We Are...

I watched the first half plus of the Penn State/Oregon football game this past Saturday. The stakes could not have been higher. It was the game of the week for the television viewing audience. It was played at Penn State during a white out with 120,000 fans mostly from Penn State. The expectation was that finally Penn State would win one against a top ten team as they were ranked third and Oregon was ranked sixth. I viewed most of it until just after half time with Oregon dominating the game. I didn’t see the comeback that Penn State made, or the interception thrown by their highly touted quarterback, Drew Allar, which ended the game with Oregon winning after double overtime.

There were many “We are Penn State”  shouted throughout the game. It was a perfect example of fans identifying completely with the loss. The team lost but the fans lost as well.

The reaction from the fans postgame were brutal both verbally and online. It was outrage that we have seen too often from sports fans. Both men and women students were unified in their attacks of Franklin. Fans called for Coach James Franklin to be fired. But something else happened that I had not seen before. Coach Franklin’s wife went online to write, “Please be more kind to my husband as he has been dealing with serious mental health problems.” He makes 8.5 million dollars a year. But he was paying a high price for being the leader of a team where he was making a lot of money. He was a high-profile coach! I have written often about the statement, “We are all paying a price? Everyone! Is it worth it? Is it worth it to (in this case win) or empower a person as a leader empowers a community to be better or to be instruments of love and justice?

That price is not often seen in an obituary but is spoken at the services for someone who has died.

The Penn State loss is a metaphor describing our lives and our country’s focus on winning, but seldom does it pay attention to the price people are paying along with the journey of everyday people as well as leaders. We had an athletic director at EA who facetiously would say before a competition that “I am with you win or tie!” That slice of humor could be the truth of it all.

We focus and see the result. We don’t see what it takes to get to the “win”. We don’t see Franklin’s stress and endless effort for someone that strives for the win which often implies chasing perfection.

I grew up in a win at all cost culture. Competition entered my life at an early age. I had a football coach who was a former marine who would yell I want to see blood when a particularly vicious drill was not violent enough for him. My walls at Berkeley at Yale had slogans posted all over it like, “Play like a champion today!” “Winning isn’t everything. It is the only thing!” “Winners never quit, and quitters never win!”

My classmates at Berkeley at Yale thought I came from another world. In a real way I did.

We assume that the culture that we are raised in is the culture that exists for everyone.

It took me awhile to become more tuned in and interested in the back stories of people more so than results of wins over others. We always take our culture where we grew up with us.

We knew the back story of James Franklin regarding his mental health challenges, but what did people know about Coach Dan Lanning of Oregon. He came up through the ranks starting as a high school coach, then through coaching at various universities before arriving at Oregon. Most people know this, but what few people don’t know is that his wife had osteosarcoma of her knee and had surgery and rigorous chemotherapy while he worked and took care of his three young children. It was that which reshaped his life, faith, and coaching.

When running, I still tried to catch people as they blew by me even though they were younger and in better shape. It made no sense. When I was at Duke Medical School in group therapy, one of my supervisors called me into his office and indicated that he and I were alike, ultra-competitive, but seeing me in the group, he wanted me to know that to help others I had to rein that part of me in a bit. When I was on the staff of a church in Swarthmore, one of my colleagues refused to play tennis with me anymore because I played as though my life depended on winning. He was playing to enjoy the game.

My personal experience with cancer and death in my own family changed my view of life, faith, and taking care of what is important to others. I still have the competitive nature, but I have been enriched not by winning, but by being trusted with the back stories of others. It is a privilege to be trusted with those. I learned about the Tree of Sorrows that in the next life we can walk around that tree and put our sorrows on it with the caveat that we must take another person’s  sorrows from it. After we walk around it, we choose to take our sorrows off it.

Perhaps we should put above the entrances to Penn State’s Stadium what is above the entrance that is the last thing competitors see before they take the court at Wimbledon. It is a quote from Rudyard Kipling’s poem, If, “If you could meet triumph and disaster and treat these two imposters the same…”  I would add just one brief line to be below this. I am a Christian, but no matter what your faith there is a statement that complements Kipling’s words and points to something that I think Lanning and Franklin both have experienced, “Does this path have heart?” Remember that we shake hands with our opponents for thanking them for the opportunity to compete, something that not everyone has.