If the Washington Post’s Chuck Lane was annoyed by the weekslong reign of “Jeopardy!” champion James Holzhauer back at the end of April, he must be positively apoplectic at the powerhouse contestant’s ongoing success. “Do you not see that this guy is a menace?” Lane asked, denouncing a culture that celebrates Holzhauer’s “relentless march to victory.”
Yes, sometimes a crushing victory is grotesque, but it can also be a thing of beauty, even to those defeated. What’s the difference? Let me see if I can get at an answer.
Back when I was in graduate school in Boston, I played intramural basketball in an informal league. The various teams were near parodies of the reputations that the different schools had. The Kennedy School of Government team had players who, as you would expect from a bunch of politicos, had a competitive streak. Which is not to say we were skilled, but it did mean we played scrappy, opportunistic round-ball. The medical school played with elegant determination, but the fact that the doctors in training had to study all the time took the edge off their game. The Harvard Law School team was combative but tended to misdirect their energies into litigating the most punctilious application of the rules. The School of Education would have done better if they hadn’t treated the games as, well, games.
But the perfect expression of competing competition cultures came one night when I showed up early. It was halftime of the game before mine. I sat on the bleachers, put on my flat-bottomed, high-topped Chuck Taylors and strapped my big, geeky, plastic basketball goggles to my gulliver. I glanced at the scoreboard to see how much time was left before the second half was going to start. That’s when I saw a bloodbath was in progress. I can’t remember the exact score: It was something like 48-2 or 76-3 or 112-0. It was brutal. I turned to the person sitting next to me and asked what teams were playing. It was the Harvard Business School against the Divinity School. You can guess which side was winning.
The buzzer buzzed, the teams took to the court, and the Divinity School brought the ball in bounds. They didn’t keep it long as the biz school guys put on a full-court press. They pressed the entire half. It was slaughter. It was ugly.
And yet, several years ago, I witnessed an even more decisive blowout, and it wasn’t ugly at all. Indeed, it was a thing of rare perfection.
During her freshman year of high school, my oldest daughter, Priscilla, was on the swim team for her school. The event that came with the most pressure was the 200 freestyle relay, which Priscilla anchored. A few weeks into the season, she had a meet against Stone Ridge, where a number of her grade school friends had chosen to go to high school. Among them was an unfailingly polite young woman, whom I had known only as the girl who did crosswalk patrol with my daughter. I had heard she could swim.
As it turned out, she was the girl anchoring Stone Ridge’s 200-meter squad, which is how my daughter came to be crouched on a starting block next to future Olympic gold medal-winner Katie Ledecky. It was swiftly over: Priscilla had barely hit the water when Katie had turned and was reaching for the wall of the pool. It was breathtaking and beautiful.
Why do these crushing defeats strike us as so different? In the basketball game, the victory came not from the greatness of the Harvard Business School’s team, but through the ruthless and ugly exploitation of the opponent’s weakness. Katie, by contrast, didn’t exploit anyone’s vulnerability. Instead, she honored her opponents by giving her best effort against them.
Twenty or 30 years from now, Priscilla will still count herself lucky to have lost to Ledecky. I doubt the guys from the Harvard Divinity School basketball team treasure taking a beating from the biz school.
And what about “Jeopardy!” champ Holzhauer? I suspect those who lost to him will value having been part of something extraordinary.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
