Desire to win

Desire to win is a topic I keep hearing about in sports. I want to clarify something before I go any further. I want my favorite sports teams to win. I want to see the desire. However, I also want limitations. I hate teams that embrace a win-at-all-costs mentality and are willing to destroy a sport for personal achievements. I do not want the Canucks to turn into the Blackhawks or the Bruins.


There is a big difference between wanting to prove that you are the best and wanting to have your name attached to a major championship. In many ways, that's what I want to discuss. Modern athletes don't care about proving anything. All they care about is personal fame and fortune. When that happens, honor, respectability, entertainment, and more are diminished.

Teams should not go out of their way to take advantage of errors in the rule book or look for ways to get away with breaking the rules. Teams should not scout the refs (I'm looking at you Blackhawks), and they shouldn't be exploiting the media's uneven treatment of teams (The Bruins were horrible with this one). We also shouldn't have to deal with drug abuse or about a million other components of modern sports.

While my frustrations with hockey were primarily responsible for adding this topic to my list of ideas that I wanted to write about, I'm going to shift a bit right now. I want to say something about the so-called deflate-gate. I'm going to do something a little different. Instead of focusing on whether or not Tom Brady was involved in any wrongdoing, I want to focus on reactions that I have seen online that downplay cheating.

A very common defense of Brady was to say that all teams cheat. Numerous people made comments with websites attached to show how teams cheat. Ultimately, Patriots fans insisted that there is nothing wrong with cheating because everybody does it and they want to win. They make up excuses to defend cheating, and they don't care about honor or fairness.

Yes, every team in all sports will cheat at some point. That doesn't mean that we should be indifferent when we know it's happening. For starters, cheating is uneven. Some teams are better than others at cheating. To act as though all teams are the same is ridiculous.

More importantly, cheating is bad for integrity and fairness. If the game itself is not deciding the outcome, why watch? Sports are becoming less and less about being the best and more and more about who can best exploit flaws in the game.

Winning at all costs is not just about cheating. A lot of teams play styles that are bad for the game because they feel that it will help them win. We have seen that with ultra-bland success from the Blackhawks and Bruins in the NHL. A lot of times, fans will defend the teams purely because they win games. Success is not worth destroying the entertainment value of a sport. There is a reason I used to watch a lot of hockey. It was exciting. If it's all about winning, why not switch to a rock- paper-scissors competition?

It's a shame that the Canucks will never win the Stanley Cup as a hockey team. The NHL is no longer a hockey league, and the game has been displaced by an inferior mutant byproduct. I still want them to win, but I want them to win the right way. I want them to have honor, prove that they are the best, and do it in a way that is actually worth watching. A lot of people criticize them for a lack of desire to win, but that's part of the reason I love them. They aren't destroying the game for their own personal glory. They are actually worth watching.