Suffocating

A team of world class athletes, one that is heavily favored to defeat its opponents, enters a championship tourney. They ride a wave of national media attention and the emergence of their controversial star to overcome hostile crowds and earn a shot at a championship. They proceed to lose, despite being heavily favored, in heartbreaking, confusing fashion, with their aforementioned star falling apart before our very eyes. In the aftermath, they become heroes and an example of the value in overcoming adversity, earning dignity in defeat, and their star became a face of the game worthy of admiration.

Or maybe, in the aftermath of the same story, they’re chokers whose failure somehow made us all more successful, who got what they had coming to them, and whose star became a punching bag for a media with an axe to grind. It really depends whether we’re talking about the US Women’s World Cup Team or the Miami Heat.


The truth about the label “choker” is that its application tells us more about who we are than to whom it is applied. After all, sports almanacs are littered with names like Manning, Rodriguez, and Mickelson, all of whom carried the label around until they proved they could, in fact, reach the heights of their respective sports. The label was, in fact, false, even as it was relentlessly etched into history by fans and the media. What we were left with, as with all witch hunts, was a picture of the people who worked so hard to see the truth obscured.

Of course, this could certainly mean that the label just doesn’t work at all if it’s so subjective in its application. Perhaps that’s the real issue here; when an athlete “chokes” it is meant to indicate some personal failing beyond the professional loss. This, of course, neglects to acknowledge that one cannot “choke” without reaching a level of competitive success that only a rare sliver of humanity, sometimes only one other person, has reached. But rather than appreciate a talented competitor at the most elite level of competition, or even a worthy foe if we dislike the person behind the professional, we craft a thru-way from the personal to the professional in our target, one whose traffic flows out of ourselves. In smashing statistical legacies and forcing one failure to bleed into the rest of an individual athlete's life, we unload our own subjective anger onto the back of that athlete's being. Their failure being a symptom of "choking" allows us to engage in total loathing of the professional and person by uniting the two with the bridge of the "choke", letting our personal dislike run between the two entities unchecked by mathematical reality.

This is, of course, incredibly disingenuous. None of us would like to have anybody catch us on a day when we were off of our game and extrapolate that moment into not only our careers, but our lives as well. If that same moment were used as damning evidence not only of our performance, but our souls, I doubt most of us would venture to accomplish anything that required any real risk. Still, our collective dislike somehow empowers us to put that bile on people who lose at what are glorified games, as much as they may be fairly or unfairly loaded with metaphoric meaning. Furthermore even that dislike is fueled by the subjectivity of a moment, a preference, or a single decision. Hope Solo publicly shames her teammate, then goes on to have an equally abysmal performance in an equally critical moment, and we wrap her in the flag to protect her from the realities of what she did in the distant and recent past. Lebron James puts on a bad hour of television and he is questioned not only as a player but also as a man. We make two bad decisions and hundreds more and nobody talks about them because they are, in the grand scheme of things, often not indicative of the whole of our lives. That’s the point, I suppose. The “choker” exists only in a world where mere moments can speak for entire careers or lives, and that’s a world that we aren’t comfortable living in, but are more than happy to build for our athletes.