No Contest (17 page)

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The constituents of enjoyment that are used to argue for recreational competition actually do not, for the most part, require competition at all. We do not need to try to beat other people in order to have a good time. Why, then, are competitive games so popular? The first response is that the extent of their popularity may not be so great as we imagine, at least if participation is our standard of measure. Some people, of course, avoid or drop out of sports because of disabilities, other interests, an aversion to exercise, and so forth. But a huge proportion dislike such activities precisely because they are competitive. “For many children competitive sports operate as a failure factory which not only effectively eliminates the ‘bad ones' but also turns off many of the ‘good ones,'” writes sports psychologist Terry Orlick. “In North America it is not uncommon to lose from 80 to 90 percent of our registered organized sports participants by 15 years of age.”
⁴¹
Research in nonrecreational settings clearly shows that those who are not successful in initial competitions continue to perform poorly,
⁴²
thereby setting up a vicious cycle. Other research suggests that these individuals drop out when given the chance.
⁴³

Many people who defend competition actually encourage this, invoking a “survival of the fittest” ethic. School athletic programs implicitly do likewise, concentrating resources where the very best athletes are. Expressions of indifference or even satisfaction when many participants drop out of a given activity are disturbing under any circumstances, but they seem particularly outrageous when it comes to recreation. What, after all, is the point of games if not to encourage widespread participation and enjoyment? This sort of attitude has become self-defeating, moreover, since many accomplished (or potentially excellent) athletes find the competitive pressure distasteful and onerous enough to bail out.

The situation has reached the point that dozens of magazine articles and popular books are published every year decrying the excessive competitiveness of children's athletic programs, such as Little League baseball. The spectacle of frantic, frothing parents humiliating their children in their quest for vicarious triumph is, of course, appalling, and the cheating and violence that result will be explored in a later chapter. For now, consider the simple fact that these experiences with competition are so unpleasant as to lead uncounted children to leave sports permanently.

Is this mass exodus a bad thing? Unlike most critics, I am not at all sure that it is. In order to regret the fact that children are turned off to sports, you must assume that competition
itself
is unobjectionable if not delightful—and that potential athletes are alienated only because they receive too large a dose. I propose instead that while ill effects increase in direct proportion to the extent of competitiveness in an activity, it is competition itself that is to blame (although its effect will depend on an individual's temperament and specific experiences). There is no threshold of competitiveness below which we could expect all children to enjoy sports. From this position, it follows that disaffection with sports should not occasion regret on our part—unless children generalize their reaction to all physical activity.

My point in showing that the competitive dimension of sports is creating millions of future ex-jocks is not to argue that this is a tragedy but only to show that the link between competition and fun is largely spurious. Some people quit sports outright, while others may continue participating from force of habit, out of an unrelenting need to demonstrate their competence, or for any one of a number of other reasons that have little to do with genuine enjoyment. For all the emphasis on competitive recreation in our culture, then, its popularity is not what it first appears.

But what of those who
do
enjoy such activities? A cross-cultural perspective is helpful here, reminding us that the members of some societies not only cooperate in their work but also enjoy noncompetitive pastimes. The unavoidable implication is that we are socialized to regard competition as an indispensable part of having a good time. We have been raised to associate recreation with the win/lose model that pervades our society, to assume that having fun means someone has to wind up a loser. We enjoy what we have been brought up to enjoy. A child in our culture knows without thinking how he is supposed to have fun with his friends: play a game whose structure requires that not everyone can be successful. When he does not play, he goes to watch other people play such games. This socialization is so thorough that alternatives to competitive recreation are almost inconceivable to many of us. “How can it be a game if no one wins?” we ask, with genuine puzzlement—the same puzzlement occasioned by talk of cooperative education.

In resisting competitive recreation, most liberal-minded writers have implicitly or explicitly suggested that we should place less emphasis on winning. We can stop keeping score, for example, and try to shift our focus from winning to having fun. “Every young athlete should be judged
only on his own or her own,
” sports psychologists Thomas Tutko and William Bruns urge. “They should not be measured in terms of how they do as compared to others.”
⁴⁴
This amounts to suggesting that we be less intentionally competitive even within a structurally competitive environment. Like most reformist approaches to systemic problems, this recommendation is likely to be limited in its effectiveness. Where we are unable or unwilling to abandon competitive games, minimizing the importance of who wins and who loses does indeed make sense. But the usefulness of this approach depends on the kind of game involved.

It is relatively easy to stop keeping score in golf, which consists of two or more people taking turns at independent pursuits and then comparing their success at the end. A more interdependent competitive activity, however, makes this far more difficult, if not impossible: “One simply cannot expect two tennis players to place their shots in such a position, provided they did possess the necessary skill, as to assist in the increased development of the opponent. This is simply not the
reason
for the sport as we know it today. The name of the game
is
win.”
⁴⁵
It is not merely that tennis is structured so that only one player can win in the end, but that in each instant of play success consists in hitting the ball so that one's opponent is unable to return it. All team sports, as well as most competitive indoor games (e.g., chess, poker), are more like tennis than like golf. In such cases, well-meaning exhortations to be less competitive seem naive at best.

To say we find competition enjoyable because we are socialized to do so is not merely to say that we teach our children to
want
to win, but that we offer them games where the whole point is to win. The only real alternative is noncompetitive games, and children, as we saw earlier, generally prefer these games once they are exposed to them—an extraordinarily suggestive finding.

But how are such games played? All games involve achieving a goal despite the presence of an obstacle; in football, for example, the goal is to move a ball from one point to another, and the obstacle is the other team. In noncompetitive games, the obstacle is something intrinsic to the task itself rather than another person or persons. If coordinated effort is required to achieve the goal, then the game becomes not merely noncompetitive but positively cooperative. Such coordination invariably involves the presence of rules. While competitive activities are particularly dependent on rules—and inflexible rules, at that
⁴⁶
—it is not the case that the only alternative to competition is the “Caucus-race” described in
Alice in Wonderland,
in which participants “began running when they liked, and left off when they liked.”
⁴⁷
While such an activity more closely approximates pure play, noncompetitive games are generally rule-governed. Thus, the presence of rules does not imply the presence of competition.
⁴⁸

Partly because they do have rules, noncompetitive games can be at least as challenging as their competitive counterparts. They are also a good deal of fun, and, like the Caucus-race, can have the happy Result that “‘
Everybody
has won and
all
must have prizes.'”
⁴⁹
Consider musical chairs, an American classic for small children. In this game, a prototype of artificial scarcity, x players scramble for x—1 chairs when the music stops. Each round eliminates one player and one chair until finally one triumphant winner emerges. All of the other players have lost—and have been sitting on the sidelines for varying lengths of time, excluded from play. Terry Orlick proposes instead that when a chair is removed after each round, the players should try to find room on the chairs that remain—a task that becomes more difficult and more fun as the game progresses. The final result is a group of giggling children crowded onto a single chair.

This is only one of hundreds of noncompetitive games that Orlick has invented or discovered, and they have been collected in
The Cooperative Sports and Games Book
(1978) and
The Second Cooperative Sports and Games Book
(1982). Another good collection is Jeffrey Sobel's
Everybody Wins: Non-competitive Games for Young Children
(1983). As early as 1950, Theodore F. Lentz and Ruth Cornelius published their own manual of cooperative games. Among them are Cooperative Chinese Checkers, the object of which is not to move one's marbles faster than the other player but to coordinate the two players' movements so that they reach their respective home sections simultaneously. In Cooperative Bowling, similarly, the purpose is to “knock down the ten pins in as many rounds as there are players”—a very challenging task indeed.
⁵⁰
Other cooperative games require that each player make a specified contribution to the goal, that all the players attempt to reach a certain score (as in Cooperative Shuffleboard, which requires a modified court), or that all players work together against a time limit. Orlick also has defused the competitive element in more traditional games by manipulating the scoring procedures or constitution of teams. In “Bump and Scoot” volleyball, for example, a player who hits the ball over the net immediately moves to the other side. “The common objective [is] to make a complete change in teams with as few drops of the ball as possible.”
⁵¹
A small family business in Ontario, Canada, called Family Pastimes manufactures about fifty indoor games for adults and children, including cooperative versions of chess, backgammon, go, Scrabble, and Monopoly. There may well be other such publications and products, but with a little ingenuity anyone can invent or reinvent many such games. Change the rules of Scrabble, for example, so that the two players try to obtain the highest possible combined score. Allow each to see the other's letters. The game is at least as challenging with this adaptation, given that one must be thinking about saving certain spaces on the board for one's partner and anticipating later developments from a joint perspective.

Note the significance of an “opponent” becoming a “partner.” This is far more than a semantic transformation: the entire dynamic of the game shifts, and one's attitude toward the other player(s) changes with it. Even the friendliest game of tennis cannot help but be affected by the game's inherent structure, as described earlier. The two players are engaged in an activity that demands that each try to make the other fail. The good feeling that attends a cooperative game—the delight one is naturally led to take in another player's success—may cast in sharper relief the posture one routinely adopts toward other players in competitive games—perhaps without even being aware of it. Cooperative recreation can, in other words, allow us to experience retrospectively just why competition is less enjoyable—and less innocuous—than we may have otherwise assumed.

5

PSYCHOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS

 

A competitive culture endures by tearing people down.

—Jules Henry,
Culture Against Man

 

Let us pretend for
a moment that the popular mythology about competition's being necessary for excellence is true—which is to say that all of the evidence reviewed in chapter 3 does not exist. Does this clinch the case for the desirability of competition? Not at all. The effect of competition on productivity tells us nothing about its effect on the competitors themselves. When we shift our attention from performance to people, we find more than enough reason to oppose competition.

The question of psychological impact, while generally ignored by empirical studies, is a matter that touches us far more deeply than productivity. Even people who have never questioned the shibboleths about the usefulness of competition will confess that the ways it affects them and the people around them can be profoundly disquieting. Given a real choice, most of us will try to avoid unusually competitive organizations or activities. More significantly, we will steer clear of unusually competitive people. When we say that someone is “one of the most competitive people around,” we generally are not recommending that person as a friend. Such people, in fact, find themselves mistrusted if not simply avoided by others. When we become aware of our own competitiveness, we often become uncomfortable—a fact that is all the more remarkable in light of the professional rewards for acting this way. All told, the alleged benefits of competition do not keep most of us from reflecting on how “the rat race” of American life takes its psychological toll.

This chapter will explore that toll carefully. It will argue that the closer we look, the more damaging we find competition to be. Its effects are sometimes insidious, sometimes practically invisible, but almost always unhealthy. Before considering the consequences of competition, however, it might be wise to look into its causes. The two questions, as we shall see, are more closely related than they might seem.