Winning Is Wonderful

Let me begin by writing, "I love winning. I love everything about it".

When I was a chubby six year old my favorite baseball team was the New York Yankees. They had players named Mickey Mantle, Hank Bauer, Yogi Berra and Billy Martin. It seems to me they won every World Series. When I was in the 1st grade Sister Mary Calasanctus would turn on the radio and let us listen to the games, usually versus the hated Brooklyn Dodgers. The Yankees always, at least in my mind, won every World Series played.

My Little League teams won the City Championship every year. I reveled in it. In high school my class defeated the team from Ames, Iowa in football. It hadn't happened in 29 years. We players walked down the street the next day with heads held high. Our high school basketball team went to the Iowa High School basketball state tournament finals. What a thrill but winning the last game to get there topped them all.

I loved to compete and did so in sports all the way through college and then onward for twenty years of high school coaching. After that career I spent the next twenty years in sales and that, my dear friends, is the ultimate in competition.

Under my photo in my 1964 high school graduation picture was a descriptive quote reading, "born to compete".

Flash forward to 2018. Since Donald Trump took office this nation has done nothing, foreign and domestic, to alter the process of winning. The perceived greatest country in America is now truly that nation. It has the feeling of the day after VJ-Day in 1945.

Do you recall the feeling we had when the USA Olympic hockey team defeated the Soviets in the 1980 games. Felt good, didn't it??

It's great to be alive. Winning is a continuing process but every time it happens there's an inner pride than can never be taken away.