The Biggest Sore Loser

I've played sports my whole life.

Thousands of games. As a kid, touch football in the street or tackle football in the cemetery. Punch ball. Curb ball. Little League. Babe Ruth. Jr. High. Countless basketball games with family and friends. Intramurals in college. Recreational softball for 25 years. Decades of golf outings. Coached youth sports for 21 years. Lived and died with Stanford teams as SID and Associate AD.

I won my share of games. Lost more than my share.

I always congratulated the winners when we lost. Always. There may have been a missed call. Or a phantom foul. Or too many mulligans or foot wedges.

But when the game was over, everyone acknowledged the winner.

One of the great things about sports is that it teaches you how to win, and how to lose.

Every day on playgrounds and in high schools, colleges, and pro sports events across our country games are won and lost. After the game, the winners are congratulated with hand shakes, fist bumps, or hugs.

But now we have a man in the White House who refuses to acknowledge his defeat in one of the biggest games of all. A man who won't concede his decisive loss in a fair and free election, an election his own Department of Homeland Security called “the most secure election in American history.” A man whose bogus claims of illegal votes and specious lawsuits are sewing doubt in his legions of followers.

This is the same man who has cheated throughout his life. Cheated to get into college. Cheated to get out of the army. Cheated in business. Cheated on his taxes. Cheated on his wives. Cheated in this election by suppressing votes, welcoming Russian interference, and asking a foreign country to manufacture dirt on his opponent.

But he lost. By five million votes. By, in all likelihood, 74 electoral votes.

The country came together to save democracy and reinforce its ideals. But the president of the United States is doing his best to undermine one of its pillars and damage its standing in the eyes of the world.

Meanwhile, he does nothing about a runaway virus that is killing hundreds of thousands of Americans.

I’ve run out of adjectives to describe the president’s aberrant, dangerous, unconscionable behavior.

Perhaps that’s because there is no word to adequately describe a man who has no bottom.