The 2024 Summer Olympic Games are coming. What a terrific sports festival for our modern era! Interestingly, the 2022 Winter Olympic gold medal for women’s figure skating was only recently determined. Finally, after two years of debate, discussion, and controversy. I wonder if that’s how the Greeks did it 2,800 years ago?
America has our own “modern game”. Did you join in the aftermath? It was Monday, February 12th. Ring a bell? How about this: It was the day after the most watched television event in history with an estimated 123.7 million viewers. Actually, the phenomenon I’m referring to started the night before; even before the fans left the stadium.
Monday February 12th brought out the rest of the seers; soothsayers; second-guessers, pundits; pontificators; doubters; experts; gurus; quarterbacks of the arm-chair and Monday-morning variety, and (of course) the critics. Some are still grinding on it. I chuckle about the pontificators:
“Pontificator”
in British English
NOUN a person who pontificates
Yes, yes, I’m a pontificator, too. Even so, are these other gurus worth listening to? All the hoopla reminds me of Dale Carnegie’s pontification:
Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain - and most fools do.
I’m talking about Super Bowl LVIII. (That’s 58 to us non-Latin-Speaking-Romans). I get it. Sports fans, bettors, media, and even the 123.7 viewers have their opinions about whether the Chiefs won the game or the 49ers lost it. Is Kyle Shanahan an elite NFL head coach who has yet to win a Super Bowl? Or is he a bumbling idiot who blew the game over a coin flip?
Shanahan certainly unleashed the “What if’s”. Especially the “if’s”. And we all know:
If
the Hamm’s Bear drank Schlitz, there’d be no land of sky blue waters.
Unknown Sage
I could join in. “What if” it turns out that the Kansas City Chiefs are one of the greatest NFL teams ever assembled. In spite of the Bills Mafia (a favorite fan base of mine), Buffalo couldn’t beat the Chiefs at home. Not even the Baltimore Ravens with the best regular season record, home field advantage, and the NFL’s Most Valuable Player in 2024 could beat KC.
Personally, I admired Shanahan’s confidence. Score first; hold KC; and the debate shifts to whether the Superbowl MVP should have been Brock Purdy or Christian McCaffrey. Oh, Kyle could have doubted; played less aggressively; feared Patrick Mahomes; anticipated the punditry. But try as they might, the post-game media experts couldn’t get him to say he made a mistake. He remained confident in the face of criticism just as Michael Treacy wrote about in his book The Discipline of Market Leaders ©:
Courage in the face of doubt is essential.
Oh well, criticism of defeats have been with mankind as long as there has been mankind. I’m sure you and I face the doubters and second guessers every time a decision we made doesn’t turn out very well. I’d rather heed the ancients:
There
is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing; say nothing; and be nothing.
Aristotle
Nonetheless, the debate and the criticism continues; especially the criticism in spite of what the ancients might think. As for the Olympics, the International Olympic Committee has published this historical perspective:
The Original values of Olympism as expressed in the Olympic Charter were to encourage effort, preserve human dignity, and develop harmony.
Hmmm… No mention of coin flips by a single seer, soothsayer, or pontificator.
GAP
When life gets tough we could get a helmet… or…
we
could leverage the peace and share the power of a positive perspective.
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