Learning how to lose with class

I used to have a podcast titled The Good in Sports. My premise was to find and tell stories about the positive impact athletics has on society. I’m not sure I’m as high on the availability of content for that podcast today.

For weeks, the Argentina men’s national soccer team was praised for its greatness, its ability to pick itself up when it was down and find a way to win. The breaks it caught along the way were debated as well but were swallowed up by the hero worship that followed Messi and his teammates.

Then Argentina ran into an opponent that was simply the better team. Spain absolutely shut Argentina down, and Messi and company were left with the silver medal.

Of course, the team that received all of that praise was gracious in defeat. Oh, wait…

Soon after the final whistle sounded, ending the match and giving Spain the World Cup with a 1-0 victory, Argentina’s Leandro Paredes was caught on video footage throwing punches, grabbing opposing players by the throat and tackling them to the ground.

Other Argentine players were involved in altercations. It wasn’t the first time ugliness followed the end of a World Cup match, and it’s not the only sport in which this kind of behavior occurs. It seems that, with all of the training to become a champion, lessons about how to lose with class have too often been omitted from the curriculum.

Then again, in a world in which, during the same week as these soccer incidents, the president of the United States delivered a prime-time speech revisiting claims that he really didn’t lose an election that took place six years ago, maybe I’m expecting too much from athletes.

One ongoing post-World Cup debate among those who long for the United States to be more competitive in international soccer revolves around whether pay-to-play youth soccer programs are one of the primary things holding the USMNT back. Perhaps what is really restraining U.S. soccer is that too many youth coaches, in all sports, choose not to focus on teaching skills but instead put winning above everything else, even with children under the age of 10.

Sports are a great place to learn how to deal with setbacks. If the "adults" haven’t learned the lesson, it’s going to be hard to teach the next generation.

Speaking of losing perspective in sports, I wasn’t the least bit surprised when Southeastern Conference Commissioner Greg Sankey said this week that the SEC's talk about potentially leaving the NCAA isn’t just a negotiating tactic. Of course, the league that was paying players long before it was "legal" to do so is bothered when everyone else can do it too.

College sports are at a crossroads. The NCAA is made up of colleges and universities — institutions of higher learning — but the presidents of those schools seem to have essentially dropped the pretense that college athletics has anything to do with education.

Even the major professional sports leagues have instituted measures such as salary caps because owners realize, however reluctantly, that having half the teams go out of business could be damaging. It’s hard to claim to be a champion when there are no teams left to play against. Everything involving the NCAA seems to be headed in a bad direction.

I’d just like to be able to open the sports page again and find something that reminds me of The Good in Sports.