Why Use Hate to Motivate? Hatred Makes Us All Ugly.

Sam and I hate “hate.” We don’t understand why that word is even necessary in our language. Yet a couple of sportscasters on ESPN Talk Radio the other morning were talking about the Seattle Seahawks needing to conjure up a good measure of hate for the San Francisco 49ers in order to best that team in an upcoming football game (which they did).

The Seahawks, last year’s Super Bowl winners, had failed to win some games they should have won this year and their record stood at 7 wins and 4 losses – not a good scenario for returning to the Super Bowl or even the playoffs again. Clearly, something needed to be done if the Hawks were going to beat the 49ers and advance to 8 - 4.

I don’t remember if it was a sports announcer or a Seahawk athlete who said it, but it was postulated by one of them that the Hawks needed to hate the49ers more in order to win.

Why? One of the few things I’ve disliked about football and other team sports – especially on the college level – is the apparent need to wind athletes up like play soldiers so they’ll hate the other guys badly enough to beat them. Why can’t athletes just go out on the field or court and play their best and beat other people without hating?

I even saw in the local newspaper that some high school kid was talking about having the necessary hate to beat an opponent team (didn’t happen). Remember your old high school days when fights often broke out between fans of opposing teams?

It has been postulated that the underlying psychological dynamics of hatred is generally explained with our need to release aggression. Maybe. Sam and I like to think that ain’t necessarily so.

George Orwell once said, “Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting. ...there are quite enough real causes of trouble already, and we need not add to them by encouraging young men to kick each other on the shins amid the roars of infuriated spectators.”

Irwin Shaw said, “If the players were armed with guns, there wouldn't be stadiums large enough to hold the crowds.”

And Heywood Hale Broun said, “Football is, after all, a wonderful way to get rid of your aggressions without going to jail for it.”

You’ve probably seen it and I have experienced it, where an athlete becomes totally ineffective because he becomes so frustrated and angry at an opponent who doesn’t take the hate being directed at him seriously, but laughs at it instead. Muhammad Ali used that tactic on his boxing opponents to great success. “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” Remember? And all the while Ali was smirking at his opponent like he knew a great secret that his opponent didn’t know.

Personally, I like this quote by a writer named Laurell K. Hamilton, who said in her piece Burnt Offering, “Hatred makes us all ugly.”

Right on Laurell.