What It Means to Be a Good Sport

Commentary

A friend lost his temper on the tennis court the other day and he was telling me about it. He missed several shots in a row and the frustration built up. He threw a tantrum. Looking back, what disappoints him is not his missed shots but the way he responded to them. All his training told him never to behave this way. It ruins the game for everyone.

He was recalling the meaning of being a good sport. It’s a phrase that was once very common, both within athletics and in professional and domestic life. To be a good sport implies a full range of etiquette and ethics thereby. Let’s review some basic principles.

Never lose your temper. There is nothing more unseemly than a man who loses his temper. It means losing control of one’s emotions and letting them run wild, behaving purely biologically rather than intellectually. No one respects a man who does this. Ever. Never. It is always and everywhere disreputable in any context.

To be sure, there is a role for anger when circumstances demand it. But it should always be read through mental discipline, a cool energy marked by careful calculation, a low but firm voice, and clear decision-making. A man who deals with anger with feet stomping, yelling, and foul language is a child, not a gentleman.

Always admit error. The first rule in basketball is that you raise your hand if you have committed a foul. You put it up and admit it right away. That reflects humility, but it also reflects fairness to others. We all make errors, just as we are all sinners. The key is to admit it. The Christian religion posits contrition as a condition of salvation and has variously offered confessionals to make this a habit.

But in our culture, just as anger is no longer disciplined and cool, the simple act of saying “I’m sorry” seems to be endangered. It’s just not a habit. For some reason, people think that it is beneath them, as if mouthing the words alone were a disgrace and an embarrassment. It is not. The most manly act is the simple admission: I screwed up and I’m sorry.

Praise your opponents. There are two ways to respond to losing a competition. You can be angry at yourself and throw a fit. Or you can be magnanimous and praise the skill of your opponent. Saying “good shot” should be a habit. This builds in a willingness to praise others and to recognize that other people also need praise, same as you. The habit is returned to you as you both develop good sportsmanship.

This is exactly the same in professional life. A boss who praises the work of others is respected and appreciated. Even better, the boss should praise in public while reserving criticism for private conversations. A boss who reverses that will find himself loathed in short order. Also, if you are the most talented person on your team, it is even more incumbent on you to praise others and deflect all praise coming your way with a simple comment: I accept that compliment on behalf of the whole team.

Play by the rules. This is a key point that sports teaches young people. There is a framework. There are boundaries. There are rules. You must comply with them. All your skills and talents must be developed within them. You are not free to do whatever you want. If you do that, you will be penalized.

All of life has rules: the home, the office, the public square. They can be good rules or bad rules. If they are good ones, comply with them. If they are bad rules, work to change them. But let us not imagine that any aspect of life can operate to the benefit of everyone without rules and norms. Nor is the goal to find sneaky ways around them. That will not benefit you in the long run. Being a good sport means playing within the rules, and even accepting bad outcomes and bad calls with a sense of honor.

Pass the ball. Early in basketball, everyone discovers some one player who hogs the ball, dribbling everywhere in hopes of the perfect shot. He wants to be a star. Everyone hates him because this is not the way it works.

It’s true in professional life, too. There are task hoarders, people who want to be the only guy handling a single important piece of the production structure. They do this not because they are uniquely talented (though they may be), but as a means of job protection. They hold up everyone else and wield their control as a weapon against others. Such people hold up whole organizations in the desire to move forward.

Passing the ball, sharing the work, and enlisting others in a mission that goes beyond individual ambitions is another feature of what it means to be a good sport.

Don’t be a sore loser. This phrase used to be common in the culture. I’m not sure it still is. But it should be. A sore loser blames the game, the umpires, teammates, or forever accuses the competition of cheating. This is nasty behavior. This is being a sore loser. When you lose, you congratulate the winners and strive to be better next time.

The scoreboard is a fact, not an opinion, and arguing with it changes nothing. What it does change is you: A man who can absorb a loss without flinching, shake a hand, and mean it has already won something the victor may not possess.

Win with grace. Losing badly is a test of character. Winning badly is a greater one, because it comes with a temptation to gloat. The winner who struts, who reminds everyone of the score, who lets his victory diminish others, has learned nothing from the game. The better move is to credit the opponent, to name the good things he did, and to make the losers feel that they were part of something worthwhile. A victory that leaves everyone else feeling small is only half a victory. A victory that lifts the room is complete.

The same holds in the office. The man who lands the account, gets the promotion, or shapes the project should be the first to name the people who helped—not out of false modesty, but out of accuracy, since no one does anything alone. The colleague who wins and shares the credit builds a reservoir of goodwill he will need the next time he loses—and he will lose again. Everyone does.

Respect the game itself. Sports teaches that there is something larger than any single player: the contest, the tradition, the rules that make it possible. You are a temporary custodian of it. You inherit a field that others built and you leave it better or worse for the next man.

The same is true of every institution worth belonging to: the family, the firm, the parish, the town. To be a good sport is to honor the thing that made you, rather than using it purely for your own advancement. The player who only cares about his own stats will be forgotten. The player who cared about the team will be remembered long after his numbers are.

There is a reason all of this matters. None of these rules are really about tennis or basketball. They are a compressed course in how to be a decent human being under pressure. The court is simply a low-stakes rehearsal for the higher-stakes arenas of marriage, work, friendship, and civic life, where the same temptations appear in larger form.

A man who can’t control his temper over a missed forehand will not control it when the stakes are his career. A man who won’t admit a foul in a pickup game will not admit a mistake in a marriage.

What we call good sportsmanship is really just a name for a set of habits: cool under pressure, honest about fault, generous with praise, faithful to the rules, willing to share, and graceful whether ahead or behind.

These are old virtues dressed in athletic clothes. They were once transmitted almost automatically, learned on playgrounds and practiced in front of neighbors who were not shy about correcting you. That transmission has weakened. This is why we have to name them again, deliberately, and teach them again, on purpose.

My friend who threw his racket knows all this. That’s what stung. He wasn’t disappointed by the shots he missed. He was disappointed that, for a few seconds, he forgot who he wanted to be.

The good news is that the habit can be rebuilt, one point at a time. The court gives you a thousand chances to practice being the kind of man you claim to be. So does every ordinary day. The whistle blows, the ball goes up, and you get to decide all over again what kind of sport you are.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.