What can you learn about life from a car race and a basketball game? Turns out quite a bit.
After 23 hours and 57 minutes of the 2016 24 Hours of Le Mans, Toyota Gazoo Racing had reason to feel good about their chances of winning the legendary car race. They had been a contender throughout and led it, decisively, for the final four hours. Then, with just a couple of laps to go, their leading No. 5 car inexplicably—and heartbreakingly—stopped making power. It stalled, cruelly, in front of the packed grandstand with just one lap to go. The No. 2 Porsche swept by and it was over in mere seconds. By the quirky way rankings are determined in endurance racing, the Toyota wound up classified as not having finished the race. It was like it never existed.
We are unmerciful in how we treat the almost-as-good.
The fact is nothing really hung in the balance in what is well beyond a rich persons’ game. Nobody was going to go hungry as a result of not winning Le Mans. Car manufacturers, with effectively unlimited resources, compete to best each other in an artificially difficult test as they have since 1923. But watching the quiet elation of the would-be, first time winner Toyota turn quickly into ashen-faced silence could bring even the most hardened, winner-take-all fan of the sport to a new emotional plateau. Briefly setting aside the billionaire context, it was an intensely human moment.
What if? What might have been? If only.
As it was with Cleveland and Golden State on exactly the same day. A seventh game tied for virtually the entire 48 minutes and then to be separated by a three-pointer and a free throw at the end. The three point shots the Splash Brothers had poured in earlier were all but absent. Just one more from each, and they would forever be known—at the very least—as two time, back-to-back winners instead of barely warranting a mention in the post-game interviews. Other than to wonder out loud what the heck happened to them. It was like their record regular season had never happened. Instead, they became enablers of some other guy’s dream and some other team’s moment in history.
Would have? Could have? Didn’t.
This is part of the enduring appeal of sport witnessed as it occurs in real time. It’s a world where with great certainty one side wins and everybody else loses, to one degree of another. When our side wins, we win. When our side loses, we lose. In a world that is becoming increasing virtual, this is still something physical, something felt in the gut. It is real Reality TV as opposed to fake Reality TV which reeks of something concocted and contrived. In sport, every day the stories are written indelibly into history, leaving us to think about what was, what is and what might have been. Coming close—but not winning—has real, not virtual, consequences.
In the movie Field of Dreams, the character Archie ‘Moonlight’ Graham says of his exactly one at-bat in The Show “at the time we don't think much of it. You know, we just don’t recognize the most significant moments of our lives while they’re happening. Back then I thought, ‘_Well, there will be other days.’ I didn’t realize that that was the_ only day.”
No spoilers here, but things do work out for Archie in the end, although in ways he could not, would not and never have predicted. Life worked out OK.
When the unconsolable race car driver steps from the cockpit, or the dejected basketball player steps from the court, and rationalize there will be a ‘next time’, you hope—you really hope—that this is not their Moonlight Graham moment. A moment where destiny brushes past but never reaches out and touches them. Odds are, though, that’s exactly what will happen and these good people will be left with a lifetime of wondering what might have been.
I will never, ever be a professional athlete of any description under any circumstances. I have genes, the clock and lack of talent working actively against me.
However, many years ago when my career was just getting underway, I had my own Moonlight Graham moment when I scratched together enough code for what could legitimately be called word processing software. I even understood marketing enough to realize that a decent product review in a trade rag could really make a difference. In due course my software was reviewed alongside the product-of-the-moment, WordStar. I had earned some media long before I even knew what earned media was. To be candid and setting all modesty aside, I did pretty well by comparison to my well funded rival. Long before Archie Graham ever took the field in W.P. Kinsella’s ‘Shoeless Joe’, I could reasonably be forgiven for believing this was my Moonlight moment. But as is the way with these moments, I just didn’t realize it at the time.
It turned out that through a combination of circumstances I never got my software out of the starting gate, even with that decent review. After that moment, I made choices that were hopelessly wrong. To be completely honest, I blew it.
As a result, like Archie, my one day in The Show did not result in my life hurtling off on a trajectory that would have wound up who knows where—for better or worse. At that moment in time, I remember thinking the equivalent of ‘never mind, there will be other days’ only to realize, just recently, there is a good chance that was the day. It just took me 35 years to figure that out. I sometimes think about what might have been if I had just tried a little bit harder to get the code right on my word processor. Was I 23 hours and 57 minutes into a 24 hour race? Was I a single fall-away jump shot away from a championship?
I’ll never know. Things did work out, though, in spectacular, remarkable ways I could never have imagined back then.
Life worked out OK.
©2016 Terence C. Gannon
If you prefer, you can listen to this essay as a podcast. This article previously appeared on Medium on June 22, 2016. I welcome your comments below. If you enjoyed this article, I would appreciate it if you could share it with your social networks. (header photo: Toyota Gazoo Racing)