When you teach a sports journalism course, and your school’s football team ends up on national television for all the wrong reasons, the lecture almost writes itself.
According to Las Vegas and the rest of the prediction markets, Western Michigan University should have never been in the game last Saturday against Michigan, much less be in a position to win. Sadly, since my alma mater Western fell 13-12 to the Wolverines, the story of their play has been overshadowed by how they lost. Michigan’s game-winner came after officials added one second back on the clock — a second that was not apparent to viewers at home because the Big Ten conference used an internal replay-feed clock and not the one we all see on television.
Western fans, and the Mid-American Conference (of which Western is a part), didn’t buy the rationale. The MAC filed an appeal earlier this week, asking for the results to be overturned, and the NCAA said no. As for fans … I was most surprised that many students at Western were less hung up on losing the game and more disapproving of the enthusiasm with which Michigan fans greeted their predicted victory. The game should have been a blowout in the Wolverines’ favor, Western students said; a contested one-point win is no cause for rushing the field in celebration.
I reminded them that wins and losses mean nothing without feeling. And that’s why, no matter who wins or how often, the life lessons that come from being around sports will always matter more.
All of us are pressured, constantly, into revealing who we are. Most of that revealing happens in private, in rooms without cameras, in the small unwitnessed decisions that make up a life. Sports are different. It happens on television, in the Super Bowl, at the U.S. Open, in the exact moments when the calls go wrong and the world is unfair — and nowadays somebody’s phone is already up and recording.
What comes out of a person in that instant isn’t scripted. It isn’t a PR statement. It isn’t something absorbed from ESPN. If there’s hatred in a person’s heart, it surfaces in sports. If there’s love, you can tell the difference. Sports don’t just help build character. They broadcast it.
The drills, the reps, the thousands of hours in the gym — they’re not just there to build strength and skills to hit the shot or strike the ball. They’re building something else in a person too: muscle memory. The kind that means when the pressure arrives, the body doesn’t consult the mind. It just moves.
You don’t acquire that in the moment when it’s needed. You earn muscle memory beforehand, in practice, after years of turning that learned skill into something closer to a heartbeat. Involuntary.
The companion to that is your moral memory, and it’s built in the same way — not during the big and obvious moments but in the small and private ones. When nobody catches you on camera. You build your moral memory over the course of a thousand unremarkable moments in life. Those times when you know lashing out would be unproductive, even if doing so would be satisfying. How you handle those moments becomes structural. It becomes who you are. When the pressure comes, it’s not a mission statement or what you learned in Bible study that directs your next step.
It’s the moral memory — a byproduct of the discipline that keeps you anchored to your own core while the endorphins of the moment are actively trying to drag you off course. It’s the difference between being steered by whatever’s loudest in the room and being steered by something you built in yourself, rep by rep, long before anyone was watching.
When my students wanted to know my thoughts about what happened, I told them it never occurred to me that the Michigan students rushing the field were the ones who owed anyone an explanation. Releasing joy after an emotional finish is not unusual in sports.
What I talked about was our coach, Lance Taylor, because for me, that’s where the actual drama was. It was a close game, with an outcome that felt unfair, a finish that didn’t go the way it was supposed to. A coach has plenty of cause in the moment to lash out at referees or make an offensive gesture, to say something defensive, maybe even destructive, that plays well for 90 seconds. But he didn’t do that.
Instead, when things didn’t go his way, he showed his players how to keep cool when the pressure comes. In the end, that life lesson will have a greater impact than the Hail Mary that cost them the game.
YouTube: @LZGrandersonShow
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