The Agony of Victory: When Winning Isn't Enough
Friedman brings together essays written over the last 20 years into a fascinating anthology. The individual pieces concern sports as varied as bowling, cycling, basketball, boxing, and golf, but they are linked by a common theme: the pursuit of excellence as a path to self-destruction. For example, take Scottish cyclist Graeme Obree, a man so determined to excel that he built his own bike (out of washing-machine parts and other scrap metal) and pitted himself against the giants of the sport. He won, too, and kept winning until cycling's regulating body changed its rules to prevent him from competing; so he changed his technique, and they changed the rules again. Finally, after he started coughing up blood months after a race, his career came to a close. His story—and the book is full of stories just like his—perfectly illustrates the physical and psychological toll that the drive to win can take on a person. An apt counterpoint to the multitude of winning-is-everything books, this one says that winning is nice, but it isn't everything (and maybe, in some cases, it can be lethal). Pitt, David