COMING TOGETHER to compete

Baseball continues to enjoy popularity worldwide. Stadiums are packed, and the fans enthusiastic. Here, former professional baseball player Sandy Vance offers an insider's view of athletics and competition. This interview was originally printed in The Herald of Christian Science, French edition.

Herald: What has drawn you to sports and what have they meant to you?

Sandy Vance: I began playing baseball as a professional when I was right out of college. At that time of my life, I went through a growing process, learning how sports related to my spiritual progress. For me, baseball and sports in general have been a waymark for other aspects of my life. It's more than just an athletic event. It's really a medium through which I learned about life. It was an arena that regularly tested my very best efforts. In some cases those efforts resulted in failure or loss, and in other cases, success. Then once I began to study Christian Science, I learned a higher view of what I was doing in athletics and sports.

I learned that God is the source of all my movement and that each of us is the expression of the one Mind, who is God. The originator of the grace and power and strength that I needed was God. It was through God's power, not mine—and through an understanding of my relation to God—that I would be able to see, perform, and feel the joy of playing sports.

I was learning from a whole different viewpoint about what had once seemed to be a very physical activity. Now I began to see what I was doing as not only a mental but also a spiritual activity.

H: Did this spiritual point of view also change your view of the relationship between the players and between the players and the manager?

SV: Yes. I think one of the most beautiful things about a team sport is that it's a cooperation of players all coming together as one. And the more they play as one, the more successful they are in the contest, whether it's soccer, baseball, basketball, or whatever. Or even if it's an orchestra playing music. To see the beauty of many coming together as one is a wonderful way to grow in the understanding that there is one divine Mind governing all of us. All of the things we learn about getting along with others is magnified on a sports team, because the players are all working together each day for a very specific goal. You must work together in order to be successful as a team.

Some years ago, I looked at the definition of the word compete, and for me it was a further awakening. The word comes from the Latin verb competere, meaning "to seek together" or "to come together." Competition is all about coming together as one, not about beating the other guy or about winning. And I asked myself: Ok, what then is the motive behind the competition—the higher, truer motive? Is it dominance over another team? Ego, or pride, or self-aggrandizement? Physical power? Is it only about beating the other team—about how well can I do, how much better my capability is than the others'? No.

The true meaning of the word competition has to do more with striving together. And why strive together? For camaraderie, the love of the game, the love of each other. And to express excellence—a higher level of excellence—to break barriers. Naturally, an important part of any team athletic contest is to see if your team can score more points, runs, or goals than the other team. And the beauty of it is that in this striving, both teams lift each other to achieve higher levels of excellence, precision, accuracy, and strength. I have been on the losing end of many games in which I emerged a better, more mature athlete, having broken barriers.

So many new barriers are broken by Olympians. People say the human athlete can't do this or that—that it's too difficult. Well, those barriers are broken regularly. So, as a group, a team can say, how many barriers can we break in terms of working together more closely, doing this activity in a more perfect way, expressing our creator's omnipotence, God's power, God's oneness, in a deeper way?

Competition can also mean the appreciation of the activity itself, the love and joy of being able to be a part of that activity. And in my coaching and teaching of young athletes today, that's the thing I try to encourage first. In a sense, competition is really two teams coming together and saying to each other, "Hey, we all enjoy this activity. Let's come together and go for greater heights. And in the process, let's see if we can score more points than you can! That will be fun—that will make it interesting and urge us on to higher excellence. Besides, that's the object of the game we're playing."

H: You mentioned that this view of competition and the game can also apply to daily life. What can you tell us about that?

SV: One thing that immediately comes to mind is humility. In sports you learn that you don't always perform as well as you would like—and there are times when you fail and times when you succeed. It's the times when you think you didn't perform up to your capabilities that deep humility is so important, just to release the sense of self—to give that sense up and yield to the one creator, the one God, who is giving all of the capabilities we all have.

H: What do you mean by "the sense of self"?

SV: It's a sense that there are lots of "selfs" or minds or egos that are all warring with one another to gain the upper hand. But in fact there really is just one Mind, expressing itself in many different ways and in many different individualities. As we see that and live by that, we can be happy over somebody else's success. When you've succeeded, you can, through humility, be thankful for the qualities of that one Mind that enabled you to succeed. As you do that, the false sense of competition—gaining domination over the other person, the sense of winners and losers—begins to fade, and you see that it's really the one God, the one Mind, that is enabling us all to feel the joy and love of companionship and excellence.