I sat in a ball on my living rom floor with my eyes covered. Tom Brady had one more chance to beat my beloved Eagles…and he was going to throw a Hail Mary. My thoughts? Of course he will complete the pass…he’s Tom Brady!
Well, we all know how it ended…I could go on and on about my Eagles…but there is something else is aggravating me and I need to vent about it. I know…shocking…there is something I want to vent about 😉
Let me start with this: Tom Brady is one of the greatest athletes of all time. Not just a great football player…not just a great quarterback…he’s one of the greatest ATHLETES ever. He treats every practice and every game just as intense as the Super Bowl.
But…
My kids were about to get a pretty important life lesson served up close and personal on the big screen.
My eyes were filled with happy tears so I didn’t notice it…but my oldest kids did…and it’s all they could talk about.
“Look, he’s running off the field. Why isn’t he going to shake the Eagles’ hands?”
“That’s not nice. He’s a sore loser.”
Rather than shaking hands…giving a high-five or heck, even a dirty look…Tom Brady ran off the field and into the locker room. I was reading articles that defended him and said, “it’s okay because he is a fierce competitor!”
Losing stinks. I could use a million other words to REALLY describe it…but we’ll just go with “stinks” for now. I get where Brady is coming from…ok not really because I have never played in a game even remotely close to the magnitude of the Super Bowl 😉 But I can’t imagine it would be any fun standing on a field with hundreds of thousands of pieces of confetti falling down while you hear fans singing “FLY EAGLES FLY!” I would want get out of there ASAP too.
Losing isn’t fun but it shows our character. Failure shows others who we really are. Sure, we’re all about the high-fives, hugs, fist bumps and smiles when things are going our way. It’s like thanking God in the good times but wanting to blame Him in the bad times. We can’t roll like that.
I have to admit…I laughed when I was listening to Nico be critical of Tom Brady. This is the same kid who quit playing kickball mid-game because he got called out instead of safe.
So I took a break from celebrating my Eagles to reiterate this to my children: it just wasn’t his day. It’s not going to be your “day” every single time. You may not win every game. You may not ace every single test. But you will get up the next day and try even harder until you win…until you ace the test. If you never fail, you’ll never really know how great it feels to succeed.
Nobody said it better than Winston Churchill:Â “Success is not final, failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts.”