Written by John Mark Adkison
I’ll never forget those energetic moments before a game as my teammates and I sat crammed into a school bus with our athletic bags and 6-foot metal poles. Of the wide range of sports our world has to offer, lacrosse is perhaps the most material heavy. After all, you have heavy, metal sticks and an armory of padding. When a player takes the field, he feels more akin to Attila the Hun than Tom Brady.But as we sat on those long bus rides to enemy territory, like the riders of Rohan galloping quickly toward the armies of Mordor, one cannot help but feel a slight nervousness and a quickening of pulse.Who knows what awaits you on those far and distant fields, painted in the enemy’s colors, surrounded by the enemy’s allies and infested with the enemy itself. I always imagined our opponents simply waiting in grim arrogance for us to arrive, take their field and then unleash their malice by way of metal sticks and hard-hitting checks.Each game was not simply a game, but a battle. It was a war of good versus evil, a clash of titanic forces, an epic scene of bright bravery facing dark villainy.It was simple: We were the good guys and they were the bad guys. Thus, we had to win.Perhaps I’ve seen “The Lord of the Rings” too many times; perhaps I’ve read too many adventure novels; or perhaps I was listening to my Epic Soundtrack playlist on the bus, but when I envisioned the team as the antagonist, as the villain, as the adversary, I found myself getting more and more pumped up for the game. I was not turning it into just another game, but a battle that needed every last bit of my strength to win. In order to win the game, I needed to put my mind, body and imagination into the game.Now, perhaps envisioning my opponents as incarnations of pure evil is not exactly being fair, but it does help in life. Maybe if we viewed our struggles, our obstacles, and the things in life that put us down as an evil entity that must be defeated at all costs, we could find ourselves living a far more adventurous life.Everybody loves a story in which the hero vanquishes the villain, restoring peace and harmony, and so why should not our lives be epic tales of good overcoming evil? We can have a happy ending, and have an adventure getting there.And as an afterthought, I would suggest not following my logic in pre-game thinking, because you feel like even more of a failure when the opposing team beats you. But there is always next season.
