The Thrill of Victory, and...?

Quick, finish that phrase! 

If you can, you're old like me. 

If not, it's part of the intro to one of the longest running shows in American television history, ABC's Wide World of Sports. 

Here is the intro's narration in its entirety, written by Stanley Ralph Ross, and read by Jim McKay:

Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sport... the thrill of victory... and the agony of defeat... the human drama of athletic competition... This is ABC's Wide World of Sports!

McKay's voiceover and its accompanying musical fanfare remained unchanged for most of the show's run from 1961 until 1998. The visuals, stock footage from sites around the world mixed with action shots of athletes from figure skaters to arm wrestlers to everything in between, were updated every year. 

Except for one clip.

It was the shot of ski jumper Vinko Bogotaj that illustrated the words: "the agony of defeat". Week after week, year after year, decade after decade, fans of the show saw Bogotaj losing control of his skis on the ramp just before he was about to make his jump. Instead of gracefully springing into the wild blue yonder like an eagle soaring off a cliff, his skis providing enough lift to keep him airborne for several seconds until he gently meets the hill below, Bogotaj tumbled off the ramp looking more like a bowling ball than an eagle, knocking down every stationary object in his way. 

If you've seen the clip, even only once, you've never forgotten it.

Here's a link to the 1974 iteration.

There may have been pedestrian reasons not to replace the clip for all those years. Maybe it was difficult convincing other athletes that it would be a good idea to allow footage of themselves screwing up used to illustrate defeat over and over again.

Or maybe the show's producers were sending us a message sticking with that clip of Bogotaj while all the other images of athletes experiencing the thrill of victory came and went. Could the message be that victory is fleeting while defeat is eternal? 

I don't know, I just made that up, kind of profound, isn't it? 

Consider this: in any sporting event, the honor of experiencing the thrill of victory only goes to one competitor, or team of them, while the agony of defeat is shared by many. In that sense, sports are kind of like life, only more so. 

Since I'm writing this the week before the Super Bowl, I have football on my mind, at least a little. The last few weeks of NFL playoffs featured many fantastic games that were competitive until the end, some of them won by three points or less. That means the difference in those games was one field goal. In at least three of those games leading up to the big game this Sunday, field goals not made were the deciding factor. Two of those were attempts missed by the kickers from Buffalo and Green Bay. The third was a field goal not attempted as the head coach of Detroit chose to "go for it" unsuccessfully on fourth down, rather than attempting a much less risky field goal and scoring the three points that go with it.

I propose that defeat is far more agonizing in team sports when the mistake of one member costs the team a victory, or at least the chance of one. Magnify that by at least one hundredfold and you might understand the pressure placed on the football kicker. While his teammates battle in the trenches fighting hand-to-hand combat against the defense, beating themselves up play after play trying to move the ball yard-by-yard into a position to score, the kicker sits and waits. If his teammates don't succeed in moving the ball past the goal line to score a touchdown for six points, the next best thing is to get within thirty or maybe forty yards. When and if that happens, the kicker has only one job, kick the ball between the goalposts for three points. Sounds simple, doesn't it?

Try it sometime.

It looks easy because professional football kickers are successful on average, about 90 percent of the time. If a FG attempt fails in the middle of a game as happened to the Green Bay and Buffalo kickers, hopefully there's time to make up for it. Consequently, there's usually not much public display of agony during a missed field goal, the game just goes on.

But when it happens at the end of a game, that's a different story. Some of the most famous football games in history including a few Super Bowls were decided by a field goal either made or missed in the last seconds.

Make it and you're the hero, miss it and you'd rather be swabbing the deck of a tramp steamer. 

Talk about the agony of defeat.

For me, one play along those lines stands out above the rest. It is known simply as the "double doink". The mere mention of those two words, or the name of the main player involved in the play is enough to drive any Chicago Bears fan into a deep state of melancholia.  

I won't go into much background, suffice it to say the opportunity to move on to the next round of the playoffs after their best season in years*, rested upon the foot of the team's kicker, Cody Parkey. 

Here is a link to the last play of consequence in the Chicago Bears' 2018-19 season. The call is from the Philadelphia Eagles' Spanish language announcer, Rickie Riccardo (I'm not kidding, that's really his name). You may not understand a word he's saying but the tone of his voice from the winning side, and the faces of the players and the head coach on the losing side, contrast the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat better than anything I can think of, with not a little humiliation thrown in for good measure.

If Wide World of Sports is revived and there is ever a need to redo the intro, I think Cody Parkey would be a noble successor to Vinko Bogotaj as the enduring symbol of agony.

There are many who claim that sports are a metaphor for life. There are probably an equal number who reject that assertion, after all, how many average people experience the kind of adulation bestowed upon a sports hero, or the public humiliation of an athlete whose mistake loses the big game for his or her team? But that's missing the point, the fact is, few professional athletes themselves are in a position to experience those things either. 

It's in the details I believe, where sports and real-life merge.  

For example, on the surface, every head-to-head athletic competition can be viewed as a zero-sum game, where you have one winner and at least one loser. But it goes much deeper than that. As much as sports like American football are often compared to war, (Check out George Carlin's brilliant comedy routine comparing baseball to football), in sports, the losers always live to play another day. 

What do running backs Barry Sanders, Gale Sayers, Eric Dickerson, quarterbacks Warren Moon, Dan Fouts, defensive linemen Deacon Jones, Merlin Olsen, the most intimidating tackler in the game, linebacker Dick Butkus, and perhaps the game's greatest wide receiver (before Jerry Rice came on the scene), Steve Largent have in common? They are all professional football Hall of Famers who have never won a championship. In a sense you could say great as they were as players, they were all perpetual losers. 

So obviously there is no shame in losing, it's an integral part of the game. 

What can we learn from that? 

One thing is that we have to look at the bigger picture. In football as in every other sport, the big picture is the Game itself. Teams don't exist in a vacuum, they depend on all the other teams to play against for their existence, otherwise, what would be the point? Teams depend upon the league to provide the structure in which to compete. And that structure depends upon a set of rules in which to play. 

Playing any sport or come to think of it, conducting any reasonable contest without rules that every participant agrees upon would be like a chess player knocking down all the pieces on the board in the middle of a game with the exception of his own king, then declaring himself the winner.

We have enough of that already in our society.

That's not to say the rules are always adjudicated correctly. Sometimes games are decided by bad calls. Check out this notoriously bad call, or more accurately, non-call. It was a foul that everyone in the world watching the game saw, except for the officials. Had a penalty (pass interference in case you're keeping score) been called as it should have, the New Orleans Saints would have been in a very advantageous position to win the game and move on to the Super Bowl. Instead sans call, regulation time ended with the game tied and the L.A. Rams won the game in sudden death overtime by you guessed it, kicking a field goal. Then THEY got the chance to lose to Tom Brady and the New England Patriots in the big game two weeks later. 

Yes the Saints protested and naturally got nowhere, even though the offending player received a fine from the league for his dirty play. It was a terrible no-call, perhaps one of the worst ever in a widely seen playoff game. But the league determined, rightly in my opinion, that it was nothing more than human error, pure and simple. Frustrating as that is, especially if your team is on the short end of the stick, that's part of the game as well.

The best we can do in situations like this is realize life isn't always fair, that the best team, ours of course, doesn't always win, brush ourselves off, and live to play another day, which of course is what they always do in New Orleans: laissez le bon temps rouler.

As with all sports, the Game is bigger than any one athlete or team. To illustrate that, tens of millions of football fans will gather this Sunday to watch a contest featuring two teams most of them are not fans of, as members of the team they root passionately for, having been long eliminated from competition, will also be watching. 

There are lots of reasons to watch the Super Bowl for people who are not football fans. It's an American ritual for starters. It's an excuse to get together with friends and family to have a party. There are the eagerly anticipated commercials, short films created just for the event that in some cases display remarkable creative talent of storyteller-artists, all in 60 seconds or less. There's the halftime show which in my opinion with the exception of one, Prince in 2007, usually sucks. This year there's the additional sideshow of hands down the world's most popular pop star at the moment who also happens to be the girlfriend of one of the players. She'll be there too.

Then on Monday morning, rest assured tens of millions of Americans will be discussing all that around the proverbial water cooler. 

And yes, there's the game itself, the ultimate achievement for any athlete who has ever stepped onto a gridiron wearing pads, cleats and a helmet. History has shown that it too is usually a disappointment, failing to live up to all the hype. We'll just have to wait and see this Sunday. **

Oh I almost forgot about the wagering, something that predates athletes wearing clothes when they perform their magic. 

For a few hours, at least a third of the country will be brought together to participate in a uniquely American ritual that has been around since 1967. 

We have few things to unite us these days and when we are united, it's usually over our mutual hatred of one thing or another, rather than our love of something. 

Maybe we should keep that in mind as we get together with our families, friends, colleagues and complete strangers to watch the game this Sunday, as football fans, and especially as Americans. 

Enjoy the game.

And go Bears!

Oh wait a minute...

 

CODA

*That 2018-19 season was the Chicago Bears' last winning season to date. Being a Chicago sports fan, and having unfortunately passed that trait on to my son, we both happen to know a little something about agony.

POSTSCRIPT

**Well it was a great game, perhaps a classic, at least after halftime. The Kansas City Chiefs beat the San Francisco 49ers, 25-22 in overtime in Super Bowl LVIII. Once again, a kicker's miscue factored into the result as Jake Moody of the 49ers missed a one-point conversion after his team scored a touchdown to take the lead with two minutes left in regulation. Had the kick been successful, SF would have been up 4 points meaning the Chiefs would have had to score a touchdown to get back into the game. Instead, they only needed a field goal to tie and force overtime, which they did. 

It could be argued that the KC offense as they say, was running on all eight cylinders by the end of the game, and could have scored a touchdown if they needed one. Moody's attempt was also blocked. Still, I bet he didn't sleep well last night, and will probably relive that moment at least until he gets back onto the field next season. 

Such is the life of a kicker.