The Art of Sporting: His (Far From) Holiness George Huitker’s 17.5 Steps Towards Contentment and Fulfilment On Match Days.
1) Remember to stay happy. Sport has enough constipation associated with it as it is. It need not be life and death - sort those issues out away from the sportsfields. If you don’t enjoy it, it’s hardly recreation. Note that if you think sport is more than recreation you are heading into dangerous waters. Monitor yourself.
2) Remember that the people who have just beaten you in a measly game are not that much better or bigger in the grander scheme of things. They will eventually get beaten when they move out of the small pool into the larger one with bigger, nastier, niftier fish. (South American ponds are particularly scary.) When they come back to the small pool, it will be with scars.
3) Remember to look behind a result. There is always something immensely valuable to be gained from even the smallest or hugest loss. You generally learn more from losses than you do from wins. Loss is a wonderful mechanism for keeping us all honest as well. Loss - and coping with it - is an integral part of the game ... and life. So if you are in a Superteam and spending too much energy trying to avoid loss (by recruiting better players or just quitting) rather than gaining in skills, strategy and character - both your own and your team’s - then something will bite you in the bum very shortly.
4) Remember that if you have a son/daughter in a team or you are involved in representative circles or “academy” programs you will lose a certain amount of objectivity and perspective when coming to terms with success or the lack of it. Talk regularly with someone outside of your chosen sport. Ask them frequently if you’ve lost the plot.
5) Remember that the truly successful know how to win with high degrees of humility and grace. A loser is someone who calls someone else a loser.
6) Remember that you can be champions without winning anything. You just need to redefine and reframe what you are setting out to achieve in more realistic goals.
7) Remember that to be an astute analyist of why you are not succeeding at something can be a more valuable trait than being an avid listener to why you are succeeding. As Norman Vincent Peale wrote in The Power of Positive Thinking, “Most people would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism”.
8) Remember always to keep things in perspective. When feeling sorry for yourself because of sport simply do a charitable, selfless activity (preferably with teammates) for those less fortunate. Your mental attitude at the following fixture will have improved tenfold because you’ll feel better about yourself for helping others. If a team engages in a charitable act together, they will be more cohesive and unified as a result.
9) Remember Mary Oliver’s maxim that the real work is to look and listen. The sweet stuff of life will then naturally follow.
10) Remember to stay with your club. When things are going wrong in your life, you need your friends to be there for you. Similarly, clubs need their members to do something significant for them when at crisis points rather than whinge, complain, tantrum, pontificate and quit in a big fat huff, without even slightly attempting to solve the problem/s. Clubs, like people, deserve a second chance. Give them that much.
11) Remember not to complain without doing something about it. Instead, coach/manage a team yourself, get a referee’s badge and officiate at a few games whenever you can, or do some late-night reading/research on how to improve skills, defence, attack, etc. and share it with the coach. Gain an understanding of the finer points of the offside rule. Otherwise shut your big fat mouth.
12) Remember that the messages you provide throughout a junior player’s sporting life can govern, influence and change the sort of player and person they become. Set a good example so that when a youngster develops grey matter they will remember you fondly.
13) Speaking of grey matter, remember that Eric Cantona once said, “When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea”. David Beckham desired his kids to be christened, but wasn’t sure into which religion. Stuart Pearce spoke of the carrot at the end of the tunnel. Alan Shearer once bragged that nobody could accuse him of giving 100% at every game. Sigh. We need to provide for our kids heroes and role models who have nothing to do with professional sport. Sport professionals are generally too driven by success and focussed on themselves to say anything remotely wise, sensibile, sensitive, intelligent or lasting.
14) Remember that Gregory Peck believed that “it takes ten pictures to make a star”. Significant development and improvement will come with experience, rarely within one or two seasons. So forget about short-term achievements if you want success to be anything more than temporal.
15) Remember that it is better to be remembered as a person than as a player. It is better to be remembered for deeds rather than for antics. Be noteworthy rather than notorious.
16) Remember that success has very little to do with victory, except in a temporal sense. It has everything to do with accurately defining happiness, making correct and humane choices, embracing a kaizen philosophy of development and living your sporting and non-sporting lives with consideration for things other than your own raw and aching needs.
17) Remember to play to affirm your life rather than change it. Juggle for joy. Not for a contract.
17.5) Now who’s for a round of If You’re Happy and You Know It Clap Your Hands...??? One, two, three...
(Taken from George Huitker’s How to Succeed Without Really Winning, Ginninderra Press, 2005.)
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