My wife and I are, for better or worse, fans of Gordon Ramsey, the foul-mouthed, charismatic, and decidedly non-vegan-friendly celebrity chef. We enjoy all of his various programs produced for the BBC and American television, and last night took in the conclusion of his silly but eminently watchable Hell’s Kitchen. Following the model of so many reality shows, Hell’s Kitchen follows fifteen contestants as they compete for a spot as an executive chef at a new Ramsey restaurant. One contestant is eliminated each week, and last night saw the final two engage in a very close competition before one was selected. It was very tense and exciting — and even if much of that tension is manufactured and much of the excitement is manipulated, I enjoyed it thoroughly.
The final two contestants, a man named Petrozza and a woman named Christina, seemed to like each other. They were not hostile or unpleasant towards each other, but each obviously wanted to win very badly. And watching them balance genuine affection with tremendous competitiveness was, for me, quite moving. I found the relationship between these two final contestants to be the most intriguing — and bittersweet — part of the entire show.
What last night’s episode got me thinking about was the pain of competition, and how long it took me to accept the inevitability of going up against another person for a prize only available to one.
When I was a child, frankly, I hated competing at anything I thought I was good at. I was happy enough to play most sports, because there were very few physical games at which I was any good. As long as I wasn’t teased too badly for my lack of athletic prowess, I was content to play team sports at school. (I didn’t discover whatever small talent I had for running until I was in my twenties.) The only games I became good at were table tennis and croquet; in my family, these were the two main “sports” played by the younger generation at our large clan gatherings. And I discovered, particularly with “ping-pong”, that I didn’t like winning.
I remember the first time I bested a friend of mine in a long game (it ended something like 25-23). I was perhaps ten or eleven years old. When I won, I saw the disappointment in his eyes — and I was devastated. I promptly threw the next game, but did it so obviously that he got even angrier with me. Over the years, I got craftier at losing. Sometimes, of course, I was beaten outright. (Including more than once by my very talented father.) But other times, I did deliberately throw the game, often by attempting deliberately unlikely shots that displayed a lot of effort but which were almost guaranteed not to produce a satisfactory result. I got pleasure out of trying to make the other person believe that they had won fair and square, and I got better and better at this people-pleasing deception as my adolescence wore on.
My senior year of high school, however, brought me face-to-face with cruel reality. We had a very small advanced German language program at the school, and only a handful of seniors were genuinely fluent in the tongue. The local Monterey Peninsula chapter of the Foreign Affairs Council offered a generous scholarship to a graduating senior with an expertise in each of the main European languages. Teachers were to nominate two students in each language, and the council would read our essays (in both English and German) and interview us (again, bilingually.) My German teacher, Frau Daly, nominated me and a fellow senior named Suzanne.
Suzanne and I were friends. Suzanne was especially close to my girlfriend at the time, and we had been on some double dates together a few times. We were the two most promising seniors in the German program, but I knew that while Suzanne had a bit more oral fluency than I, my writing and interviewing skills were better. The competition process dragged on for a month, a month during which Suzanne and I sat together in class every day. Suzanne told me one day, without (I think) trying to be manipulative, that she really wanted the scholarship badly. “I know you want it too, Hugo”, she said; “I really wish there were two of them.” I fervently agreed.
The night before the final interview, I came home from school with a strong sense that I was going to win the award. And I knew that if I won the award, Suzanne would be bitterly disappointed. Rather than focus on preparing for what would be a tough interview in the two languages, I began to panic, thinking about how awful it would be for Suzanne if she lost. I finally went into my mother’s study, nearly in tears, and told her I wanted to call Frau Daly and drop out of the competition. “I don’t want to win if it means hurting other people”, I told my Mom. “I’d rather Suzanne get this than me, really; I think she wants it more than I do.”
My mother was, to her great credit, very understanding. She did not ridicule me for a lack of competitive spirit. But she told me, gently, that as I moved forward in my academic career I would be competing, over and over again, for finite commodities. She told me about her application for her tenured teaching job at Monterey Peninsula College, and about the other applicants whom she knew against whom she had been pitted. “Competition is painful”, my mother said, “but it is part of life. Remember that all you have to do is your best, and you let the committee make the decision. Diminishing yourself to do what you think is helping someone else hurts everyone in the long run. After all, do you really think Suzanne would be happy if she found out you pitied her?”
Put that way, I rethought the decision to drop out. I went off to the interview, did my best, and as I expected, won the scholarship. The day after the contestants were notified, I came to school terrified to see Suzanne. What would I say? What could I say? Bless her heart, the girl was immensely generous in defeat. She came over to me as soon as she saw me, hugged me, and whispered “Congratulations. I’m happy for you, really I am.” I looked in her eyes and saw tears, and then I felt my own tears well up. We cried together, the one and only time I let myself cry publicly in high school. (After a few brutal junior high experiences, I had learned to force myself to hold back tears until I was alone.) I only saw Suzanne a few times after graduation; we went off to different colleges. We haven’t spoken in over twenty years, but I’ve never forgotten her.
Nor have I forgotten the painful lesson I learned. There are only so many prizes, so many championships, so many awards available. Some things in this broken world are finite. One of the many reasons why I was such a devout socialist in high school and college was out of a moral objection to brutal competition. Better that all have a little than some have much and others none — that was my reasoning then, and it is often still my emotional reasoning now. My left-wing politics were connected not only to a strong sense of justice but to a horror at the idea of living in a world where one person’s victory must mean another’s defeat. Little wonder that the only sport I’ve ever enjoyed competing in, distance running, is the sport of the single athlete competing against the clock rather than against another human being. And when I play ping-pong now, even in my forties, I still have to fight the tendency to “throw” a game when I am matched against a weaker opponent.
Watching Christina and Petrozza last night, and in particular, seeing their obvious affection for each other in the midst of their desperate competition, brought back painful memories of competing with Suzanne for that damned scholarship all those years ago. I know that competition often brings out the best effort in people. I know that in a world of limited goods, some competition is essential for survival and success. I’ve learned to compete at many things, and most of the time, when I’ve really wanted something, I’ve gotten it. But I will say that I have never, ever, ever enjoyed these battles. I’ve cried as many tears in victory as I have in defeat. Something of my soul gets lost every time I compete at any game where one person wins and another loses, whether those games were athletic or academic or economic.
I’ve won more often than I’ve lost, and forgiving myself for the victories has been harder than comforting myself in defeat. I know that there are other people — yes, even men — out there who feel much the same.
I never really allowed myself to be competitive growing up, which I expect was part of my perfectionism/fear of failure, but I understand what you’re saying about hating to win. I also like your point about running, it reminds me of why I like to sail so much. In sailing, you are competing against yourself and nature as much as the person in the next boat over, and if you win, sometimes it’s down to strategy, and sometimes it’s down to luck. You can’t take all the “blame” for winning, and you can always soften your loss by trying to learn from your mistakes.
Coming from someone who was never competitive, it was interesting to finally discover why some people like it so much - there’s something very intoxicating and I think a bit savage about doing all you can to win. This is probably why I set very clear parameters for when and where I can be competitive. I find excessive competitiveness both threatening and obnoxious. I often feel that competitive people should be as deliberate in “turning it off” as I am in “turning it on.”
I never tried to be athletic when I was living at home. I think I carved that part out because that was my brother’s area. I didn’t want to compete with him and win in the area that he claimed as his own. My brother is bigger than I am, very competitive, but more emotionally fragile than I am. Losing seems to hurt him more. He dwells on comparisons more than I do. So I deliberately didn’t step on the field. Which was probably not good for me (long term health wise and team dynamic developmentally), even if if made our home life easier while we lived together.
As adults, we bought roller-blades together and tried them out that evening, and he was so angry that he fell, and that I didn’t, that he didn’t put the blades back on again to my knowledge. I continued to roller-blade for years, until a muscle imbalance in my left knee forced me to give up blading.
Hugo,
touching story and interesting glimpse into your thinking.
Interestingly, my main concern with much of the muddled modern leftist “justice” thinking is precisely what you point out drew you to it: the diffuse belief that there is something inherently immoral about winning and something inherently moral about losing… ever watched “Seabiscuit”?
Great post Hugo. You got great advice about this from your mother, and I’m sure she would be proud of the man you’ve become.
Thanks, STF. Livy, I hear you — my second wife was much like Kate’s brother — an incredibly competitive woman. We couldn’t run together after a while (the least of our problems.) Everything had to be a bloody race.
Sam, I have seen Seabiscuit. And I’ve grown to accept competition as a necessary evil, mind you. I still think that a great many of society’s winners and losers have their fates determined by factors well beyond their control. Then again, one of the joys of being an animal rights activist, to be incredibly candid, is that I can advocate for those who have so little agency. Animals are never architects of their own adversity as humans so often are.
Touching and great post Hugo. I never allowed myself to be competitive while growing up either and behaved similar to you. Actually, I think I was taught to be more self-sacraficing and my competitive urges were probably stifled. I’d rather cooperate and be accepted by the group than pay the higer price of alienation. I recognized that I paid too high a price. As an adult, I’ve had to unlearn behaviors which were not serving me well. Yet, I’ve always preferred activities where I am self-competitive. rather than group activities. I can’t think of any good examples of people that I’ve met who I respected who were competitive in the sense that you speak of on the show. Most people I’ve experienced in competitions were poor losers and brutal competitors (dirty fighters)–they didn’t engender either trust or respect, unlike the self-competitive types that I’ve met.
Sam, yes, I’ve seen Seabiscuit (several) times as well as read the book. I’ve also seen the movie about Phar Lap, Australia’s legendary champion. I love horses, but I have little respect for the racing industry.
Hugo, I was wondering reading this how much experience you had growing up with losing (I’m not sure if I saw that clearly), really I mean losing at things that you really cared about and wanted to win. You said that you were always okay competing at sports you weren’t good at because you didn’t care if you lost, and that overall you’ve won more often in life than you’ve lost. I wondered if those different experiences people have with whether they win or lose more at what they care about early on affects how they see competition. It’s intimate experience with losing, in my opinion, losing when you really wanted to win, learning to hate it, and taking the full measure of crap from others and from yourself for being a loser, that teaches an appreciation for competition (sometimes, it can get to the point at which one just drops out if one NEVER has much experience with winning, so I suppose there’s some need for balance there). In my experience, it’s getting your ass kicked a few times that gets you mad and hungry enough to force yourself to get better, and that’s the big value of competition: how it plays out in the iterated sense and can give people a reason and an opportunity to push themselves harder. Anyway, that’s just my opinion, but looking at your title: “Hating to win more than fearing to lose”, if it’s having the greater experience with the one or the other that determines which one we want to avoid (losing or winning) more.
Hugo,
“I still think that a great many of society’s winners and losers have their fates determined by factors well beyond their control.”
that’s absolutely correct. But this doesn’t say anything about attributed morality of winning and losing. This possibly means that someone who factually loses is none the less a winner in some sense, because the competition didn’t take place on a level playing field.
I think I understand what Hugo’s saying about winning and losing–not that either winning or losing in of themselves have any intrinsic morality but that it makes him unhappy that our society is structured so that overwhelmingly, one can only be a “winner” at the expense of others, the “losers.” For instance, look at a race where the “winner” is the person of a group of ten that runs a set distance faster than anybody else in that group. By the definition of the situation, you can only have one winner; everybody else will be a loser. However, if the race is structured so that there is a set time that is considered the goal, and anyone who runs the distance faster than that time is the winner, you have no longer set up a situation where there must be “losers” in order for there to be a “winner”–theoretically, the entire group of ten could win (or even the entire group of ten could lose). Also, by setting the race up the latter way as opposed to the former way, you are actually testing people to purely objective standards–their individual speeds and running strategies–as opposed to the former, where depending on what the specific situation is, you may be testing any number of other things about them as well, including their willingness to win by, say, cutting someone else off in a running lane or using psychological tactics against someone else to worsen that other person’s performance. Though I didn’t see this aspect really coming up in his post, he may find some moral gradient in a society that places your ability to mess up other people as equally valuable as a “winner’s” tactic to actual athletic ability and dedication to hard physical practice.
I don’t have Hugo’s issues with winning; I much more hate losing–in a situation like his scholarship competition, while I’d have felt sorry for my friend and genuinely wished there’d been more than one scholarship available too, I’d have been perfectly happy to be chosen, as I would have felt that it was based upon my hard-won skills. (By contrast, I wouldn’t have been able to tolerate it if I thought I’d won based on personal favoritism.)
I hate winning too. But I hate losing more. Losing because it marks me as inferior and a failure, and winning because not only does it make other people feel bad, but it doesn’t even make me feel good; after all, it just means that no one better than me happened to be in the competition, because I am not objectively and provably the best in the world. (Perfectionist much?) People say they feel good when they win through their hard work, but when I win it usually seems to me that I just happened to be good enough to win this particular contest. (Even if there is some preparation involved, it’s still luck that I was born with the talent to do it easily, because if it weren’t easy I couldn’t do it.) I have serious issues here because I’ve had working hard to achieve a goal fail horribly well over half the time, which is much worse results than just happening to be good enough already.
So I hate competition; it gives me nothing but pain, because defeat is meaningful but victory is not. But sometimes it’s fun in fictional stories about other people, preferably far enough removed from reality that I don’t feel the moralistic lecturing bits are all about what a failure of a human being I personally am.