Whatever Happened To Nice Guys Finish Last….?

The preamble to modern competition has become a collection of non-statements about who’s best, who’s tougher, and who’s going to win.  Anything to avoid bulletin board material that might give the media a boost and opposing teams a competitive advantage.

Back in 1946 when Brooklyn Dodgers manager Leo Durocher said that “Nice guys finish last” no one ever believed that there would come a day when those words, or words like them, would someday become a stain on modern sports culture.

Some brief history on Durocher and his words at that time about a July 4 doubleheader with the New York Giants, managed by hall of famer Met Ott, known to be one of the nicest people ever associated with major league baseball.

Durocher, for his part, was just the opposite of Mel Ott, and he owned a seven game lead in the National League pennant race on the day that his statement about nice guys finishing last would forever seal his place in history.

Durocher was combative, arrogant, aggressive, and played the game with a win-at-all-cost zeal that made him both respected and hated.  And, as it turned out, respected even now, eighty years after saying “nice guys finish last”.  Durocher died in 1991 at the age of 86.

Ironically, when they buried Durocher, they also buried a lot of the attitude he worked so hard to foster during what has been called “the golden era of professional baseball.” In fact, most modern historians of the game would point to Billy Martin, the former fiery manager of the New York Yankees as the last guy to play the game like Durocher on an everyday basis.

In football, Green Bay’s Vince Lombardi came close, and enjoyed saying publicly that  “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”

And of course, in basketball, most people think in terms of Indiana legend Bobby Knight, who once criticized even Michael Jordan for not playing the game with the passion that he, Knight, required.

Today, none of those attitudes persists at least publicly.  And at Tuesday’s Ohio State press conference Buckeye coach Ryan Day and quarterback Julian Sayin went out of their way not to say anything that could be construed as bulletin board material for Saturday’s national marquee game with Texas.

How far have we come?

Well, do you think Woody could have disciplined himself to remain mum in the face of all the obvious questions surrounding Saturday’s game in Austin?  Remember now, that it was Hayes who once answered the question following the Buckeyes’ 1968 50-14 blowout win over Michigan:  “Why, when you were up by four scores did you go for the two-point conversion when you scored your last touchdown?”

Hayes glared at the reporter and answered, “Because they wouldn’t let me go for three.”

Ryan Day wouldn’t say that today if you threatened him with a guillotine.

High school coaches go out of their way in modern times to pay competitive respect to opponents, even opponents who haven’t won a game in three years.

“That may be,”  they will say.  “But we know they’re going to come out and play hard.”

And fans, themselves, have been known to say in recent times:  “I don’t care who wins.  I enjoy seeing kids be respectful to each other in the post-game handshake line”, a statement received a few years ago from a reader following a blowout loss in an OHSAA tournament game.  She, or he, went on to add:

“I believe that being nice is more important than the attitude of being superior.”

The OHSAA at the time was running PSAs that said that winning is secondary to the way you play the game – noble to give up your own chance of winning to help someone else across the finish line.

It’s also the reason that the endless hours of television pre-game analysis is worthless and tiring.  Because players and coaches, themselves, are restrained to say something controversial, the analysts make up their own scenarios to talk about.  Like, “Who do you think will be the best quarterback on Sunday?”

In his day, if someone had asked him that question about Rex Kern, or Art Schlicter, Woody Hayes might have said, “If it isn’t my quarterback I’ll have a different one next week.”

“What’s that mean Woody,”  someone once asked him on his Saturday night post-game show on WBNS, Channel 10.

“It means just what it sounds like,”  answered Hayes.

If he were to say something like that now it would never make it on the air.  Coaches and players today, no doubt, never heard of Leo Durocher.

Or John McKay, for that matter, the famous coach at Southern Cal who once answered a reporter’s question:  “Coach McKay, what do you think about your team’s execution?”

“I’m all for it,”  McKay answered without cracking a grin.

There’s no question that McKay knew who Durocher was.

But back then, it didn’t seem to matter.