After a team wins a big game, the coach of the winning team (be it college, pro, whatever) goes into the handshake situation, obviously, feeling pretty good. Because they’ve just won, they have that 80′s movie feel-good feeling going on (probably complete with the weird 80′s movie feel-good music playing in their head) and they want to revel in it. Well I am often annoyed by how this winning coach goes about the handshake with the losing coach. (And for the record, this happens between winning/losing players too.) Consumed by his own state of victory-euphoria, he gets it in his head that the losing coach will be touched in that moment by his words of condolence and admiration for the “effort your team put forth” or some such attempted statement of deep, deep understanding. It is a situation where the winning coach wants to talk for hours about the game and how “hard fought” it was or how it is a great example of “how tough our division is” because he is in a great mood. But with what seems like a sudden infusion of engineer-like social skills, the winning coach doesn’t recognize that the last thing the losing coach wants to do is talk about the loss. He just wants to get the hell off the field, get home and crack open a beer…or depending on the magnitude of the loss, possibly a Schlitz Malt Liquor Ice. The losing coach can often be seen very obviously pulling away from the interaction while the winner would love to chat. I find the situation somewhat analogous to the person at the office who arrives late and hasn’t had a chance to grab his coffee running into the person who has already put away cup #2.
November 22, 2009 at 10:45 pm |
What???
he gets it in his head that the losing coach will be touched in that moment by his words of condolence and admiration for the “effort your team put forth”
What???
It’s more a matter of common courtesy something not too common any more.