Underwood: It's how you deal with losing that matters

Robert Underwood | For PDN

I am writing about something I know a great deal about. Losing. I have lost at many different things in my life (love, sports, job promotions, political office) — I don’t know where to begin.

I will start with a girl I asked for a date to go to a dance in the 10th grade. I telephoned her and I was elated when she said yes. An hour or so later, her mother called my mother to tell me that she was saying no.

That was one of many searing experiences I had in growing up. In sports, I was in the eighth grade, where we were regularly timed and measured in physical education. I came in dead last in my class at the 50-yard dash at 8.4 seconds. I remember the look on Mr. Tagg’s face as he grimaced. I said I wasn’t feeling well.

Eventually, I overcame both experiences and I matured physically and more girls said yes, although some still said no.

After college, I returned home to Guam and started teaching at George Washington High. My main objective in professional life was to become a principal. After a couple of failed attempts to get the assignment, I tried my hand at being an instructor at the University of Guam, at a significant pay cut. I could have blamed DOE politics. I didn’t and I just moved on and proceeded to have a fairly successful career as a professor of Education and eventually becoming academic vice president. My life at DOE ended at assistant principal, although I did marry a superintendent over 30 years later.

I then tried my hand at politics and while I won most elections, I lost twice in running for governor, in 2002 and 2006. These were not just personal loses, they were public humiliations. I had to face the public and kept wondering who was really with me and who just said they were with me.

I correctly blamed politics. It was bad, incompetent politics on my part and dirty, underhanded politics on the other side. I didn’t fault God or myself. I just remembered the 50-yard dash. In the end, my opponent won and I lost. But I didn’t think of myself as a loser.

There are some people who will never admit that they failed. They lost an election or applied for a promotion and didn’t get it and then spend the rest of their life recounting all the nuances of their failure and how nefarious individuals conspired against them. They adopt their failure as a symbol of courage, evidence of somebody else’s failure and in the process become real losers.

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They don’t just lose once. They continue to lose over and over again in some self-arranged spiral of excuses and blame. You know these people. They are in politics, at the work place and even among relatives.

Sports analogies and mom aphorisms abound about how to deal with losing. Didn’t your mother ever tell you that the effort matters more than winning? Didn’t she tell you God has another plan? In sports, they tell you not to blame the officiating or teammates. When an individual loses, they are supposed to try again not continuing to talk about their loss as if this were the signature event in their life.

At the end of the day, reaction to failure is not really about the loss. It is about your character and integrity. The reaction is an opportunity to demonstrate grace, honesty and good humor. If you don’t have these characteristics, you will be a real loser.

At the 40th reunion of Norwalk High School for 1965, I attended out of curiosity. I ran into the girl who turned me down in the 10th grade. She was a snake dancer in Las Vegas. I was dancing with other snakes in Washington. I guess we were both winners. We just said hello to each other.

Robert Underwood is president of the University of Guam and Guam’s former delegate in the U.S. House of Representatives.