Miller’s Pacers. Jordan retires again, and the Knicks lose to Tim Duncan, David Robinson, and the Spurs. I still cannot believe Patrick Ewing, and his Knicks’ teams never won a ring.   

The Late 80’s Early 90’s Pistons

The late 80s/early 90s Pistons’ run was not near as lengthy as the Knicks’, but they packed a whole lot of winning in that shorter time frame. Some rightly blame the talent around Jordan, but the Pistons beat Jordan and the Bulls in three straight playoff series from 1987-1990.

We can all admit to some type of bias in these never-ending arguments, but those of us in the 40-60 demographic will never be able to get passed “The Run”. When Jordan and the Bulls finally found a way to beat the Pistons, no team could stop them. They won six championships in a row (not counting the retirement years), and no one, outside the 60s Celtics, have been able to match such a run. Those of us in this demo will listen to arguments about stats and advanced metrics that suggest the argument between LeBron and Michael is a lot closer that we thought, and we might even entertain the idea that on many of those scales, especially in the postseason, LeBron was statistically better, but LeBron was never able to amass anything equivalent to “The Run” of six championships in a row (not counting retirement).   

If Michael Jordan never existed, how many rings would Hakeem Olajuwon, Patrick Ewing, Charles Barkley, Clyde Drexler, and Malone and Stockton have? How many more would Magic, Bird, and Isiah have? How many different legacies would have been cemented with a ring, if he never existed? There’s a reason they call Michael Jordan the legacy killer.

The counter argument might be, that if Michael Jordan had to compete against “The virtually unstoppable” David Robinson, Tim Duncan combo, the Kobe, Shaq combo, the LeBron, Kyrie combo, or Steph Curry and the Warriors ability to shoot the ball from outside the arena, he might not have had such an almost unprecedented run. Before we strip Jordan of his crown, however, we do need to go back those names of elite, hall of fame names from the era’s elite teams of its own “virtually unstoppable” combos and elite talent that Jordan and the Bulls defeated. Our conclusion matches that of the Reddit use who claimed: “There’s no evidence to support [the idea] that the [elite] players from the 90s are any better or worse than the [elite] players of today.”  

Of all the biases involved in these arguments, the toughest to overcome is the emotional one. We can all argue our generational biases, as we all deem the best players of “our” era as the best to ever play the game. Others, from other eras, might argue that Bill Russell, Wilt, Dr. J, Pistol Pete, Oscar Robertson, Kareem, Magic and Bird, Isiah, Tim Duncan, Kobe, LeBron, Steph Curry, and Nikola Jokic were/are better, but these arguments focus on tangible elements of the game. No NBA player I’ve witnessed, in my life (and I admit to many biases to arrive at this conclusion), has combined elite talent with elite levels of doing anything and everything he had to to win better than Michael Jordan. His own teammates talk about how vicious and downright mean he could be to them during practice. He played psychological games with them, his opponents, and himself in order to gain some kind of edge for that series, or that night, for one win in a series. On some level, we have to throw the idea of biases and metrics out the window and put ourselves in Michael Jordan’s shoes. He had all the money in the world, he couldn’t leave his hotel room in most countries around the world, because of his fame, and he had every creature comfort a human being could dream up, but when one of his teams needed a win, he almost always came through in the final six years of his career as a Bull (the one series loss to the Shaq, Penny Hardaway-led Magic being the sole exception). Five of the six championships, during his much talked about run, were 4-2, six game wins. Each of them required him to dig deep to help his team find some way to overcome his opponent, and I’ve never seen another player will his team to win as often, or with as much consistency, as the greatest basketball player who ever lived, Michael Jordan.

When Kids Lose in Sports

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“We stink coach!” kids in movies say after a baseball game in which they got slaughtered. These kids are sweaty, dirty and dejected.  

“C’mon fellas,” the coach, and the star of our movie, 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 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 the 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 failure as much kids in movies. Those kids read lines written and directed by middle-aged men who basically want to help us rewrite our past in a disaster-turned-glorious theme. 

It might be tough to remember our childhood as it actually was, as opposed to the way we want to remember it, but we didn’t really care if we won a game or not. We enjoyed doing all the things we could do with a ball when we were young, and we enjoyed running around and playing a sport with other kids, but did we really care how many points we scored? The way I played, to a certain age, was as if it were almost a coincidence that my friends, and our opponents, decided to get together to play a game on this day. It’s almost as if our parents decided that instead of letting us play in the backyard, they signed us up to let play here. Again, winning is always better, but did we, and do they, truly understand the difference between those who can and those who can’t. If they learn the difference, will they seek private coaching sessions to take them to the next level? Did we care? I know I didn’t.  

We see the natural abilities they have, and we know them as well as we now know how naturally gifted we were, even if we weren’t. We know the difference between us and those who succeeded on the field was that we were never “coached up”. So, we want them to maximize whatever natural gifts they might have, but the crucial ingredient we forget is that it’s all about us. They don’t truly care, no matter what they might tell us.

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 happy to be there.

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 1,800 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 their five-year-old kicked the ball. Then, when he kicked it, they encouraged him to kick it again, and they encouraged him, at high-volume, to continue kicking it until it crossed the goal line. 

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 afterwards either, and it just rubs us the wrong way when they run with excitement to the concession stand with their post-game food tickets.

In a number of leagues my son was in, the coaches gave them concession tickets to “buy” products available there. The kids humored him long enough to hear his post-game wrap up, and they nodded through his appraisals of their play, what they did well, and what they needed to work on. When the tone of his voice suggested he was near completion, and they knew his tones well, they got excited. They were right at times, but there were other moments when they grew overly excited over what happened to end in a hard comma. In the end, they weren’t excited by a victory or dejected by a loss, but what concessions they managed to find with their tickets. It was, for many of them, their first taste of purchasing power, not limited by parental consent.  

Middle-aged screenwriters often love to depict the spoils of victory and the agony of defeat, even in the form of eight-year-olds, because they want the arc of storytelling. They depict them as dirty, sad, and dejected after a loss, so they can depict them as clean, euphoric, and worthy in the end. It all makes sense to us, the middle-aged men in the audience, because that’s how we remember our childhood. 

If it were possible to attain a video of us failing in a crucial moment in our youth, at around eight-years-old, we might remember that crucial failure, because it haunts us to this day. What if we had some extended minutes that followed us to the dugout? What if, in those extended minutes, we saw ourselves laughing and playing with our friends. My bet is 9.678151 out of ten of us would be shocked. “That’s not how I remember it,” would be the theme of our response.   

An overwhelming majority of the kids I see on fields, playing games, don’t care near as much as we do whether they win or lose. If the movie makers depicted this reality, however, they fear that we might not care about their movie either. Kids have this annoying-to-the-point-of-frustrating habit of wanting to have fun while playing games. We know we were different. We were winners, even at their age, who cared far more than they do about winning, because we’re winners now. If we had that video of ourselves, as a kid, laughing with friends after a disastrous loss, we might find that we just loved playing the game. We were having fun playing it, and that’s why we kept playing it, until we became better at it when winning and losing actually meant something to us. If we remembered that correctly, our kids might look something like this: