Collateral Bloggage What passes for thought around here…

Ninja Warrior and Competition

Quick comment on the Super Bowl here.  Trivial Pursuit is better.

(We managed to miss the onside-kick that sparked the Saints’ getting back in the game.  DVR good.  And WTG, Saints.)

So it’s getting toward baseball season here, and I’m not just going to wax poetic about how much better baseball is than football, because there’s really little left to be said, and it’s so manifestly true.

No, instead I’d like to opine a bit about competition.  I often hear from other parents that they want their boy (I’m being boy-centric here, because I am one, and I have one) to be in a non-competitive league.  I.  Just.  Don’t.  Understand.  This.

Okay, so I do understand wanting to give kids a low-pressure way to experience sports.  And maybe it’s a good entry point, or a toes-in-the-water point for kids who probably aren’t wired for sports competition.

But I think there’s something we miss when we remove competition, and when all the kids get trophies.  As Dash put it in The Incredibles, after his mom (Elastigirl) commented that “everyone is special”:

“Which is the same as saying nobody’s special.”

Now, I’m all for rewarding effort and not just performance, and I can see the argument for a trophy being a good carrot to dangle, even if it’s not earned by performance so much as participation. 

But shouldn’t our kids be learning to lose well?  Learning that, hard as you try, you just might be on a pretty lousy team?  That it’s okay to lose if you tried your best?

The thing is, in teaching our kids about losing well, we also get to teach them how to win well.  And they learn how great it feels to win.

(Incidentally, this is why I generally don’t let the Boy win.  I want him to feel good when he beats me.  Though I do sometimes handicap myself to level the playing field.  But within those strictures, I still try to win.)

As I’ve written before, we’re big fans of Sasuke, known in America as Ninja Warrior.  It’s a lot like ABC’s Wipeout, only a hundred times cooler.

It’s basically the world’s toughest obstacle course, but it’s not just the obstacles that make it cool.  It’s the fact that they might go SEVEN YEARS WITHOUT A WINNER!!!!!

On Wipeout, there’s always a winner of the $50k prize.  Twenty-four start the competition, and one of them wins it.

On Ninja Warrior, one hundred people start the competition, and most of the time, one hundred are eliminated.  Sometimes only two or three even make it past Stage One (of Four).  Oh, and the prize is less than $20k.

And they keep making the course harder.  If you look back at the first winner (there have been two winners out of more than twenty competitions), his course was much easier than the second winner’s.

But of course, sometimes somebody does win.  For instance, The Pancake Eating Boy’s current hero, Makoto Nagano.  Here’s a video of him completing all four stages back on Sasuke 17 (the video lacks G4’s English translation, or you’d get the impression that the announcer has just as big a Man Crush on Nagano as The Boy does):

The Boy gets seriously emotionally invested in watching his Main Dude on Sasuke.  When Nagano fails, the Boy is very put out.

I think it says something about the Japanese that they’re willing to watch a competition that may not even have a winner and most of the time doesn’t.  (Strictly speaking, I think you could call the course itself the winner most of the time.)

But there’s another good lesson on Ninja Warrior, and that’s respect for your opponent.  It’s really cool to see the way all the contestants pull for each other.  Granted, they’re not really competing against each other, but it’s still awesome to watch how disappointed the All-Stars are when one of their ilk fails early.  Even cooler was when all the All-Stars were eliminated (Nagano fell on the first obstacle of Stage Two) and only American free-runner Levi Meeuwenberg was left standing.  They did their best to coach him through Stage Three (this time with English subtitles):

Am I off base (Shocking, eh?  Baseball term!) about competition?  I love the fact that the Boy’s Fall Ball team didn’t win any games last year.  It’ll make a winning experience all the more awesome.  Plus, it pulls a layer back so the experiences of individual games are the best parts.  Okay, so we didn’t win a game, but I made a great play at first base.  Or I scored two goals in a losing hockey game.

I could see how a kid could get spoiled by always being on a winning team, but how often does that really happen?  When I think back to my Little League days, I only remember being on one pretty good team (hmm…and I was the common element on all those lousy teams).  But that one winning year stands out as a highlight for me.

Thoughts?  I know this wasn’t a normal Monday post, but I haven’t written a lengthy non-theology post in some time.