Perfection
So I’ve been seeing a new girl for the past few months. She’s a real cheery type. Ebullient and optimistic, I would even say.
She also happens to probably be the one person in the world that knows even less about football than I do.
I don’t care a lick about the Patriots nor the Giants, but I found myself getting drawn into the game more and more, and by the end I was yelling at the top of my lungs for the Giants.
Aside from having to explain to the girl what a 3rd-down conversion is, and pretty much how the entire game of football works, I also had to justify my decision to root for the Giants. She had decided to root for the Patriots.
“It’s so sad,” she said. “Why don’t you want them to have a perfect season?”
That got me thinking. Why was I rooting for the underdog? Is this a sign that I hate perfection? Does this mean that I secretly resent success in others and, maybe, in myself?
I think the reason I rooted for the Giants was because of the magnitude of the mismatch coming into the game.
Had the Patriots played another team this year, one that, at least by the numbers, more closely matched with the Pats, then I think I would have rooted for the Pats. I would have cheered them into a perfect season. In my mind, it would have been an earned achievement.
However, the press couldn’t stop talking about how much better the Patriots were than the Giants. An unlikely Giants victory would be “possibly the greatest upset in Super Bowl history”. By some accounts, this year’s Giants didn’t even deserve to be in the Super Bowl.
I rooted for the Giants because this wasn’t a fair fight. I rooted for the Giant’s because the mismatch in this game reminded me of standing up to bullies in grammar school. I rooted for them because the pre-game press reminded me of times when I strove to succeed when no one gave me any chance or credit. And I cheered for them because true, compelling, history-making drama does not come from the stronger defeating the weaker, or even from the slightly weaker defeating the slightly stronger, but in the rare times when the the child defeats the giant. The writers of the Bible decided to include the story of “David and Goliath”, not the story of “Biff and Mongo, who was a bit larger than Biff.”
So I’m not anti-success. I’m human.
We all find success in our own way. There are times in our lives when we are truly remarkable and others admire us in these best moments. And sometimes, we are the ones that watch others in their Big Show. And we’re fascinated by these moments and these people. We want to be them, and be around them, and watch them succeed, because these times are as rare as they are significant.
But these moments must come under fair and noble circumstances. They must earned. They must not come at the expense of those that remind us of ourselves - because then we abandon the allure of perfection to rally to the defense of our own…like the 2007 Giants.
That being said, I hope my Steelers make a good showing next season.
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