School of sport: BEING MEN

HAVE you ever wondered what Snoop Dogg, Rabbie Burns and Rudyard Kipling have in common? And have we ever realized how important they are to the sport?

None of them are known for their athletic ability, but all have a larger following than the majority of athletes, while the lessons they can impart have deep relevance to the sporting world we are introducing our children to.

Rabbie Burns, not a footballer but an eighteenth-century Scottish poet, died at the age of thirty-seven while ten thousand people lined the streets for his funeral; In fact, in 2009 he was voted Greatest Scotsman by the Scottish public in a poll conducted by Scottish Television.

His poem ‘Auld Lang Syne’ is sung around the world to ring in a new year, while he is also known for his poems ‘Ode to a Haggis’ and ‘To a Mouse’, the latter of which includes the lines ‘The Die best plans of mice and men go aft after aft, leaving us nothing but sorrow and pain.

As is often the case in sports, players have big plans and dreams to conquer the world, but all too often they let us down and bring only misery. As part of life and the pursuit of success, we must learn to deal with failure.

Rudyard Kipling was an English novelist, short story writer, poet and journalist whose best known works include The Jungle Book, Just So Stories and the poem If. The latter poem cites numerous contrasting situations through which our character is revealed; it contains the lines

“If you can have triumph and disaster and treat these two cheaters equally” (which in our modern sports terms refers to winning and losing, success and failure), then we are judged unsuccessful (as we desperately seem to be accounted for) , but to be a man – a real man, a man worthy of recognition, respect and reputation.

If we can do all that he tells, then “Yours is the earth and all that is on it, and more than that you will be a man, my son”. Sport, like life, is about being a man, not about success. When will our children learn this?

In modern life, Snoop Dogg would undoubtedly count as an achievement judging by his wealth and influence as a rapper and the epitome of hip-hop. But in another moment he once admitted: “I used to get stressed when I thought it was important to win. I wanted to try to win and help my kids win. When I found out that it wasn’t about winning or losing, but about teaching these kids to be men, I started to relax.”

How much good would it do us if we, as sports coaches and parents of sporty children, could realize once and for all that school sport is “about teaching these children how to be men”.

Of course, here in Zimbabwe we have our own culture, honed through years of adversity, sudden and catastrophic change. We know that we can always make a plan when things don’t go well or don’t go as we planned (when things “go aft,” as Rabbie Burns put it). We make a plan.

Where better to teach that than on our school sports fields? But the plan we make has to be what Snoop Dogg came up with and Kipling formulated. It’s not that we have to be successful; we must strive to be men. This is the message we must teach our children. It’s about incorporating all the qualities Kipling wrote about into our lives, even on the playing field.

So relax with Snoop Dogg. Even being a man, as opposed to being a success, will empower us, and being a man is what we are meant to bring out in our children. They can be men, win or lose.

They can be men if they put things in perspective, including sports scores. If we don’t do that — if we push for victory and only find defeat — it will surely leave them with nothing but grief and pain, as Burns noted. We teach these kids to be men by winning and losing – the sporting result doesn’t matter, but the personal result does.

It’s not about being a human or a mouse; Both plans can go wrong. However, we don’t have to be mouse-timid, shy, or insecure about our approach to sports and life. Being a success doesn’t make us a man. The pursuit of success does not let us relax.

Treating each scenario with dignity, humility, respect and calm will lead us to this point. Poets have learned that; Rappers learned that; Writers learned that. When will coaches and parents find out?