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MYTH: SECOND ALWAYS FINISHES BEHIND FIRST

Nobody wants to be second. But why not?

A winner is supposed to come in second. If you do everything I've described in this book: if you involve your players, create teamwork, deliver feedback and reinforcement, show your people that you care and - eureka! - that puts you second and puts your people, concerns and company first.

One of the most important lessons I had to learn was that a victory should not necessarily make you a winner.  If you've done well, it's because you've helped others to win.  You may be the best player on your tennis courts right now - or the hottest salesman in the company for one month - but you'll keep that lead only when you put other things first.

Of course, you couldn't have told that to a certain 21-year-old rookie quarterback of the Minnesota Vikings on a certain Sunday afternoon back in 1961. I had been chosen as a third-round draft pick by this lowly expansion team, but they were in the National Football League and that is where I wanted to play. We were mostly castoffs from other clubs - and rookies right out of college, like me. But our first regular-season game was to be against the mighty Chicago Bears, the Monsters of the Midway.  The Bears had earned that nickname. They were the oldest team in professional football, started by their coach and owner, the late George "Papa Bear" Halas. It was Halas who practically started the National Football League. It should not surprise you that we Vikings were something like 24-point underdogs that day. We had just gone through a five-game exhibition season with a record of no wins and five losses. The year before, another expansion team, the Dallas Cowboys, had gone to the post twelve times and lost eleven games and tied one. So nobody thought Minnesota had a chance against Chicago.  When the teams were announced at the beginning of the game, our hometown crowd cheered more for the Bears than for us. After all, they had been watching Chicago on television for years. They didn't even know our names.

Our fresh-baked Vikings team could have sat in that locker room that Sunday afternoon and written off that game. Who were we to take on the Chicago Bears? History wasn't on our side. Our exhibition record wasn't on our side. We could have thought of every reason in the world why we couldn't win, and nobody expected us to.

But the beauty and the naiveté of sport is that: we forty guys were dumb enough and naive enough to think that we had a chance to win!  How could we think such a thing, when even Howard Cosell said we couldn't win? How could we defy his indisputable logic? We did not necessarily think we would win, but we thought we could win.

I don't know about you, but I have never succeeded in doing anything when I didn't think I could, where I felt there was a 100-percent "no chance." But when I thought I could, at least I had some chance, no matter what the odds.


So we went out and played that day. We played those old Monsters of the Midway and we didn't just beat them, we blew them away. Final score: 38-13.

The little 21-year-old kid from Georgia was at quarterback that day. My memory is a little fuzzy now, but I think I completed seventeen of twenty-one passes with no interceptions for 238-1/2 yards for three touchdowns and ran for another.

You can imagine how I felt that day when I walked off the field. All of a sudden my teammates had me up on their shoulders. All 47,000 people in Memorial Stadium were up on their feet yelling and screaming. Somehow they had now learned my name.

And all of a sudden this little guy with his derby hat and glasses comes pushing through the crowd and pokes his hand up to me and says, "Kid, that's the greatest rookie performance I've ever seen in the history of this League."  That man was George Halas.

By now I was thinking, "Wow, Mama, you were right! You always said I was special from the day I was born. I am!  They love me!"

I said to myself, "Unitas and Tuttle and Baugh, you all were my heroes. I planned to be great sometime, but look what I've done on the first day! Move over!"

I thought, "This is easy! I have made it!  I have arrived!  Where do I go from here?"

I went into that locker room after the game, and my teammates were telling the press what a great leader I was. I heard one of my coaches tell a sportswriter that I was perfection. And I thought he was absolutely right-on, brother!

Well, I walked out of the locker room that day, and there was my little Georgia-peach wife, and I said to her, "Honey, do you realize how many truly great quarterbacks there are in the world today?"

And she said, "One fewer than you think."

My wife obviously knew something that I didn't, because our wonderful team promptly went out and lost our next six games in a row with Mr. Perfect at quarterback.  That was the last time in my pro career that I ever thought that I had arrived. I learned that the minute you think you've arrived is the moment you'll start to lose. Not just because there is no such thing as arriving, but because once you feel you're indispensable, you start becoming blind to the essentials of good business - teamwork, feedback, reinforcement. The true winner doesn't think he has beat the world after his first good Sunday. He doesn't suddenly think God believes in him. As a winner, you should come to consider winning an everyday proposition, not a divine gift for you alone.

Winning is indeed an everyday proposition - it must be earned all over again, every time you play the game.
Learn score-keeping, feedback and reinforcement.  Practice teamwork, involvement and sharing. Drop the ways of the macho manager and of trying to live by the big play. Stop, look, listen and learn. Never feel you've come in first just because you won. "An excellent team is a group of people that play better than their parts," said John Madden, who once coached the Raiders.

But what makes it all work for you on a continuing basis is the search for better ways to live and work and play. Remember that no matter how great your victory today, tomorrow is a new game with new plays and new opponents. You're a winner if you get into the arena and play - the stakes are high, but the rewards are great. What makes it exciting and worth the risk is the wonderful, unending uncertainty of how the game will go, for the clock never stops and the score can always change tomorrow.

FACT: A winner is supposed to come in second.

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