Sport

“Nothing will work unless you do.” –John Wooden

Modern Americans are one of the few large mammals that don’t practice for life by playing. Watch wolf puppies, lion cubs, young bears, elk, deer, pretty much any mammal and you’ll notice that all they do is play. There’s really no teaching either. Parents, and the pack or herd, might put some guard rails on the play, but otherwise the kids are left to their own devices.

We, on the other hand, isolate our young, cram an esoteric collection of information in their brains, and later wonder why they can’t function in the world.

The closest thing we have to this kind of play-as-life-practice is sports. Sports teach the way play teaches: you’re on your own, with some guard rails, and a little technique. But the doing? That’s on you. The doing is where you get to see kids’ character develop. They learn what it feels like to win, to lose, to struggle, to work hard.

The kids have been training juijitsu and wrestling for a total of four years, but it’s always been broken up by our travels, which isn’t the best if you want to get good at something. Constancy allows for repetition to become muscle memory in a way that nothing else does. You have to put in the time to get good at anything.

Along with that though, they’ve never competed, which adds a pressure that makes all the training a bit more real. Competition adds stakes that aren’t there otherwise. While Elliott has played plenty of baseball games (and this winter some basketball), the girls had never competed in wrestling until this year.

Now they’ve been in two tournaments and know the pressure of competition and what it’s like to lose and how to learn from both. I asked my daughter what she’d learned from competing and at first she said “cross face” because this is what every coach near the mat is always yelling. But then after thinking a moment she said, “a wrestling tournament is where your ego goes to die.”

Die is hyperbolic, but I was glad to hear that she’s grappling with it. It’s a tough balance to find. You have to believe in yourself enough to show up, and believe you can win, but also swallow some of that same ego if you don’t. There is always someone else out there who has been working harder for longer, and there’s no shame in losing to them.

Elliott’s basketball team won nine games and lost three, which gave him a good taste of both winning and losing. It wasn’t enough to get them a trophy, but that’s fine because if everyone gets a trophy — who cares? When everyone get a trophy the trophy means nothing, and there’s no point in trying. That’s the saddest way to live. Better to lose and learn.

Probably my favorite thing about sports isn’t winning and losing, it’s that the feedback loop of learning is very short. For example, you can’t eat a box of donuts and go wrestle without very quickly learning that donuts are not what make you strong and fast. The connection between health and performance in life becomes very obvious when you are training hard in any sport.

At the same time you also learn that your body can be changed and trained and strengthened in a surprisingly short amount of time, especially when you’re young. One day you can’t even pull your chin above the bar, but four weeks later you can crank out a few good pull ups without much struggle. Put in the time, reap the reward.

Since I started juijitsu a couple years ago I’ve discovered that this still applies even if you’re not a kid anymore. Show up, do the work, see the results. It all happens a little slower when you’re older, but I think you’re much more attuned to the way in which juijitsu, or whatever you happen to be doing, applies to all your life.

Your problems and struggles on the mat are probably the same as your problems and struggles in life. I’ve also found that you have to work them out in both places before you move on. Which is where the quote at the top of this page comes in, though I would word it slightly differently: nothing will work, until you do.