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LOSING IS DEATH

Trevor Tierney — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 17:06:54 +0000

"When you learn how to die, you learn how to live." - Tuesdays With Morrie by Mitch Albom

Two weekends ago, our University of Denver men’s lacrosse team lost to Penn State in our second game of the season. We played miserably on defense and gave up way too many easy goals. As a volunteer assistant who helps out with the goalies and the defensemen, it was a bit embarrassing. I felt like I had done a terrible job preparing them for the Nittany Lions and that I had let them down in a way.

After the game, I felt miserable. I have written about this before, but losing is just not a fun experience. In fact, losing is painful. I have played or coached in athletics now for almost three decades and the losses never get any easier! I always experience a fair amount of grief after each loss and after my experience this past weekend, I really tried to sit with that feeling and see what it was all about.

A good friend of mine, Rob McNamara, has written a soon to be released book entitled, “The Elegant Self”. In it, he discusses the idea of the annihilation of certain aspects of our selves and our egos. He writes, “The sincere experience of annihilation can surface in a an intense confrontation with survival even when safety is of no actual concern.” I read this line in his book as we were traveling home to Denver after our loss and immediately texted Rob, “Losing in sports is annihilation!”. I realized that athletics are a perfect practice for us to experience this confrontation in life, make some sense of it and grow through it.

Our athletic experiences can have some very clear parallels to a certain type of death. When we fully commit to a sport, we are trying to “survive” by winning. If we lose, we may not get to play another day in the playoffs. It is also interesting to notice our term for overtime rules in many sports, which we call “sudden death”. The idea of losing literally meaning death may stem back to when the Mayans played a ball game that was steeped in ritual and spiritual meaning. After their games, which attracted huge numbers of people, the winners were awarded a feast and celebration, while the leader of the losing team was actually sacrificed and killed!

Fortunately for us today (I would have been killed several times over by now if I had been a Mayan goalie), there are ways in which athletics provides a more symbolic and subtle level of a death experience. After a loss, we are humbled. Whatever ways in which we see ourselves as superior to others, or any part of our ego that puts itself above others, are quickly brought down to reality after a loss. We can poignantly experience this wake-up call and see that we are just as fallible as anyone else in this world and we are not perfect in many ways. These are beneficial deaths for us to experience as they maintain our humility.

Another way in which we can experience death after a loss is that it allows us to let go of old ways of being. Our world is constantly evolving and changing. We must continue to grow with the universe or get left behind. So, many times a loss allows us to look at ways of being - both playing and coaching - that we may have to let go of. Perhaps our way of doing things is not working anymore and we need to come up with new ideas or approaches in order for us to succeed another day.

In the past, I have also written, “Winning Does Not Matter” and I still believe that. In that blog, I wrote about how it is important for us to strive to be our best and not attach our identity to wins, trophies or championships. So, that may sound counter-intuitive to what I am writing about here and it is in some ways. The other night, I was discussing this idea of losing as annihilation with Rob and his fiancé Brooke, who noted, “Winning and losing mean everything and nothing,” and she was completely right!

We are fighting to survive when we decide to pour ourselves passionately into competition. When we win, our highest aspects of ourselves have succeeded and proved themselves to be great on that given day. When we lose, our less integrated ways of being have failed us in a way and those parts of ourselves are destroyed by our opponents. We are disappointed in not having displayed our talents from our most optimal way of performance. We must die to those ways of being and playing that have not allowed us to compete at the highest level, so we can have success later.

So, what is the practice? For everyone, it will vary greatly, but I believe there are certain steps that people can take to let parts of themselves die after a loss and become greater in the process :

1. Feel. What do we feel after a loss? By experiencing our feelings after a loss, it may allow us to grow and see blind spots within ourselves that are holding us back from greatness. For example, these feelings that we experience after a loss may be what we fear the most before going into a game. If we fear feeling sad, then we may fear loss like death! The more we can feel that sadness after a loss, the less we will fear it the next time around.

2. Do not run away! This is one of the many reasons why it is important for athletes to practice staying sober after a loss instead of running out to a party to get wasted. The more present that we can be with ourselves after competition, the more we can learn through the experience.

3. Be suspicious of grandeur. After we lose, it is the perfect time for us to reevaluate and grow from our mistakes. One way we can do this is to look at the ideas that we hold about why we are great at something. For instance, maybe a player thinks he is a great scorer, but could have helped his team by passing the ball more in that game. It is always in important for us to be self-aware so that we can continue to grow and get better.

4. Stay balanced. It is important for us to recognize that while we might be sad or disappointed about a loss, we can still be grateful for many things in life. Especially in a team setting, we are surrounded by our teammates, coaches, families and friends, who still love us, win or lose! Certain aspects of ourselves might be dying, but we can recognize those things in our life that are still very much alive!

We can use this same practice in all aspects of our life. We can constantly strive to be our best and offer ourselves to the world in optimal ways of being each and every day. Many times, we will succeed and many times we will fail, no matter what we do! We must risk everything and nothing at the same time.

FOLLOW-UP : THE WISDOM OF THE LAX BRO

Trevor Tierney — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 20:02:09 +0000

How dare you Trevor! What are you some sort of flip-flopping politician?! Or have you just gone crazy? That's the imagined response that I believe that I will receive to this next blog, which I am creating a week after I wrote, "An Open Letter to Lax Bros : Respect the Game". Usually, I am a bit more critical of myself than others are though, so I might be overdramatizing it a bit.

It's seems in our culture that we are very prone to taking one extreme side or the other. For example, on the issue of gun-control rights, one person might make the logical argument that there should be more background checks for gun owners. However, in our society, there is this huge backlash from that statement that says, "You can't take my guns! This is my second amendment right to bear arms!". From the other side, someone might make the logical argument that there our country needs to do a better job in the mental health department and be more attentive to the needs of people with psychological disorders. The huge backlash comes back at them saying, "Well crazy people wouldn't kill so many people unless they didn't have guns! So, we should just do without guns altogether!". The bickering goes on and on, people entrench themselves in their stances and nothing gets resolved.

By the way, PLEASE note that I am not taking one side on this gun issue one way or the other. That's the last thing I need right now. All I am saying is that we really seem to struggle having a sensible conversation in the middle ground. That sense of extremes seems to be reflected in our society in many ways. There are either staunch Republicans or liberal Democrats. There are drunks or teetotalers. There are jocks or nerds. Good people and bad people. Religious fundamentalists or hell-bound atheists.

The nature of life though, is that there is a middle ground in everything that we do, say, believe or feel. Our limited amount of perception only allows us to witness so much that is going on in the world around us. For example, there is a wide spectrum of light, but our eyes and brains only allow us to take in a certain range of colors. There is an enormous range of sound waves that our ears are not able to pick up on at all. So, we might believe we have the right answer, but that is only a thought in our head. We might judge something to be good or bad, but that is simply our own subjective experience. Unfortunately, the consciousness of our own experience is not that simply explained.

So, last week when I wrote "An Open Letter to Lax Bros : Respect the Game", I received a number of responses. Some people wrote to me or commented along the lines of, "Trevor, thank you so much for writing that. I'm so tired of this lax bro culture in our sport. We need to end that whole thing!". I was appreciative of those responses as they seemed to be understanding my main point and wanting to change the negative attitude in the game. The only problem with that mentality is that it blames the lax bro, instead of noticing that there is a strong, but not all-inclusive, correlation between the image and attitude. Another response was basically, "Trevor, what are you, some sort of old fogey? This is just kids having fun and expressing their individuality and being themselves. Who made you God of how people should live in the lacrosse world?". I was appreciative of those responses as well as it allowed me to see some of the points that I may have missed and forgot to examine in that topic. However, those responses overlooked the fact that I can only write about so much in one blog and that I had actually touched on those topics in previous writings. But, you know what? Both sides are completely right! And they are also wrong. Just like me!

How can that possibly be? Well, there is always a middle ground. Never once in that article did I say that there was anything wrong, per se, with wearing certain clothes, or having a hair style, or talking a certain way, or being interested in certain things, or behaving in certain ways. Like I wrote in the first paragraph, that would be like the pot calling the kettle black as I certainly went through various trends in the game and ways of being as I grew and matured throughout the years. A third response that I received from guys who most people would consider well-known lax bros, was, "Thank you for showing that there is a difference between the outside appearance of what people think of as a lax bro and the mentality that has been used to define those people." Those lax bros who had actually lived the balance of both sides, were able to most clearly see the message that I was trying to get across.

My main point was that it is important to respect the game (as the title implies) and to care and play the game to the best of your ability. This does not mean that all players who look like lax bros do not care. The lax bro culture simply gets represented by that attitude many times. For example, many people look at Connor Martin as the king of all lax bros! He has long hair, he is from the west coast, he helped inspire and lead a company that sells crazy neon-colored apparel and he is the singer and songwriter for a band that is becoming very popular. His nickname is Con-Bro Chill! But, you know what? The real-life Connor Martin that I have met and gotten to know a bit, cares about lacrosse as much as anyone I have ever seen! He gives back to the game in various ways, he trains hard in the off-season to play in the MLL and he loves the game and plays it passionately.

So, when I wrote an open letter to lax bros, it wasn't to all lax bros. It was simply to the lax bros that were misunderstanding what this game could be about for them. And it's not because I think that I'm right on how someone should play the game. It's more from my experience and from the teachings of others, that when you pour your heart into something, you are going to get more out of it.

But, what if we were to turn this topic completely around and see what we could learn from lax bros? Here are some of the lessons that we could learn from them :

1. Have fun with the game! Sports are fun to play, no doubt. That is why we start playing them when we are young, in the first place. When we lose our joy in playing, then our performance can suffer and the game can lose all meaning. So, if a lax bro reminds us that we should be playing for fun, then they are right. But, be careful…having fun does not mean playing without passion or intensity or working hard in the game. And having passion and dedicating yourself to the game, does not mean making it an all-encompassing aspect of your life in which you have no other interests. There is a fine-line and balance in all of this.

2. Be an individual! Lax bros certainly seem to scream individuality at times. Different colored apparel, sticks, equipment. An attitude that tells the world, "I am my own man". There is the sense that you can be an individual within a team setting. We all have our own talents and personalities and it is important to bring those various traits to our team and still be in cooperation with the other coaches and players. At the same time, it is important to ask ourselves, "Am I trying to be myself? Or am I just trying to be like all the other lax bros?". Learning to bring our best foot forward as an individual to a team setting can be an invaluable lesson for us down the road.

3. Rage against the machine! There is a certain feeling of being counter-culture in the image of a lax bro that has always been an important aspect of every generation. Every decade witnesses a new uprising, especially among the more youthful people of the time, that allows us to grow and evolve as a people. Lax bros can bring innovation and creativity to the game that could get stagnant and boring. Imagine if we were still playing lacrosse like it was back in the 80s or 90s? (Not to say that was bad lacrosse by any means! I love watching old games.) But, it's important for everything to evolve and grow and remain fresh. It keeps things interesting and pushes us to greater heights.

So, with all that being said, I have a certain respect for the lax bro culture as well as having some reservations about it. One of my favorite lessons that I learned from a good friend and teacher of mine was, "Be suspicious about everything!". That includes are own thoughts, judgements and beliefs. When I started receiving all this praise and argument over my open letter to lax bros, I started to become suspicious of my own stances. I needed to clarify that for myself and now I am sharing that with any one who reads this silly blog as well.

The last thing I want to say about all this is that I write this blog for fun. Nerd alert! I would be writing these things whether or not anyone at all ever looked at them. I just enjoy writing and philosophizing on the things that matter to me the most. Please do not ever take these blogs as some sort of authoritarian voice on any matter. If anything, read what I have to say if you enjoy it and then formulate your own opinion. And then, question that opinion too.

The only thing we can sure about in this world, is that there is a lot that we don't know. There is a great amount of beauty in the middle ground, in the space of not-knowing, where we can learn and evolve the most from. As much as we might love or despise some things, it is exciting to realize that there is wisdom in everything.

AN OPEN LETTER TO LAX BROS : RESPECT THE GAME

Trevor Tierney — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 04:11:03 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, there was an amazing article in the opinion section of the New York Times entitled, "How to Live Without Irony" by Christine Wampole, a professor at Princeton University. Professor Wampole commented on our society's infatuation with living in an ironic manner (using the example of hipsters, among others) and not living in a "direct" manner. As I read it, I could not help but see a direct parallel with our own sub-culture within the game of lacrosse, commonly referred to as "lax bros".

Now, this is not about judging anyone, anything or any aspect in particular, within the lax bro culture. If you want to grow a mullet or "flow", good for you. I've had a mohawk or two throughout my life. If you want to wear lacrosse shorts that look like an amateur designer vomited color and clip-art all over them, then I'm not going to stop you. Trust me, I have made some questionable decisions over the course of my life considering fashion. You should know that I grew up in a time where we "tight-rolled" plaid cotton pants for a year or two so that we could look like MC Hammer. I also have pictures of my 11 year-old self wearing acid washed jeans with cargo pockets along with Jordans. I have absolutely no room to talk (although a conversation with my parents is in order about how they let me out of the house looking like that). Furthermore, everyone has the right to behave and choose however they damn well please. So, this isn't about that.

Where I do believe that I have the right to say something about this topic, is from a place of caring about a sport that I grew up with. I was born into a family where lacrosse meant the world to us. Literally. My father's dedication and success in the game as a coach put food on our table. I looked up to and respected his colleagues and players more than anyone else in the world. My goal was to be the best that I could possibly be in the game and I worked my entire boyhood life to try and reach that goal. Along the way, I learned invaluable lessons about myself and others through the hours and hours that I poured into the game. My world and life was shaped by a simple game with a stick and ball.

Furthermore, the growth of the game that I have witnessed throughout my life has been nothing short of extraordinary. When I was young from six to nine years old, I grew up in the epicenter of lacrosse, in Baltimore, MD. My father was then hired at Princeton University in 1988 and we packed up our things and moved to New Jersey. When we got there, I was so disappointed to find little going on in the way of other kids playing lacrosse. Most of my school mates barely knew what the game was. My father and some other great men in our community started the Hopewell Valley lacrosse league. The first year it was about 20 players, ranging in age from 8 to 15 and we just went out on the field. Today, that league is one of the biggest youth and high school lacrosse associations in the country!

Since moving out to Colorado in 2001, I have witnessed the game continue to grow in the same manner throughout the western United States. When I travel to California, Texas, Oregon, Utah or Arizona and see a kid with a lacrosse t-shirt on or carrying his stick down the street, it brings me so much pride and happiness. I know that the game is touching countless lives throughout our country and world and I hope that it brings as much to everyone as it did to my own life.

Now, my point in this little history lesson is to illustrate that this game is truly great! It is great in the way that it should be highly respected by anyone that participates in it, in whatever role they play. To relegate this sacred game to some style or immature attitude, as the lax bro way of being seems to point towards, shows a complete disrespect and ignorance of what it is truly all about.

Furthermore, it is important to understand where this idea of "lax bro" was created. I started seeing this culture in its infancy when I was in college (although I am open to the possibility that it started long before that). I started to notice that due to the fact that there was no professional lacrosse at the time, that some players looked at the game as a joke and not as a real way of making a living. There was an attitude that pervaded some players and teams that I came across, that it was not cool to care.

This is exactly how Professor Wampole described hipsters in her article :

"The ironic frame functions as a shield against criticism. The same goes for ironic living. Irony is the most self-defensive mode, as it allows a person to dodge responsibility for his or her choices, aesthetic and otherwise. To live ironically is to hide in public. It is flagrantly indirect, a form of subterfuge, which means etymologically to “secretly flee” (subter + fuge). Somehow, directness has become unbearable to us."

In the same way, lax bros take on the lifestyle and attitude that proclaims, "I am way too cool to care about a stupid sport like lacrosse…how juvenile." The haircuts, the dress, the laid-back attitude and most importantly, the lifestyle decisions, all scream to the world, "I'm way too cool to care about being a great athlete, a great ambassador, a great example for the game of lacrosse." The ironic aspect of this standpoint is that these same people want to use our game as a way to look cool to outsiders. So, a lax bro is someone who is too cool to care about the game, but will use it for their own gain.

For me to say that this all points towards the fact that these people are all scared of failure, or scared of success for that matter, would be a bit presumptuous and over-simplified. My point is that, for whatever reason, lax bros do not want to be seen as people who strive for greatness. If they are in fact talented enough to reach the pinnacles of the sport, while still maintaining their lax bro image, then they can contend that they never really cared, and they were just that good. In either case, they are phonies because they are inauthentic in the highest sense of the word. Even worse, their projection of our game to the outside world is a bastardized version that holds no true meaning of what lacrosse is really all about.

Here's the deal if you really want to be a lacrosse player, and not just some lax bro. When you sign up to play lacrosse for the first time, you are signing up to play a very tough and brutal sport. I have seen teammates and friends severely injured for life playing this sport. I still deal with the scars that I incurred from playing on a daily basis.

You are signing up to play a game that has been played for hundreds of years by the native people of the continent that we now inhabit. This is a game that those people played for their God or Creator, their spirit, their own training and their own joy. It is important for us to have a deep respect for those people that created the game that we now get to enjoy.

You are choosing to play a game that has been grown by people all over the world, that have dedicated their own time and energy, to grow the sport so that people like you, could have a chance to play it. There is a long history of great players who have helped evolve this game to what it is today. It is humbling to see that each one of us is just a very small, but important part of that growth and evolution.

So, if you are going to choose to play this game, then play it and practice it with the most intensity and passion that you possibly can. Realize that no piece of equipment, no pair of shorts, no socks, no new stick, no haircut, no uniform, nor custom helmet, will ever make you a true lacrosse player.

The only way you can truly become a lacrosse player is by pouring your heart and soul into it and trying to be the best at it that you possibly can be. Maybe you won't play pro lacrosse or in a NCAA Final Four. Maybe you won't even choose to play in high school. But, as long as you are going to do something in life, then do it to the best of your ability and truly care about it.

This in itself, is the most important point of examining this issue. We are only here in this world for a very short time when you think about it. I know when I was in high school and college, I just figured that life lasted forever and I could just let my limitless days waste away in one way or another. That changes quickly as you grow into adulthood and the years seem to pass by faster and faster.

This lesson, that lacrosse or any sport for that matter, can teach us is to live fully and authentically each and every day. One thing I notice as a coach of youth and high school lacrosse teams is there seems to be a sudden closing down and self-consciousness, once a young man reaches high school. The teams that I work with in which the players are under 15 years old seem to have fun and truly care about the game. They laugh and joke with each other and the coaches. They are intensely caring and friendly to everyone. Then high school hits and the pursuit of cool seems to be the only thing on everyone's mind.

Quite certainly, this is a part of adolescence and development in self-discovery, but there is a healthier, less egoistic way of doing things. Wampole suggested :

"Nonironic models include very young children, elderly people, deeply religious people, people with severe mental or physical disabilities, people who have suffered, and those from economically or politically challenged places where seriousness is the governing state of mind. My friend Robert Pogue Harrison put it this way in a recent conversation: 'Wherever the real imposes itself, it tends to dissipate the fogs of irony.'"

Anyone can be a lax bro, just like anyone can be a hipster. But the "reality" of lacrosse hits hard when you step on the field on game day. Have you prepared yourself to be your best on that day and compete at your highest level possibly along with your opponent? Have you cared more about throwing against the wall and improving your skills or more about your sock color? Have you cared more about making yourself a great athlete through running and lifting or more about your popularity in school as a lax bro?

This is about calling out the companies and people that are assigning this style, this name, this reputation to a sport that many of us have loved for so long. This is a reminder that you cannot just get a haircut and go out and buy the most outlandish "lacrosse" shorts and socks and pretend that you are a great lacrosse player. If you want to be a real lacrosse player and not some ignorant and mislead lax bro, then you are going to have to care about the game in the same way that many before you have done so.

The great thing about sports is that they tend to separate the real warriors from the posers, the contenders from the pretenders, the men from the boys. So, I won't judge you, but the outcome will when the final whistle blows on game day.

Finally, if you really don't care about the game enough to not truly "live" it and reach your highest potential and excellence through your participation in it, then don't play! If you care more about your image and being cool and not caring, then just go be a hipster. Our game does not need or want this image anymore. There is too much history and love and sacrifice in lacrosse for it to be reduced to that.

Our game is special, treat it with respect. If anyone ever calls you a lax bro, tell them, "No, I am a lacrosse player," and then walk the walk.

This blog was revised and edited for minor changes on January 14, 2013.