Mary Pilon - Losers: Dispatches from the Other Side of the Scoreboard

The locker rooms of winners are crowded. There are coaches, staff, family, friends, and strangers who have managed to slip past security guards; there are the players themselves, who seem suddenly to fill the room more fully than they did before. And there are reporters, flocks of them, ready to record the moment. How did it happen? How does it feel to be a winner?

The locker rooms of losers are desolate and awkward. The players are somber, quiet; some shrink into the stalls. People avoid eye contact, keep their distance, as if losing is a contagious infection. There are a few beat reporters on hand, dutifully getting the quotes to file the local story, but they tread carefully and leave quickly, if theyre there at all.

That is a mistake.

Victory brings us closer to a fleeting kind of transcendence, but losing reveals something raw about what it means to be human. Everyonefrom world champions to the last kid picked on the playgroundhas known defeat. Yet loss is an intensely private, specific, and isolating experience, ironically when people may need connection and community the most. I often wonder what other fighters feel, and what goes through their minds when they lose, the boxer Floyd Patterson said to Gay Talese, who is one of the few journalists to mine the rich stories of defeat. Ive wanted so much to talk to another fighter about all this, to compare thoughts, to see if he feels some of the same things Ive felt. But who can you talk to?

So they often stay silent. Yet these are the experiences that may tell us the most. Losing, after all, exposes the dynamics of expectation and pressure in society and reveals the cost of persistence and perseverance. Some have trained their whole lives for a single moment, and they are left withwhat? Often a blend of guilt, humiliation, anger, and anxiety. Losing forces a person to account for the past and revise the future. It puts pressure on friendships, coaching relationships, teammates, families. The win that didnt happen can be haunting, making this book, in some respects, a collection of ghost stories. When the pursuit of some goal is gone, people are left with themselves.

The most prominent examples of defeat come, of course, from athletes who seek glory at the highest levels. For some, like LeBron James, who has a losing record in NBA Finals, losses are fodder for arguments about how to evaluate greatness. For others, like Ralph Branca, the pitcher who gave up the home run to Bobby Thomson in 1951 that completed the Giants improbable comeback to win the National League pennant, defeat is so operatic that it achieves its own kind of immortality. But for others, losing means a kind of erasure. Not many people know the name Jeremy Taiwo, who finished second to Ashton Eaton, the greatest decathlete of all time. For some, like the sailor Kevin Hall, losing can open doors that are long kept shut. Some struggle with a sense of embarrassment or disbelief. Losing, after all, can be taboosomething to be covered up or finessed.

For an athlete, of course, it can be particularly intense, but even fans feel the loss of their favorites with a fierce and personal kind of pain, and even shame. Boston may be enjoying a glut of championships, but for a long time, it wasas its residents knew too wella losers town. Likewise Philadelphia, where being a Phillies fan was, for decades, an exercise in humiliation. For some fans, loss could be even more literalas fans of Wimbledon FC learned when their football team was sold and moved. And those losses can, in turn, connect to other lossesthe loss of a place, the loss of childhood, the loss of a father.