The following is taken from Bob Knight’s The Power of Negative Thinking: An Unconventional Approach to Achieving Positive Results.
I have seen all kinds of books about winning, often by athletes or business executives whose lifelong record of victories (or profits) is dubious.
I haven’t seen one intelligent book yet about losing.
There should be one, because every coach – every person – has to deal with losing. The first essential to have in place – in your mind, at least – is a plan to recover after a loss, to learnfrom a loss, to eliminate those things that caused a loss.
Learning from a loss doesn’t make it a good loss. Late in our 1975-76 season at Indiana, I’m absolutely sure that Al McGuire, whose Marquette team was No. 2 in the country at the time, was being honest, and not trying to play head games with our team, when he said it would be best for us, as far as winning the national championship was concerned, to lose a regular-season game, to take off the “pressure” of a long winning streak. I didn’t agree with Al, then or now – 37 years later.
And I’m sure the players on that 1975-76 Indiana team are as proud as their coach that we were the last major college men’s team that never for the “pressure” off. Every champion since has lost at least two games.
But I always felt that when you did lose, it was imperative that you learn from the loss. Why did we lose? If we lost simply because they had better players, we’d need to recruit better players. But the vast majority of time, it’s going to go back to mistakes. That’s where constant focus has to be.
Coaches often inwardly if not publicly blame a loss on a bad call, an injury, or something unusual that happened in the game, when the real reason was mistakes. A typical press-conference comment from a losing coach is “They just shot lights-out,” when the real reason “they” did was his defense allowed them to get good shots. Or “We couldn’t hit a thing; our shooting was really off tonight,” when the truth was “we” took too many bad shots, “we” did not work to get good shots – any team is always likely to miss bad shots.
Every team must play with confidence, but losing is a potential reality you’d better be thinking about – in a season, or in a game, any game, just as a banker or broker had better be thinking about downside risk in any investment.
And let me be clear: Preparing not to lose is designed to aid and abet winning. The object here is to win. It’s not a character fault to detest losing.
You constantly hear that losing is a part of sport that you have to learn to accept. I made a conscious effort after losses to acknowledge what the other coach or team, or a specific player, had done especially well, but it probably isn’t surprising that I don’t buy the inevitability of losing – ever! I never wanted to be – or to depend on – a person who isn’t bothered by losing. To me a good loser is probably someone who has had too much practice at it.