[Excuse the (lack of) narrative here - just processing tonight.]
Okay, hokey title, but my team just lost. No, I didn’t play, but I very well might have been. Tonight my high school alma mater came as close as they’ve ever been to winning the CIF title. And lost it with 1.97 seconds left. The other team outplayed them in the second half, came from behind and scored when it mattered most. [Huge freaking long sigh.]
I am hesitant (verging on embarrassed) to admit that I am devastated tonight. (1) I graduated almost a decade ago, and have scarcely paid attention to the sport since then, jumping in the pool once or twice a year, (2) it is certainly not my team, and not my defeat tonight – there are young men who suffer much more acute defeat tonight, (3) it just sounds corny, maybe because of the relative unpopularity of water polo, maybe because of the juxtaposition of words like “strength, glory, victory, defeat” next to words like “water polo.” Regardless, my gut hasn’t settled yet.
I remember taking defeat pretty hard – being unable to get outside of the raw, desolate emotion of loss – back when I played. My team in 2001 was the best Vista High had for decades: we lost in the CIF quarterfinals, taking 5 overall. The feelings of playing your last high school water polo game surged back into my senses tonight – I felt the same tension in my gut that I used to feel at the beginning of each game, in the seconds before the sprint, as I ducked under the water to pray for stamina, victory and the determination to give everything to those 28 minutes.
Further, I was excited for this game. The burden of papers and finals and work and, well, everything took back seat tonight as I cheered for my team.
And now, in the wake of defeat, I have a perspective I couldn’t afford back when I was a player, in the heat of the game. I’m more pensive now about the experience of lactic exhaustion, and constant back-and-forth, and counter attack, and stalwart defense when you’re down a man, and the weight of three men on your shoulders as you set hole for the chance for one backhand just to make the first pass to the goalie on the other team’s next drive.
Coach Spence always told us, “Water polo is a thinking man’s sport.” Now that I’m beset and haunted by philosophical reflection on just about everything, tonight I see that it truly is a thinking man’s sport. I’m proud to have played it, and I suspect that it is one of the better sports to exemplify the glory of competition in athletics. It is so hard to play water polo well. It is just so hard.
I’d thought recently about my general excitement for this year’s team; and even then felt a bit embarrassed. I said to myself, I says, “You’re like that Dad – the stereotypical, paradigm case, washed-up Dad pressuring his son to achieve the glory that he (maybe never) did.” I was wondering, for guys like me who leave the sport after high school (but it applies equally to just anyone who eventually stops playing any sport, at any time in their lives), what is left of glory, now that I am an ordinary man, leading (what feels like) a much quieter, more ordinary, sober life? There is so much more to life than water polo, or any sport, but a cliche like that is incredibly untrue to the loser of a battle like tonight’s. There is, it in fact seems, to the water polo player, nothing more than this defeat. And it will remain. And it will sting. And it will stay for a long time. Or so it in fact seems. But it is precisely this seeming – this phenomenon of the dire importance of that game played, and lost – the heaving experience of your best being not quite enough for that match-up – that I think is more significant and meaningful and life-giving than a cliche like “There’s more to life than [blank]” could ever reveal. But the clarity – the lights – to see that in the moment (and now some hours after; and even some years or decades after) is fleeting and elusive. The glory is crushingly real (even and especially for the high school water polo player), I think. The sweet incredibility of victory, the utterly disbelieving shock of defeat. It all offers us – the players and coaches who put in so much loving pain, loving sweat, and loving desire – a brief glimpse and a fond memory of what it was to skirt the edges of human limitation, finitude and achievement.
