Winner Take All Society

The grumblings will eventually start, if they haven't already - LeBron won the championship by stacking the deck.  This is why people were so upset with the Miami trade.  It offended their sense of "fair play."  What people and the media don't get - it's partially their own fault.  All you hear, ad nauseum, is that they only thing that matters is rings.  You're nothing unless you have a ring.  What's more, you can't even enter the discussion of greatness unless you get 4, 5, 6 rings like Jordan.  Such thinking is ludicrous, of course.  Winning rings depends on tons of uncontrollable factors - teammates, injuries, competition, luck, David Stern fixing games.  Our value systems, however, are so out of whack when it comes to competition and sports and how we treat these athletes in the public eye.  It smacks of little man syndrome, a cultural-wide Napoleonic complex.  When did we become so obsessed with winning at the exclusion of all else?  And not just winning - greatness.  Look at how we celebrate - Kobe Bryant - an unloveable, borderline sociopathic rapist, betrayer, bad teammate, who coasted on Shaq and Gasol's shoulders while trying to steal all the credit for himself.  This is who we celebrate?  Why?  Because he has 5 rings?

I'm going to come out and say it - why do we give a shit about rings?  My high school baseball coach was obsessed with winning pennants in our league.  Unsurprisingly, like many people who obsess about such things, he had never won.  He gave a speech about winning and got us meathead high school baseball players excited - "when you win, it's something no one can ever take away from you." While I was there and part of the team we won the league 4 years in a row.  Guess how much this effects my life?  Zero.  Zilch.  This did not boost my confidence or make me a better person.  It did not help me succeed in life.   And basically no one from that team, with all their dreams, went on to play at a high level of baseball.  In fact, I might have been smarter to play soccer more full time.  I might have been able to play at a tiny bit of a higher level than I achieved - maybe D1 instead of D3.  Maybe our D3 team gets to the tournament one year if I'm a little better.  My soccer team never won a championship while I was in high school -- but our competition was the high school equivalent of Spain's national team.  Of course we didn't win!  Does that make the experience less?  Of course not.  In fact, it makes it better.  It was awesome to get to compete against good players.

Of course LeBron stacked the deck.  It is the only way to even come close to meeting the expectations of the chattering class.

Here is something to think about...we are becoming more and more a nation of cheaters, or if not overt cheaters, people who stack the deck, just like LeBron.  We see others do it and it deflates our sense of decency and morality and yet we participate in it during our own lives.

Our financial elite rig the market to their benefit and treat the average investor like a suckers.  High school students take expensive test prep courses to game SAT scores in their favor.  Baseball players used PEDs to improve their chances at winning.  Politicians manufacture half-truths to get elected.

We get what we pay for, I guess.