HELEN Rowland was an American journalist and humourist in the first half of the twentieth century who often wrote about love, marriage and relationships, usually with a cryptic, satirical but humorous tone.
She once declared “There are only two kinds of men; the dead and the deadly” while she also opined, in seeing the differences between men and women, that “To be happy with a man you must understand him a lot and love him a little.
To be happy with a woman you must love her a lot and not try to understand her at all.”
While we might be tempted to think that she was speaking of sport when she said “You will never win if you never begin”, she was again speaking of love, a topic to which she also referred when declaring that “Falling in love consists merely in uncorking the imagination and bottling the common sense.”
Another wise lady of a later and more modern generation, Maya Angelou, is noted for her wise insights in many different areas of life but in this subject of love she once stated that “First best is falling in love.
Second best is being in love. Least best is falling out of love. But any of it is better than never having been in love.”
We may take the views of these ladies alongside those of Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, the winner of numerous Olympic and World Athletics Championships gold medals and the world record holder for the women 400 metres hurdles (as well as the American record holder in the 400 metres flat) whose comment that in athletics and life, “the best ability is availability” we considered in a previous article.
In the same interview where she made that remark, she is also quoted as saying that “As the expectations continue to grow, and the parameters of what success to the world for me looks like, I think a lot has just come back to keeping it very basic. I’m not on social media before I compete.
I’m just remembering why I loved running in the first place when I was six years old.”
She fell in love with running in the first place and ended up coming in first place in running because she loved it.
How true it will be for all our children for them to discover for themselves the truth of Angelou’s statement with reference, not to another human being but to sport.
Falling in love with running (or any sport, but running takes some beating!) is first place; second place is being in love with running, not just all through school but even beyond; the worst news is discovering someone has fallen out of love with sport for whatever reason yet even that is nothing compared to never having fallen in love with sport.
Our role as coaches and parents is to introduce our children to sport at an early age so they may fall in love with it and stay in love with it.
We have shared before the beautiful advert where a young boy is dressed in his cricket whites, padded up with oversized equipment, and sitting gloomily on his bed declaring, “I don’t like cricket!”.
The camera then shows him walking in that attire to the limousine carrying his sister to her wedding and he clarifies the situation by saying “I love cricket” (so much that he has to wear all his cricketing paraphernalia to his sister’s wedding)!
The young boy fell in love with cricket and became beautifully besotted by it! Success!
We want children to love sport. As Rowland (who may not have understood running) said, “To be happy with a woman you must love her a lot and not try to understand her at all”,.
Similarly many people may be advised not to try to understand it at all.
But the simple, indeed the basic, truth is that children will flourish in sport, and therefore (as well as thereafter) in life, when they love it.
It must be sport that they love, in the first place; not loving it when they come in first place.
They may fall for so many different reasons, as teachers may love teaching because they love the children or they love the subject or they love sharing or they love the challenge or they love the holidays — whatever, we fall in love for different reasons but one thing is key — to fall in love.
Bess Myerson, an American politician, model, and television actress once said that “to fall in love is awfully simple, but to fall out of love is simply awful.”
It is very basic, so even Helen Rowland can understand.
Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone may just have agreed with that in the first place — and look where it has taken her — to first place.
Remember that. Uncork the imagination again and drink to it.