Athletes Often Thank God for Wins. Why Not Losses?

I began my career as a sportswriter, going wherever my editor sent me — unglamorous high school track meets, softball tournaments in the 100-degree sun, Friday night football. Over time, as my work developed, so did my beat, to state championships, college football, and even the NFL. I interviewed and met some big names: Mia Hamm, Nick Saban, Peyton Manning, heavyweight champ Deontay Wilder. 

Most of the time, though, I covered regular, ordinary people, just like you or me. High school juniors who just sank a winning free throw. Part-time coaches barely earning middle-class wages. Parents pumped full of adrenaline and hope. 

Wherever I went — from pros to the most forgotten of playing fields — I noticed a trend. 

People thanked God.

During our post-game interview, many people would often give thanks to God. 

I just want to thank God for this win today.

First, I just want to thank God for this team, my coaches and this win today.

Couldn’t have won today without God. This team, this win — I want to give him the credit and  thanks. 

 

It became so normal, this insertion of God into the post-game interview. Over time, I noticed another trend.

No one thanked God for the defeat. No one — never, not once — thanked God for the loss, injury, or humiliation.

I want to give thanks for this humiliating defeat today.

Just want to thank God for the way our team fell apart, especially when I dropped that winning touchdown pass.

This season-ending ACL tear? Thank you God. 

 

This remarkable dichotomy bears attention, for it is at the heart of American sports, from the pros to the rec leagues. It stems from an unconscious belief from which so much flows: That God is synonymous with victory, triumph and accomplishment, not defeat, loss or suffering. That God is present when we achieve our goals athletically, when the game goes our way. God is forgotten when things fall apart. 

In this context, winning becomes a form of worship, or its inverse: to worship is to invite a win. 

Yet, is it not suffering that is the hallmark of God? In religion and myth, we find defeat as a consistent theme in the spiritual story, one that always points us downward, into the depths, the belly of the whale, the operating rooms, the divorce court, the AA meetings, the many faces of Golgotha. It is the downward trajectory — not an ascent to the mountaintop or hall of fame — that most bears the signature of the transformative spiritual experience. 

On his last day, Jesus did not hold a trophy; he was executed in the most degrading of ways. 

Now, a timeout, please. I love sports. I play them, coach them, watch them. I’m a fan. I’ve coached my kids and others. Last winter, I won my fantasy league. I rarely miss a Braves game and can name you nearly the entire Hawks roster. I am not disparaging athletics; sports must be built on this frame of winning and losing. Plus, athletics, at their best, teach virtues and life lessons that transcend winning and losing (and at their worst, can equally devastate and wound). 

Jesus picked up his cross, not his trophies.

So How Do You Become A Success?

Trappist monk Thomas Merton addresses this question  in Love and Living:

I replied indignantly that I was not able to consider myself a success in any terms that had a meaning to me. I swore I had spent my life strenuously avoiding success. If it so happened that I had once written a bestseller, this was a pure accident, due to inattention and naivete, and I would take very good care never to do the same again.

 

In business, sports, and politics — talking this way would be madness, would it not? Merton continues: 

If I had a message to my contemporaries, I said, it was surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success.

 

It’s breathtaking, the gap between such a statement — avoid success — and the deeply ingrained messages within American capitalism and a gospel of prosperity. Pursue happiness, we are told. In God we trust. With such conditioning in place, it’s easy to see how so many of us would associate winning and success with God. 

Yet Merton is calling out success as an obstacle to the spiritual path. Why? Because success gives us the illusion that we are in charge and in control. Success can strengthen one’s sense of independence, yet it is dependence that God requires. This is why loss and defeat often seem the best, if not the only, methods for waking us up to our dependence, helplessness, and vulnerability.

Consider the Bible’s cast of characters: 

• Jacob, who struggled all night, only to lose in a crushing defeat by the riverbank and then walk with a limp the rest of his life. 
• Jonah, who was swallowed up in utter darkness, defeat and loneliness.
• Jesus, whose entire life was spent as an outcast, alienated by the popular powers who ultimately crucified him.
• A supporting team of rogues, thieves, prostitutes, lepers, orphans, and working-class men and women. 

“There must be, and, if we are honest, there always will be at least one situation in our lives that we cannot fix, control, explain, change or even understand,” the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr writes in Falling Upward. And that is a good thing.

Suffering and the Spirit

During those post-game interviews, the winner projected victory onto the divine; within the inner workings of the mind and heart, there was an unconscious association between success and God and an equal disassociation between loss and God. An athlete’s win brings a sense of pride and control, accomplishment and strength. Subconsciously, her mind identifies this feeling as happiness and links this feeling with God. 

But if the athlete loses? If he has played terribly, his team loses the championship, he suffers a high-ankle sprain and is carried off the field? There is immense grief, anger or even rage, disappointment, and loss. Is there self-hatred or self-doubt? Both, probably so. In these moments, there is no projection onto the divine. 

In the midst of suffering, our minds do not assume God’s presence or influence; we do not praise God for the way life is unfolding because — and this is critical — we do not like the way life is unfolding. So there is no thanking God. In fact, if we’re honest, we’re doing the opposite: We curse and resent. 

But, as Rohr says, this kind of inevitable collapse must occur. It is necessary, for it is the only doorway through which our growth and transformation can arrive: “Any attempt to engineer or plan your own enlightenment is doomed to failure because it will be ego driven,” he writes. “You will see only what you have already decided to look for, and you cannot see what you are not ready or told to look for. So failure and humiliation force you to look where you never would otherwise.”

When we neglect to find God within the loss and suffering that human life brings, we suppress and remain illiterate to the pearls of great price that appear within suffering. We, in turn, become averse to loss and difficulty. This requires a “renewing of our minds,” as Paul says, so that suffering, which we may endure with gritted teeth and breaking hearts, may not always be viewed as wrong, bad, or something to avoid, hate, and curse. 

It is suffering, after all, that winds up redeeming us at times. It is by suffering that we find the real, enduring form of success, happiness, and triumph. Again, Rohr says:

Sometimes it seems that half of the fairy tales of the world are some form of Cinderella, ugly duckling, or poor boy story, telling of the little person who has no power or possessions who ends up being king or queen, prince or princess. We write it off as wishful dreaming, when it is actually the foundational pattern of disguise or amnesia, loss, and recovery. Every Beauty is sleeping, it seems, before it can meet its Prince. The duckling must be “ugly”, or there will be no story. The knight errant must be wounded, or he will never even know what the Holy Grail is, much less find it. Jesus must be crucified, or there can be no resurrection. It is written in our hardwiring, but can only be heard at the soul level. It will usually be resisted and opposed at the ego level.

 

It is the ego that is primarily activated during winning and losing, yet it is the very ego that the spiritual journey attempts to unseat and undo. 

What are we to do? 

The spiritual life teaches us that through loss we often find our greatest fortune. “So we must stumble and fall, I am sorry to say,” Rohr says. “We must actually be out of the driver’s seat for a while, or we will never learn how to give up control to the Real Guide. It is the necessary pattern. This kind of falling is what I mean by necessary suffering.”

It’s simple: We give God more real estate. Present in the touchdowns and triumphs, the divine, we may see, is also present in the heartbreak and gut punches of life. And for that, we give thanks.