There's a word used habitually by soccer coaches that I've never heard used in any other sport. The word is: unlucky.
It's a statement of encouragement, a more efficient construction of the sentiments in "shake it off."
When a player fires a shot that clanks off the frame of the goal, a coach will simply say "unlucky." When a pass hits a patch of wet grass and skids off target, a coach will chalk it up to misfortune, not player error. When a goalkeeper guesses incorrectly and leaps the wrong way during a penalty kick, the coach will console "oh, that's unlucky."
Mark KennedyOther sports may expect perfection from players, but soccer - by tradition - allows for blameless misfortune. It's a refreshing point of view that has applications for everyday life.
The use of "unlucky" in soccer probably stems from the fact that soccer is a game of constant flow that penalizes sulking. If, for instance, you stand - hands on hips - grieving a bad shot in soccer, the other team may use your momentary paralysis to mount a counterattack that ends with the day's decisive goal.
What then?
At that point, you are no longer just unlucky; you deserve whatever scolding from a coach you get.
Sometimes, modern culture wants to make everything a meritocracy, when some failures are just random. Imagine scolding someone for losing a coin flip. But that's what we do.
When a batter in baseball hits a line drive that lands an inch out of bounds, there's too much random physics involved to blame it on a flawed swing. But we don't say "unlucky"; we command the player to "straighten it out."
When a golfer hits a putt that lips out of the cup, we say it was offline, when in truth it might have hit a spike mark that nudged it a half an inch left or right. OK, that's just unlucky.
When a broker makes an errant stock pick because of the unanticipated jailing of the company's CEO, obviously that's misfortune not incompetence.
Last weekend, we took our 12-year-old son to a soccer tournament in Nashville. His team lost the first two games on Saturday, and their two games on Sunday, against lesser opponents, were rained out.
On the drive home on Sunday, he thanked his mother and me for taking him and apologized for the way things turned out.
"It's not your fault, buddy," I replied. "You guys just got a little unlucky."
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There's another soccer term worth adopting in a broader context. A soccer official will often order kids to "play on." It's a signal that although there has been contact between two players, no foul has occurred. Or maybe a foul has occurred, but the official wants play to continue to avoid penalizing the offense, which could be mounting a scoring push.
All that is to say that soccer, the world's game, has appropriated the virtues of hard work and continuity. (Unfortunately, it has also sanctioned fakery - a.k.a. flopping and feigning injury.) Still, you see soccer fans all the time who would rather nurse a grudge for an uncalled foul than see their team score. Which is a bit loopy.
The lesson for today: Life goes on while we are feeling sorry for ourselves.
It's a measure of how entitled we are as a culture that we are willing to stop working to assign blame to every shred of bad luck or misfortune.
Of all the lessons of childhood, learning that life can be randomly unfair is the toughest.
But when misfortune happens, there is only one admonition that is guaranteed to right the ship: "Unlucky. Play on."
Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645.