Winning isn't everything, it's the ONLY thing

How comfortable are you with competitiveness? Do you forge ahead in any game, stepping on every toe, eyes on the brass ring, savoring the taste of victory in your mouth and doing a little happy dance on the bodies of your vanquished foes? Or do you hold back just a little, afraid you'll hurt someone’s feelings, and credit your win to the luck of the draw.

If you do the former, you’re probably a man. If you do the latter, you’re most likely a woman.

There’s no polite way to say it: I suck at sports and I’ve never been Numero Uno at cerebral activities. But I can play a mean game of Scrabble, and, more importantly, I love the game. Over the years I’ve had a few Scrabble buddies who pushed me to play harder and better. I watched Word Wars about true Scrabble champions, and I’m well-adjusted enough to be grateful I’ll never be that good. The game has always entertained me, and I really can’t remember learning how to play. I never studied any strategy guides or surfed the net to look up advice.

Now I’ve got a new Scrabble buddy, and he’s really pushing me to get better. For the first time, I picked up a book called Everything Scrabble, and spent an entire weekend working through anagrams, looking at parallel plays, memorizing acceptable 2-letter words -– in short, I gloried in the world of the word geek.

In my competitive frenzy, I noticed something. The nature of competition cropped up in several of the books I’m currently reading. I first came across a discussion of it in The girls of summer, in which Coach Anson Dorrance talks about the difficulties of making competitiveness not only socially acceptable for the members of the U.S. women's soccer team, but admirable.

Our society trains women to be acquiescent and is fundamentally at odds with the culture of competition in general and athletics in particular. Women tend to be motivated differently than men; for women, relationships mean as much as competition. Aha! I said to myself. This is why I always fret after playing a game, hoping I didn’t crush anyone’s self-esteem or destroy a fragile psyche.

Then, I read of another concept in a book by local author, Allyn Mitchell Evans. She explores the difficulties women have in breaking free of male-dominated cultural roles. Like her, I was brought up with Southern cultural imperatives: be nice, don't call attention to yourself, remember your manners, mask your own desires while putting others before you. These instructions came from my parents, which were passed down from their parents. Once you're accustomed to wearing a mask, it's not easy to remove it.

Maybe one day I’ll be comfortable with my desire to crush my Scrabble opponents. Perhaps I’ll be able to walk away from a game, after having bluffed everyone into accepting a made-up two-letter like “Za” (for a double word score, no less), and not have to justify it internally on the 20-minute ride back home.

Until then, I’ll keep playing. And studying. And, hopefully, winning!