Our society puts a premium on winning. First place. A gold medal. An international championship. The lotto. Or, let us be completely honest, winning in anything. Even winning just for the sake of winning. Undoubtedly Vince Lombardy best expressed our attitude to winning:’’Winning is not the most important thing. It is the only thing!’’

Winning feels good. When we win we are on a high! We feel justified. Exonerated. Vindicated, for putting up with all of that training, all of that studying, all of that preparing and all of the expense involved. And let us not forget those sacrifices we had to make! ‘’All that pressure, stress and worry seem to have been worth while after all!’’

We even feel encouraged to continue. We are the ‘heroes’ of the hour! We might even become ‘role models’ for others to emulate...

Nobody remembers who came in second in any world cup downhill ski championship...even if he was only 5/100th of a second slower than the winner. Similarly nobody remembers who won the silver in some olympic swimming championship. And we probably don’t remember who came in second in any of last year’s Formula One Grand Prix races. It is not so much that he is forgotten, as much as he is irrelevant!

That is what we are conditioned to think.

There are so many billions of dollars invested in the sponsorship and promotion of such a large number of competitions, sports and contests—both olympic and professional—that the only way for each separate activity to compete for presence is by focusing on the winner. So the television, the written media, the radio, and the internet just concentrate on winning...winning...winning, until we are so accustomed to expecting it that we take it for granted that that is all there is!

It has become one of the most successful marketing strategies of the modern era.

It is a cruel world, the world of top class competition. For every winner there are 100 losers. The pressure and stress to finish at the top is so great that a huge secondary market worth hundreds of millions of dollars has been created: illegal drugs to enhance performance, cheating in the form of ‘fixing’ competitions by the players themselves, the ‘fixing’ of games by buying arbiters or judges, and so on.

This is probably true for the majority of sports, at both the professional and the olympic level. Rarely does a world meet take place where some athlete or another is not expelled for drug abuse. Or how often does one hear about suspicions about the arbiter? Newspapers are filled with stories like this, but in the absence of proof the sports authorities can do little. (What a relief it must be for them!?)

Even the chess world, at the top, is no exception to this.

But what about the spirit of competition? Where does this fit into this scenario? Or the challenge of pushing oneself to the limit? Or the thrill of setting a personal best? Or of testing oneself against the best?

No, the competition model that puts winning ahead of everything else is too limited, too inflexible to be of any use to amateurs. It is too unforgiving. Too stressful. Maybe it is ok for those top athletes who don’t mind risking everything just for the chance of trying to land some big multi-million dollar endorsement contract. But it is not a model for amateurs to aspire to.

For those who want to compete, at the amateur level, it is necessary to put things in the proper perspective. A perspective that is realistic and rational. Something that has a basis in daily life. Not fantasy. One that keeps one’s two feet flat on the ground and one’s head on one’s shoulders...and not in the clouds with some romantic ideas. One that allows for goals of gradual improvement, striving for optimum performance—not world records--without being handicapped with a ton of new stresses. And this model should be about respect, for yourself and your opponent(s). About basic human values.

I remember that as a result of the ’72 Fischer-Spassky match there was this great boom in chess in Montreal (and most everywhere else, for that matter). Tournament participation levels jumped overnight from less than 100 to 350 or more. One tournament—the ’72 Quebec Open—had more than 700 participants.

Everyone wanted to be a winner! Every ‘closet’ chess player came out. The local chess cafes used to receive phone calls from complete unknowns who wanted to know what tournaments they had to play in order to win the world championship! It was a crazy time!

But the party didn’t last very long. Within 6 months tournament participation levels had dropped drastically. Most of the Fischer boomers who were encouraged by Bobby’s success to compete in chess tournaments, disappeared back into the closets from which they came.

Why?

I think that there were two basic causes:

1. Too high expectations. The competition model that Fischer symbolized was not practical for beginners.
2. Too high stress levels. The average player’s motivation for competing was ego involvement based. He was not able to perform up to his potential because he put too much stress on himself. He had no idea what he was doing to himself. He very soon felt incompetent, and as sport psychology predicts, he withdrew from competition.

(It is curious that many people believe that the Fischer boomers stopped playing because the regular tournament players crushed them easily and they found tournament chess too difficult. While this argument has its merits, it is not very convincing as a general explanation. First, the level of the Fischer boomers was not low: many had already read chess books and were frequent players at home. Second, (and this point is important) the Fischer boomers were in such large numbers compared to the regulars that they actually found themselves paired against each other more often than not. The stress factor created in the boomer vs boomer games was more predominant than boomer vs regular games !)

Don’t let the lesson be lost! Set your own basic values. Not only should you have a reasonable competition model, but YOU (and nobody else) should define what a winner really is.

Copyright 2000    Kevin Spraggett

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