Trust me – growing up in Green Bay, Wisconsin, the daughter of a Silver Medalist from the 1956 Olympics (long jump), I know the fine line between winning and losing. Vince Lombardi was pretty clear: “Winning isn’t everything – it’s the only thing,” and he meant it. My father finished second in the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, to a guy whom he had beaten in the Pan American Games. By only a few grains of sand, he took away the Olympic silver rather than gold.
Covering NASCAR so closely it is evident to me that most of the NASCAR drivers grew up as children giving everything they had, including their childhood, for one thing ... the win.
In NASCAR there are 42 losers every Sunday. There are only two outcomes to a NASCAR race ... winning or losing.
FedEx Sprint Cup driver Denny Hamlin broke a 24-race winless streak when he won at Martinsville in March. Gibbs Racing President J.D. Gibbs said of Hamlin, “He can get like he’s moody, like he’s not in a good mood or something’s gone wrong. I always wonder is it something at home, is it something personal? But the reality is if he runs well and wins he’s in a good mood. If he doesn’t, he is not in a good mood. That’s it.”
Hamlin has struggled with being able to be happy unless he wins. “It’s hard for me to come to the Cup Series and not win like I have been doing my whole life,” Hamlin told me. “There’s not much job security in NASCAR,” he added. “If you’re going to be in the Cup Series, OK, you are in a losing sport. You are going to lose more than you are going to win.” Hamlin says his crew chief had to teach him that he had to find things to be happy about other than winning.
Budweiser driver Kasey Kahne agreed. “It’s been really hard for me,” Kahne told me. “I’ve had an attitude that I think I can win all the time - that that is the only thing, and that if I don’t win I’m mad and there’s something wrong.” His crew chief and the team VP of competition have helped him learn to deal with not winning.
Sprint Cup champion and Lowe’s driver Jimmie Johnson told me, “It’s such a humbling experience and it doesn’t matter who you are in the sport, you go through it. You’ve got to find ways to be happy and to not tear apart the team.” He and his team have learned how to handle not winning and how to get through the low points.
Most of us don’t have clear winning and losing marks in our job every week. Imagine if you did.
I’ve said it before in this column and I try to remind myself regularly of this fact: It's not those who know how to win who are a success – it is those who know how to lose.
