Of course, we've also lost all four of them. Yesterday we managed to clinch a losing record. The losing part doesn't really matter, as long as we have a good time, but it definitely does remind me of my past history with organized sports.
Or, to put it another way: organized sports teams I've been on have managed to fight their way to a combined (and this is just a rough guess, trying to estimate the number of games in a season -- counting the wins is no problem) 10-77 record. That's two wins in four years of pee-wee baseball, two wins in two years of elementary school (seventh and eighth grade) basketball, two wins against the Koala in Guardian-Koala softball games, and four wins in UCSD intramurals.
This means half of the wins I've ever been involved with were in Innertube Water Polo. You get some idea about the incredibly success I've had.
They say losing builds character. I hope that's true. The only other person who experience such depths of losing was an elementary school friend of mine whom I haven't seen in years. He and I played on the pee-wee baseball team and the elementary school basketball team together.
It's all made me understand about how great competition is. But it's also taught me to savor winning.
Really, I've been told that winning's not the most important thing. That's how the platitude goes, anyway. But when you're the first baseman for the Columbia Pee-Wee Braves and you're in third grade and you've lost 30 games or so in a row, winning feels mighty good.
How good? I can't explain it. I have the feeling winning means more to me, in some ways, that it means to other people. Maybe if you lose too much, your character starts being taken away again.
When I play, I really want to win. Especially because the 10 times it's happened, it's been a really good feeling. An incredible feeling. When the pee-wee Braves beat the Standard Indians (yes, I was in third grade, and I still remember it), I ran over to that friend of mine and we hugged and jumped up and down. We were crying -- the whole team was.
After a long losing streak, winning no longer seems to be "a job well done" -- something routine, something where you pat your teammates on the back and head for home. It becomes much more. Winning becomes nothing more than some impossible dream, one that probably can't be reached.
And when you do finally win one, like we did on that dusty field in the old logging town of Standard -- the field where cows grazed on the other side of the outfield fence -- it seems like you've beaten the universe. The Indians probably looked at us and shrugged. Big deal, they probably though. It's just one game. We'll win next week.
But we knew that we probably weren't going to win next week, or the week after that. Chances were good that we were going to lose every game by a large margin. And we did.
But we had won one game -- we had done the unthinkable. It didn't matter what the score was, or who scored the runs. All that mattered was that we had done something that nobody -- including ourselves, our families, or our coaches -- though we could do.
And so when I play any game, even Guardian intramural softball games, I just think back 12 years -- to that dusty infield next to a cow pasture. We were a bunch of crying kids, bawling over winning one little baseball game.
To us, the ones who had tried hard so many times, who had put everything they had into playing but had come up short, this was the best thing in the world. We couldn't believe it, but we had finally done the impossible. We had won.
So the Guardian team lost again yesterday. So what? Losing's no big deal.
Winning -- now, that's special.