Treat Those Two Imposters Just the Same

A big part of my desire to contribute to Culture in Sports (cultureinsports.com) is because, to paraphrase the famed late Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi, “culture in sports isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”

Lombardi claimed to have been misquoted in 1959, when he talked about “the will to win” being “the only thing,” as “winning is the only thing.” As it turns out, a less well-known football coach, UCLA’s Red Sanders was associated with “the only thing” phrase even before Lombardi. Perhaps any exercise to distill something as a complex or integrated as sports are to us as individuals and to society as a whole to a single “only thing,” is overly simplistic and destined to come up short.

So why then do I believe that culture in sports is not just everything but the only thing? Every day brings us winners and losers, Americans, especially, have even virtually eliminated the possibilities of ties. Like ‘pitching pennies,’ anyone can win, or lose, on a flip or a bounce. Sports matter to us not because someone wins every game. Sports matter because of what is learned, how that learning changes us as people, and as part of a larger society. All of these are indicators of culture.

Earlier this week on this site in “Throwing Chairs,” Jeremy Piasecki wrote about how harmful and counter-productive angry, emotional coaching can be… culture. Alexis Lupton explained the importance of “Using Sports as a Platform for Social Justice”… culture. Finally, Denise Harvey shared the story of field hockey athletes are pushing back against abuse…still more culture. We have a chance here to demonstrate that while winning and losing have value, they are as Rudyard Kipling- talk about a complicated potentially toxic legacy- correctly observed, two imposters to be treated the same. Victory is a neutral, not definitively a positive concept. Winning the war can be less significant than securing the peace after- the first World War teaches us that- at risk of mixing sport and war metaphors. The replicable difference between winning and losing comes in building a positive, embracing, and sustaining culture- in short, a moral and ethical culture.

Which brings us back to Lombardi, who was in many ways archetypal of the mid-20th Century American male, a blustery, wildly-emotive taskmaster. But he was also much more. As the dark-skinned son of Italian immigrants he understood prejudice in a blond, blue-eyed America. As a Catholic, he had experienced religious discrimination. He had a younger brother who was gay in the 1920s and 30s, so he even had insight into the struggles of gay people to find a place in a closed society, and was protective of gay players even in the 1960s. Lombardi’s Packers, like all great teams were great because they had a highly intelligent, inclusive, and forward looking culture- one that was greater than the sum of its parts.

Toxic cultures can be successful, certainly, but they seldom sustain for long, they can’t- see, the Bronx Zoo era NY Yankees of the 70s, the NY Mets and the Chicago Bears of the mid 80s- and the debris from their eventual crack up can take a long time to clean up. So my reason for being here is to help define the attributes of positive, sustaining, ethical culture in sports and shine a light on why this can make us better as humans, not just in sports, but in all we do.