Twenty-one and a half years ago, the world witnessed one of the greatest baseball games that ended one of the greatest World Series ever played. The 2001 New York Yankees lost the World Series in the bottom of the ninth inning, missing the chance to win a fourth straight World Series and conclude a dynasty with a championship. The Arizona Diamondbacks, in only their fourth year of existence, were champions, and needed just 48 months to do it. The athletes had given so much that the actual winner of that Series remains to this day secondary to the gift of its existence. In the clubhouse postgame, the defeated Yankees captain Derek Jeter encapsulated it all his way, by repeating the mantra he first used in 1997, and would repeat in each of the following years until 2009 — and for five more years when he retired. “If we don’t win the World Series,” Jeter said, “the season’s a failure.”
Two decades later, there is a shift in the perception of the athlete’s mission, from complete victory to philosophy. The considerations of mental health, work-life balance, political world view, and labor relations have provided ample grist for the culture wars that undergird the anger over players having the agency to reshape their working conditions. Players in individual sports are taking time away from the sport and then returning at their pace, and female athletes are having children without announcing their retirements. The professional athlete can be General Patton or the Dalai Lama. Male players once ridiculed and culturally ostracized by fans, teammates, and their own front offices for even thinking about family during the season now take paternity leaves — even during the playoffs. From Serena Williams to Naomi Osaka to Angelique Kerber, female athletes are having children without announcing their retirements. Simone Biles lost her way athletically, and a generally compassionate sports public has given her all the time she needs to rediscover it.
The Absolutism of Sports and Reevaluating Success and Failure
Sports have always existed in the world of “winner/loser, hero/goat, do/die” binary. The absolutism has been just as essential to the framework of creating the athlete colossus as militaristic cliches are to raising the stakes of this battle fantasy. It stokes the mythology, gives it the requisite dramatic components, allows us to separate the poor from the exceptional and the exceptional from the legendary. The players who embrace the binary ally themselves with fans in the suggestion that they care as much about winning as the ticket buyers. It buys them the currency of protection. Under no circumstances is Milwaukee Bucks superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo ever a failure in life, comparing his Greek-Nigerian upbringing and the prospects for him as a child against the life he now lives. There is not a day in his life, from now until the end, when he is not a winner.
The Boston Bruins won more games in a regular season than any team in the storied history of the National Hockey League. They had an unprecedented season in their home building, losing only seven times, four in regulation. They amassed more points than any team in history, and like the Bucks, lost in the first round of the postseason. The Bruins were the No. 1 overall seed heading into the Stanley Cup playoffs. They lost three games at home to the Florida Panthers. They lost a 3-1 lead in games. In a Game 5 home elimination game, the Bruins never led. In a Game 6 elimination game, they lost two third-period leads and eventually the game. In the Game 7 clincher at home, the Bruins led with 60 seconds left in the game — and lost in overtime. Was the Bruins’ regular season a failure? Of course not, but nor was it a coin toss where sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains. The way the hockey season ended in Boston was a colossal disappointment.
Giannis Antetokounmpo challenged the Jeter position, which always felt like an unrealistic pander to the ridiculousness that is the overwrought and unrealistic expectation by Yankees fans, for only one team wins the final game of the season. The wonders and discoveries of a season cannot be negated by not winning a championship. By these metrics, the team that doubles its win total from the season before is a failure, as is the team that makes the playoffs for the first time in 25 years, as is the team that started the season losing its first 10 games but finished 10 games over .500, as is the team that discovered it had a future Hall of Famer on its roster. Thirty teams, 29 failures.
If the fear is that Antetokounmpo’s ability to put his life in the proper perspective will undermine the gladiatorial fantasy and its accompanying clichés of warriors, intestinal fortitudes, clutch genes, and all the other rhetorical nonsense sports relies upon so desperately, then it is a fear that will be largely unfounded for two primary reasons. First, for every Giannis, there remains a Jeter — and an enormous, enraged subsection of the fanbase that is never in the mood after crashing out of the playoffs for metaphysical analysis. Second, although Giannis might have been measured in how he spoke of his season ending, he emerged with even more respect because, for all of his mature perspectives, there was nothing in his play charging him with an athlete’s greatest crime: playing as if he doesn’t care. He simply recognized publicly and without cliché, that losing is an inevitability that cannot and should not reduce a six-month journey into meaninglessness, even if — as seen in Milwaukee and Boston
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