Dying to Win: America's Grieving for Athletes

Abstract

A cliché about the intensity of the desire to succeed or win identifies the sense of ultimacy that many persons in American culture often accord to triumph, especially in contests: ‘‘I’d die to win.’’ Football Hall of Famer George Allen, one of the winningest coaches of all time, was a man consumed by such a desire to win, so much so that NFL Films adapted some of his motivational quips to provide the title to his biographical tribute: ‘‘Winning Is Living and Losing Is Dying’’ (cf. Allen). Although the desire to win is associated with passion for life, at what cost might winning be pursued? What is the relation between life and victory, between victory and death, between life and losing, between death and defeat? Millennia ago in a spiritual context, St. Paul shifted expectations about the relation between death and victory in his epistolary aphorism that ‘‘to live is Christ and to die is gain’’ (Phil. 1:21). Success surely comes in victory. But under what circumstances, we might press, is death, which is the defeat of life itself, the willing price of victory? And how is this equation or computation of cost-benefit complicated by the aspect or context of sports—when the victory sought is not only the rush of a kind of spiritual success but the triumph in a sports contest? For some ancient sports, like the Mayan game of ball, the victor was rewarded with death, honored by being sacrificed to the gods. The sacrifice of the winning captain, as suggested by the bas reliefs on the walls of the ball courts at Chichenitza, was not merely the reward of athletic superiority. The sacrifice was connected with a series of sacred stories about HunHunapu and Hun Vunacu, as identified in the Popol Vuh. Because the playing of the ballgame ritually re-enacted the myths of the primeval creation struggle, the sacrifice of the winning captain was understood as assuring fertility. Yet the people also recognized the death of the captain as the honor of victory in the ballgame, rather than as a risked consequence of its pursuit (cf. Wilkerson 45ff). The conflation of death, sports, and spirituality is occasionally played out in contemporary American sports, with the pursuit of victory being thwarted by the death of an athlete, who is then mourned by teammates, friends, and fans. In recent American fiction, Don Keith explores the possible convergence of sports, spirituality, and death in his first novel, The Forever Season. In the opening paragraph of the novel, Corinthians Philippians McKay, the narrator who is an aspiring Rhodes Scholar nominee at Sparta University in the South, reflects on these three themes: life, death, and football. C. P., as he prefers to be called, confesses: