Losing candidates could learn a lot from kids

Winning with grace is easy. Losing is something else. Ask any athlete. Ask any coach. Specifically, ask me. Go ahead.

I've coached enough soccer and baseball in the past few years to know that sportsmanship is harder to teach than the balk rule, or soccer's offside law. It's also more important. How many times, after all, are you going to be called on to explain the finer points of the offside trap around the conference table?

No matter how hard they try, athletes fail. The best hitters get on base 40 percent of the time. Great players lose. If you play a team sport, and your squad is really good, you'll still get beat perhaps a third of the time. If you play an individual sport, you'll lose even more.

The New York Times recently asked whether Tiger Woods is the best athlete ever, a serious question, treated seriously. Woods has won only about 30 percent of the golf tournaments he's entered.

That might be something to remember the next time you get sniped on eBay, or somebody else gets the promotion you wanted.

Kids play sports to give them something to do, to keep them active. They also play sports to learn something about the lives they're going to live. Coaches help them figure out how to compete, how to cooperate, how to respect the referees and the rules, how to shut out the shouting from the stands.

Coaches teach them how to win with class. We teach them how to shake off errors. How to hold up their heads in defeat. Dealing with disappointment, after all, is part of the game, as it is part of life. It's worse when you're used to winning, perhaps, but absolutely nobody likes to lose.

Sports metaphors are facile things, overemployed and overindulged, but for good reason. American election seasons, specifically presidential races, have devolved from a moment for deliberation and discourse to rivalries every bit as hostile as any in sport, as bitter as Redskins-Cowboys or Yankees-Red Sox.

You can't root for both teams in a rivalry. It's impossible, perhaps illegal. And, now, so it is for Hillary Clinton supporters when it comes to Barack Obama, and vice versa, and for both when they talk about John McCain.

These are not politicians separated by much. Their policies are more alike than dissimilar. Still, the enmity among supporters of the Republican or Democratic team are enough to make a Cowboys fan blush at FedEx Field.

Which is disconcerting, because Clinton, Obama and McCain aren't athletes playing to amuse us. They're politicians who want to be president. They're the last folks standing. One by one over this season, their colleagues have exited the stadium. Most have done so after fighting as hard as they could - Fred Thompson excepted, and perhaps Mike Gravel.

When an athlete loses knowing he's done his best, then supper shouldn't taste like ashes. If an athlete fights until the end, then she can lose with pride, no matter the score.

Clinton has done those things. What she hasn't done is figured a way to not be the worst loser in the history of presidential losers. Even if she exits today, or reportedly tomorrow, she's failed at that thing that earns her a chance to try again - sportsmanship, humility in defeat. Grace.

When a kid hangs his head or throws his helmet, a coach has work to do. If a kid runs down the umpire or his teammates in the after-game huddle, then a coach hasn't done his job. When Clinton eventually concedes victory, it will be the equivalent of the losing players coming back to the field four days later, and wondering why there's no one there to shake their hands.

Last weekend, the season ended for the baseball team I help coach, when we lost another playoff game. On Tuesday, the election season ended for Hillary Clinton, when Barack Obama clinched the Democratic nomination to a mathematical certainty.

My boys handled it better.

Donald Luzzatto is an editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot. E-mail him at donald.luzzatto@pilotonline.com.