Afro(ec)centric

Learning to Win

I play roller derby, as I’ve mentioned before. Last night, my team bouted and won against the Glass City Rollers of Toledo, OH. The bout was tough, competitive, and aggressive (duh, it’s roller derby), but the win, for me, was not satisfying. It wasn’t a smack down for us like our first two bouts of the season where we beat our opponents by more than 100 points. The final official score was 115 - 102. And there was never a moment during the bout that my team wasn’t up by some margin of points. Still, once the bout was over, I found I had to force myself to smile and celebrate with my teammates. People were coming up offering compliments and congratulation, and I felt like telling them that this win didn’t count because it didn’t end the way I thought it should have ended, because, though I played hard, I didn’t play well. I made too many stupid, rookie mistakes. I was sloppy. I had too many penalties. My hits were mediocre, my foot work was sluggish, my reaction time embarrassingly slow.

I was not happy that we won. I wasn’t happy that we won the two bouts before this one, either. My reasons for those were because it was too much of a win. The final score of the first bout was 225 - 33. The final score of the second bout was 288 - 42. All I kept thinking was how awful we looked. We looked like a bunch of bullies celebrating the trouncing we just gave a little guy. This is illogical. We’re not bullies, we’re athletes who worked and still work to be the best we can be. We scheduled a season with teams who were interested in playing us because they felt that they were ready to compete with a team of repute, which is to say a young league with little experience, chomping at the bit to get a season under our belt, just like them. We had no way of knowing if we would win just like they had no way of knowing they would lose. They just came to skate. 

My own stupidity and weird masochism wants to punish me for winning. My twisted sense of humility gets me to beat myself up over every single thing I do wrong and to scoff at the things I do well. It feels wrong to say I’m good. I’m a good skater, I’m a good blocker, I’m good hitter, I’m a good pivot. So what. Good isn’t good enough. I always remind myself that there are bigger fish, there is always someone better. So in every moment of triumph, I look for what went wrong. This victory was not a victory because it didn’t end in carnage. We didn’t have to fight tooth and nail, we didn’t come in as the underdog everyone doubted, we didn’t have to stage some miracle comeback to win in the last few seconds. We just…won. We won because we’re good. We won because this is what we have practiced and worked to do. 

But I am an expert at being uncomfortable. I’m a professional scrapper. Winning isn’t winning without tragedy, in my mind. There has to be pain and suffering and loss. There has to be desperation. Someone has to bleed, collapse, be avenged, come up missing, be presumed dead, lose an eye, and be emotionally exhausted at the end of a bout for it to be a victory. Winning can’t just be about team work, communication, wit, agility, and persistence. Can it? I mean, you don’t just win because you’re good, right?

I’ve gotta stop watching Buffy.