Aristotle

Who has it better than us?

Does it get any richer for the sports fan over the weekend than two girls’ soccer games at the Parade Grounds in Brooklyn, pennant races, college football drama on Saturday, U.S. Open meltdowns on Sunday and uncomebackable comebacks against the best on Monday, and National Football League all day Sunday and two more on Monday night?

Nope. It’s all good (is that still the au courant saying?).

Mr. Del Porto, guns glistening in his sleeveless blouse in the Queens County September sunlight, somehow dispatched Mr. Federer, whose black sox may have undone him. Superstitious, I know, but these things have consequences. To my detriment on the golf course and elsewhere, I continuously rebel against Aristotle’s admonishment: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit.”

There’s more, though. Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good. A defensive back makes a remarkable leap to slap an arching pass into the hands of a Denver receiver behind everyone who scoots to the score with seconds remaining.

But is luck, as Aristotle posited, the residue of practice? The defensive back did what he was trained to do and ended up costing his team the game. Should we teach him not to disrupt the play and allow the pass to take its course? Of course not. Can’t do it, as Mike Singletary would say. One must always try.

Guys

We play for fun and play out of fear.

The fun is hitting the perfect approach shot and the fear is missing the birdie putt. The fun is stroking a frozen rope to left field and the fear is getting thrown out at first. (Believe me, it happened). The fun is being part of a perfect game and the fear is booting a ground ball to spoil it. The fun is sprinting to the end zone and the fear is having the ball stripped at the one-yard line. No one wants to be “that guy,” but one must accept the moniker if this sporting life is to have any piquancy.

Failures must accompany successes for the latter to be sweet. To be unerring surely would bring on the old ennui. Yet the Pope probably doesn’t entertain an encyclical proclaiming an allegiance to Lucifer just to stir up another schism and have some fun. You would think that “those guys” who win all the time must find life boring, but then “those guys” are different than “that guy.”

And I mean gals as well as guys.

Take Melanie Oudin, the Georgia peach who scrambled her way into the mix in the Queens County tennis tournament known as the U.S. Open. She’s one of “those guys” who declared she wasn’t going anywhere but forward. And even though eliminated in the quarterfinals, you get the sense that setbacks mean little to “those guys,” such as Ms. Oudin. It’s just a hiccup on the way to glory.

One hopes that President Obama is one of “those guys,” too. Only the secure are most successful, after all. The world is filled with “that guy” who misses the birdie putt. It’s “those guys” who make make all the difference. “That guy” depends on "those guys."