Victory
By Peter John Gardner
I've noticed that the two main "interests" that parents forcibly put their kids into during their formative years are sports and religion. As far as religion is concerned, I lucked out. While my parents were both religious (Mom is Catholic, Dad's a Lutheran), they felt it was wrong to shove it down my throat as a kid, so they preferred to let me research things and discover it on my own. I eventually grew into being an atheist. Instead, they enrolled me in various sports in order to keep me busy as a child. I played basketball, baseball, and soccer, and I rocked at all three of them. In baseball, I held the title for most stolen bases in the league for three years in a row, and my team was first place in our division for two years. As a goalie in soccer, I won the MVP award in the league one year, and we usually placed second or third in our division.
As time passed and all of the kids started to grow up, the coaches and leagues started to place more stress on the competitive aspect of the sports rather than the usual, "Let's just go out there and have fun!" attitude. This turned me off, big time. I just liked to play the game; I didn't give a fuck either which way whether or not we won. The older I got, the harder the coaches would be on the team when we weren't winning, and I hated that as a kid. So, when school finished up one year (I think this was around 6th or 7th grade), and my mom asked me if I wanted to sign up for baseball that summer, I told her no, and gave her the same answer when the new seasons for basketball and soccer started up. I was tired of competition. I just liked to play. To me, it was a hobby. I didn't see anything to gain from winning other than a cheap trophy and the right to say, "Yeah! We kicked the CRAP out of those 12 year olds! Whoooo!!!"
Rocky and a few other films aside (Field of Dreams, Major League, Rudy, etc.), I never really cared for sports movies which stemmed from the bad taste that I had acquired from my last days playing. So, I went into Stallone's 1981 film Victory ready to bored and stumped as to what I was going to get out of a movie like this.
The film is set at a Nazi POW camp during WWII. This camp is filled with mostly British and American prisoners, so in order to comply with Geneva Convention, the prisoners here actually have it quite good. Other than somebody getting shot to death trying to escape the camp in the opening scene of the movie, the camp seems like Club Med compared to concentration camps that non-POWS (i.e. Jews) were put into . This place seems less like Auschwitz and more like Camp Nowhere. Hell, in this movie, the Nazs seem like pretty nice guys. They never really talk down to the prisoners, feed and dress them well, let them roam around the camp freely, and even make an offer to the prisoners for a game of football (better known as soccer to us fat Americans). So, the head Nazi leader makes an offer to one of the POWs who happens to be an ex-football pro, played by the always charming Michael Caine. Caine's character agrees providing that he gets to choose his own team and that the Nazis provide proper equipment for the players.
Stallone plays Capt. Robert Hatch, an American POW that barges his way onto the team using the same nagging tactics that Stallone normally uses to woo women in previous films ("Hey, yo. Can I be on your team? Hey, yo, I'm pretty good, ya know? You see that kick? I can do that all the time? Am I the team yet? Yo. Hey, ya know, why are you ignoring me?"). Hatch not only wants to play the game, but he also has ulterior motives. Stallone wants to escape the camp, and he sees the soccer match as his ticket out. The rest of the film follows typical sports movie formula. The team sucks at first, they acquire some new players, including, I shit you not, the legendary Pele. The team gets better, Hatch "hatches" a plan to escape during the final match, and we get to the final game where everything follows according to formula. OUr heroes start off winning, then the Nazis start kicking their ass, and just when we're supposed to think that the POWs are finished, they make a huge, and unrealistic, comeback. Hatch and company escape and everything is hunky dory.
Watching the last act of the movie gave me an epiphany. Because I always rejected the competitive aspect of sports, I started to reject any kind of competitive traits my personality was trying to develop. I think this eventually hurt me in life, in many different areas. Too many times in my life, I have not tried for something because I always had a mindset of, "Why compete? They'll probably find someone better anyway". The thrill of winning something was too far gone from my life that I forgot what it felt like. Not winning anything helped sink my self esteem as I grew up.
Opportunities for promotion at various jobs I've worked at were always ignored by me because I would think, "Eh, they'll find somebody more deserving". Many times a girl would show interest in me, I would pull back sometimes with the thought of, "Why bother? She'll eventually find somebody better than me".
I think I ignored competition because deep down inside, I never felt like anything was at stake. Watching Victory with an analytical mindset made me realize that A LOT was at stake during all of the times I ignored competition for windows of opportunity. The lack of a drive to win has hurt my chances at life, and I think that had I felt like I was worth something while those windows were open, I would've jumped through without looking, and maybe, just maybe, I would be standing in a different place in my life right now. If I had competed more, maybe I could've "won". Maybe that would've made me feel like, "Well, I can do this really well, and others seem to agree", and I would've had more progress throughout life.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to say that winning is the most important part of sports or any other competitive situation. I still believe that having fun is what's most important. But rejecting the competition that life had to offer left me little opportunity to actually win anything at all, and that affected my decision making later on in life.
I need to take more chances in life and stop selling myself short. Having low self esteem not only hurts myself, but brings others down as well. I need to stop reflecting on what I never did and instead focus on what I could do. As far as the things I don't think I can do, who else but myself says I can't do them? Fuck that. While Orlando isn't exactly a Nazi POW camp, I'm never going to make it out of here a success if I don't try. I must stop being my own worst critic and leave it up for others to decide.
