I love competition. Actually, I like to watch it far more than do it. I just don’t have that perpetual competitive fire burning inside me – at least, not like Bob does. I wish I did. Bob loves to compete; to make a game out of even the most mundane tasks. It’s in his DNA – and it drives me crazy sometimes. But, I believe the successes Bob has experienced coaching the Indians over the years, and even successes he’s achieved in the everyday things, have just as much to do with his “life is a game” mindset as they do with his total inability to regard losing as an option. Oh, he accepts losing, after the fact – game over, move on, no regrets (okay, “few” regrets), but never, ever is losing a notion his mind can even entertain DURING a game.
In his book, “The Heart and the Fist, the Education of a Humanitarian, the Making of a Navy SEAL,” Rhodes scholar and Navy SEAL Eric Greitens says that many SEAL candidates quit during some of the least rigorous physical challenges simply because they allow themselves to think about quitting. Once you open that mental door, it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that you’ll go through it.
I thought a lot about competitive chutzpah, about winning and losing, as I read that book. And, if I look only to my own experiences, I would have to agree with Greitens. I’ve run in five marathons, but only completed three. I could always keep going strong until the moment I let myself think about how good it would feel when I stopped – and shortly thereafter, I almost always did. Bob, on the other hand, ran nine and finished nine marathons, not so much because he was such a stellar runner, but because he absolutely refused to quit.
Over the years, I’ve seen this same phenomenon play itself out time and time again among the Indians players too. It’s not always been the most gifted athletes who have excelled, but it was the ones who wouldn’t, or couldn’t allow themselves to give up.