The LOSE is not impressed by running up the score, even in it’s some team I like who are doing it. (Watching the Rose Bowl-bound Cougars of 1997 win 77-7 over Southwestern Louisiana made me feel a bit unclean.) The objective is to win the game. The margin of victory doesn’t much matter. Most lopsided scores are the result of superior talent – being bigger, stronger, faster, etc. – and I find it usually takes far more skill to win a close game against a good team than it does to win a blowout against a bad one. A blowout on a professional level is more impressive, given that the talent levels are somewhat more evenly distributed.
Running up the score is generally frowned upon in American sports on the professional level. The biggest whomping of last year’s NFL season – Seattle 58:0 Arizona – was hardly a case of the Seahawks running up the score, as Arizona turned the ball over constantly and showed a general disinterest in tackling. The following week, however the Seahawks earned a wag of the finger in a 50:17 win over Buffalo by running a fake punt well into the second half. This sort of thing is not kosher in the states. There are various tricky and clever aspects to sport – the stolen base, the fake punt – and the unwritten rule is that, once you’ve got the game in hand, you stop it with the tricky stuff and just play the game straight ahead.
This is NOT the case abroad, however.
Consider the case of our summertime heroes, those plucky footballers from Tahiti who went 0-3 at the Confed Cup this summer. To their credit, the Tahitians played with class and chose to actually attempt to play some football instead of parking the bus and going into a defensive shell, and they got shelled because of it, being outscored 24-1 in three games. Being matched in such a high-profile tournament against such an inferior opponent left their three opponents – Nigeria, Spain, Uruguay – in sort of a bad spot. All three teams needed to post big margins, since GD is always a tiebreaker in football, but they didn’t want to embarrass their opponents.
But what exactly does that mean? In the case of the Spaniards, they basically abandoned their dominant passing game for an evening and just charged ahead English style. They won 10-0 because of it, but the Spaniards could’ve easily scored a couple early goals and then just held the ball the rest of the game, basically toying with the Tahitians like a cat playing with a wounded rodent. Spain routinely possesses the ball 70-75% of the time, anyway, against the Germanys and the Italys and the Frances of the world. It wasn’t far-fetched to imagine the Spaniards holding the ball for 5-10 minutes at a time had they played that way.
Now, to the Spaniards, it would have been dishonourable to taunt an opponent like that. At the same time, they won 10-0, so it’s not like they let up. Several of the players then said after winning a game that was clearly somewhat uncomfortable that it would’ve been even more dishonourable not to give their best effort for the duration of the game.
See, and therein lies the rub – what counts as ‘best effort’ is a grey area. I learned this when playing/coaching American sports in Europe, and bringing my American attitudes with me.
While coaching a women’s basketball team in England, we lost a game by 93 points. We were hopelessly outmatched and knew it going in, and I focused on improvement and not the final result. What bothered me was that our opponents, who were bigger and more skilled, decided it was cool to have their best player stand 40 feet from the basket when we had the ball, scoring about 60 points in the game almost entirely on breakaways or fast breaks after our team missed a shot or turned the ball over. We call this “cherry picking” in the U.S., and it is a BIG NO NO. I was less than happy with this, and let the opposing coach know about it afterwards, to which he said “well, you should’ve done something to stop it.” I may or may not have then insinuated that doing something like that in the U.S. would result in his 60-point scoring star forward getting undercut by a benchwarming thug on one of her many easy fast breaks.
Another example came while playing baseball. Yes, I played baseball in England. We weren’t very good and some of the finer points of the game eluded us, like holding runners on. Our opponents would get a base hit and immediately steal second, even when they were up by 10 runs. I got rather annoyed with this. I took a turn late in the game playing catcher and a particularly annoying member of the other side got another base hit. He promptly went to steal second on the first pitch to the following batter – and I had called a pitchout, so I gunned him out at 2nd base much to his stunned amazement. The umpire for this particular game happened to be the manager of our opponents (we were short on umpires), and he didn’t care much for me to begin with, and he promptly told me with a level of disdain, “that was a cheeky move on your part,” to which I said, “in the states, if you were stealing bases up 10 runs, you’d get plunked in the earhole or the middle of the back with a fastball the next time you came to bat.” Come to think of it, I was a bit more colourful when I said it … but he wasn’t amused. (Having just said that, it didn’t surprise me when, coming up to bat the next inning, I promptly got hit by a pitch. I promptly stole second and third and scored on a base hit. I may or may not have flipped off the umpire after scoring a run. I was already a problem child without causing further international incidents.)
The idea outside of the states seems to be that anything in the game is fair game at any point when between the lines. It’s on you to stop them, not expect them to stop of their own accord. We would win basketball games by 70 in England and still have our starters in the game at the end. There seemed to also a corresponding attitude, however, that what happened on the pitch stayed there, and that you didn’t carry it over after the fact. (Now if only fans had that same sort of attitude.)
Like I say, this really doesn’t jibe with the American attitude – the exception being college football, of course, which is an exception to pretty much everything, as it’s one of the strangest sporting spectacles imaginable. Expect to see a few 70-0 scores here in the coming weeks. In many of those games, the team scoring the 70 will have the good sense to empty the bench and play the game straight up from there – but not always. In the end, I find that nothing good ultimately comes out of those sorts of games and far more often some ugly stuff starts to happen – bad players may not play the game well, but they can injure you really, really easily. Respect is a big deal on the playing field, even if the definition of ‘respect’ can be somewhat nebulous at times.
At least in scrabble, when you run up a big margin of victory, there is a certain level of understanding that the reverse is going to happen from time to time. There are some other aspects of the game, much as in any other, which we could deem 'disrespectful,' but it's a grey area which I can get into at some point in the future when I don't completely hate the fucking game.
We try to emphasize to people that they shouldn't be sore losers. Fair enough. But be classy when you win, whatever that means in whatever activity you choose to pursue. Don't be a jerk. You won. You proved your point. Over time, I’ve generally come to take a position where I win rather humbly and try to be gracious, since I positively HATE losing, and assume that my opponents hate it as much as I do. I don’t like to do anything perceived as gloating in the context of legit competition. As for handling how I lose? Well … let’s say that’s a work in progress. But given the subject of this blog, you can safely assume I’ve had lots of experience with it.
