Winning, Winning, Always Winning
When Charlie Sheen went batshit crazy and conducted his “Winning” media blitz in 2011, he wasn’t merely laying bare his own psychosis for public consumption, but also, I believe, giving voice to a fundamental strain of the American psyche; no-holds-barred competitiveness, or the rabid desire to be better than everyone else at everything. This partly explains the glee with which the American public consumed his antics - we related, in a way.
Well, I didn’t relate, really. I am just about the least competitive person I know. Maybe this is because I am, as Terry Lennox called Marlowe at the end of The Long Goodbye, “a born loser”. But it's mostly because I feel as though there is something ugly and unhealthy about our pervasive win-at-any cost attitude. Apart from my beyond-all-reason hopes that the Dodgers will one day win another World Series, any sense of competitive spirit I ever had has been beaten down and drained through years and years of false hopes and dashed expectations, not to mention my own weird self-limiting personality disorder.
This wasn’t the case in 1988, though. In those days I got all worked up over the Speech and Drama tournaments I regularly competed in, and in 1988 my teammates and I took our school play “Voices From The High School” to the district tournament, where we competed against a handful of other one-act plays presented by other schools.
On the way up to the tournament we listened to The Modern Lovers. “Pablo Picasso” was a favorite, with its description of Pablo Picasso walking down the street making girls turn the color of an avocado, hypnotizing them with his stare, all despite being only five foot three. Never getting called an asshole. Which might be another way of saying that Pablo Picasso was a winner.
Our school’s play consisted of an assortment of vignettes concerning the traditional teenage rites of passage and temptations, dealing with drugs and sex and depression. My role was a bit of comic relief, positioned at the end to alleviate the heaviness of the rest of the play (just before my slot, Elliot had a monologue about his character’s attempted suicide. It was cheery.) I played a kid who’s hired at a department store as a janitor but ends up playing Santa Claus for the Christmas crowd. For some reason, I gave the character a cigarette as a prop. Well, it was a piece of paper rolled up to look like a cigarette. I guess I did this because I thought it made the character seem rebellious, and therefore even less suited to play Santa Claus. I remember some consternation among my classmates about this choice, being as how it wasn’t in the script. But I was dead set on sticking with the choice and I eventually won the director’s approval. I had guts back then. Determination. I was a winner, dammit!
So was Max. During the delivery of his monologue he was required to catch a basketball thrown to him by someone off-stage, a move that the none-too-athletically-inclined Max pulled off effortlessly through dozens of rehearsals and school performances. Of course, during the District tournament performance the throw went wild, bounced of Max, and rolled off the front of the stage. In a moment of amazing calm and quick wittedness, and perhaps with some of Pablo Picasso’s cool under pressure in mind, Max pulled off an admirable bit of improvisation. His catch was supposed to coincide with the words “around the world”. So when the ball went awry he stretched that dialogue out to “Around the…county…the city….the state…the country…the world…why, the whole universe!” all as he walked down the steps to the side of the stage and went to retrieve the ball. Winning!
Meanwhile, I had neglected to bring the pillows that made Santa fat, which I did not realize until the play was in progress. Convinced that my forgetfulness was going to ruin the play, I fretted backstage as the play went on. Of course, the lack of pillows only made the Santa incongruously skinny, which enhanced the character’s comic plight. Even when winners screw up, they still win.
The best part of tournaments was waiting around after the competition was over for the awards ceremony. There’s that weird mixture of being able to relax after you’ve done all the work, combined with the buzz of expectation for the ceremony, which to us may as well have been the damn Academy Awards.
And wouldn’t you know, our team actually got to do some intense celebrating. Our play took top honors as best one-act. It really was a thrill when the announcement came. The reaction was so genuinely excited, so loud and overpowering, that the sheer spontaneous purity makes it hard to be cynical about it even now, years after my antipathy towards winning has been fully ingrained.
Maybe I got my fill of winning back then. Maybe that one big win was enough for me, and I just haven’t felt the need for any more since then.
Around the time of our District victory Kirk Gibson appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Gibson had recently signed a free-agent contract with the Dodgers. The article relayed the story of the notoriously intense Gibson storming off the field after a teammate had put eye-black around the rim of his cap as a practical joke. Gibson didn’t find it funny, and he let everyone in the clubhouse know that he wasn’t going to tolerate the kind of high-jinks that led the team to a 79-83 record the previous year. Kirk Gibson wanted to win.
Maybe that’s the way we all ought to be all the time. Survival of the fittest – or the winningest – and all that. Or maybe the idea of winning is a kind of false hope, a momentary escape. An illusion that steels us against the cold harsh inevitability of death.
Eh, who cares. I don’t. But I would still like to see the Dodgers win another World Series, either way.
