When you learn to lose, winning is okay too…

My collage roommate Brent was the greatest loser I’ve ever met. Sure he was as competitive as all American boys are taught to be, and he was good at a lot of things but losing was his specialty. He was great at Dr. Mario, walking on stilts, and making chicken wings in his Fry-Daddy, but what I remember the most was his ability to continuously lose at the sports video game John Madden Football. He and my other seemingly well adjusted roommate Chris use to play John Madden Football every single night for at least 3 years. Brent never won. Now when I say ‘never’ I don’t mean it flippantly or for dramatic effect either. I mean Chris kicked the pants off of Brent every single time they played the game for the duration of our roommatehood. But Brent would take these beatings with an eloquent and almost inhuman grace. See Brent came from a very small town and went to a very small rural high school in northern Michigan. I think he told me that he graduated with 36 other students. Like all good American boys he played a number of organized high school sports, and partly because of his athletic ability, but mostly due to the sobering fact that the athletically capable student population was so minuscule; Brent played offense, defense, and special-teams on his school’s varsity football team.

One night when we were profoundly drunk, and without a single female in a 10 mile radius of our apartment, he told us all matter-of-factly something equally as profound as our collective intoxication level. He explained that on Homecoming night of his senior year, which was October 17th and the day he turned 17, (His Golden Birthday), he caught a diving 4th quarter game winning touchdown pass in the end zone with time running out on the clock. Later that night he smoked a huge joint in the back of his good friend’s car listening to Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing while getting drunk on warm cans of Coors Light beer. And even later that night he had sex with a girl after the Homecoming Dance (where he may have been crowned Homecoming King, I can’t remember if that is just my subconscious trying to inflate the story for dramatic effect or not, but just doing the math on that would give him an 18.5% chance of being the actual Homecoming King. And that is if every single senior attended the dance which is highly unlikely. I’m sure the Stoners and Gearheads where out smoking pot behind a dumpster and missed the whole event because they were to busy talking about how they’d still have sex with Tori Spelling even though she looks like a horse). Brent said after that night, losing didn't matter to him anymore. That was it… this guy didn’t mind losing! Well that’s just flipping everything Western Culture holds sacred on its head isn't it...

Being a known Dove like that has its drawbacks though. Once other dudes learned this character trait of Brent’s and realized they could rack up countless W’s onto their personal self-esteem scoreboard in any sort of contest they wished, lines formed around the block with Michigan’s male youth waiting to beat the pants off of Brent in sport or other games of chance and wit. I imagine that this is what a hooker must feel like with countless suburban, often married men, ejaculating into and onto them night after night without ever so much as a tickle of enjoyment gained. (Sorry that was gross).

One of my very last memories of Brent and Chris playing Madden Football came after I had already graduated from collage but was still living in the house in a vain attempted to hold onto my irresponsibility as long as I could. It was a typical Wednesday night (or Saturday night I don’t remember). Every TV in the house was on, fighting for volume supremacy with the horrid jam-band music billowing out of my trust-fund-kid-pothead roommate’s shithole of a room. 4 smoldering cigarettes for every 1 conscious occupant of the house, and a menagerie of clear, brown, green, tall, and chubby beer bottles in various states of emptiness and temperature placed atop all manors of flat surfaces or the floor. Brent and Chris were locked in another epic battle of electronic versions of real athletes running and tackling and blitzing each other all over the place. The TV was humming with the vibrations of charged electrons and sweet-ass 64-bit graphics. I think it was storming outside or it was leap year, something was amiss from what I can remember. But this was the night, this was THE night… Brent was up by some number of touchdowns on Chris and time was running out. Everyone gathered to witness this bit of folklore in the making and it was eating Chris alive. Honestly I rarely spent any time around them when they played that game because watching two people play a videogame is on par with watching a grasshopper scratch his head with his huge back leg… although faintly amusing in some sense, it’s mostly just boring as all hell. But when history is being made the bandwagon seems to run out of window seating rather quickly. As time ticked away, Chris was trying some desperate tactics. From what I can surmise this meant throwing the long bomb on every offensive down and blitzing Brent’s quarterback on every defensive play in hopes of causing a turn over. But Brent was picking up the defensive trickery and covering all of the deep wide-outs with no problems, while also covering the flats for any would be quick slants. (Why the fuk do I know this stuff? What is wrong with me). Toward the end of the 4th quarter Chris attempted what was in the sports world referred to as the ‘nail in the coffin’ play. A quick-slant pass to a wide receiver that Brent’s safety anticipated, picked-off, and ran back for a touchdown. (Complete with high stepping and end zone spike graphics to roaring digital crowd cheers). Chris grit his teeth together with so much force - accompanied by a guttural moan - that a sizeable triangular shaped piece of his front tooth chipped off and flew about 4 feet strait ahead, hitting the TV screen and landing on the beer stained but still quite sky-blue shag carpet in front of us all. Brent didn’t throw any high-fives, he didn’t brag or do any retarded end zone dances. He calmly set the games joystick down, lit a cigarette and walked out of the room to retrieve a colder beer. It seems like everyone else spoke of this moment for weeks but Brent never said a word about it. I guess when you’ve got the whole losing thing down… winning doesn’t really matter all that much either.