This is Chloe Kim.
She is a 25 year old Olympic snowboarder.
This is Woody Johnson.
He’s the 78 year old owner of the New York Jets.
On the surface it doesn’t seem like these two have much in common. That would be an understatement.
Like I’m sure many of you I have been watching the Winter Olympics a lot over the last week despite not knowing much about the sports I’m watching despite ice hockey. Watching people perform athletic feats at high speed on snow and/or ice is very exciting even if I’m not entirely
sure what is going on.
Chloe Kim’s story caught my eye this week. She competed in the women’s snowboarding halfpipe event at the Olympics. Kim was seeking a third consecutive gold medal. She won her first Olympic gold eight years ago in Pyeongchang, South Korea. Four years later she repeated at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, China.
Kim fell short in her attempt to win a third consecutive Olympic gold medal in 2026. Instead she took home silver with a second place finish.
Reading about her story and her reaction to losing got me thinking.
It wasn’t clear that Chloe Kim would even be able to compete in the Olympics after dislocating her shoulder in January. She missed critical training time. Kim had only two weeks to prepare for the Olympics and needed to wear a shoulder brace during her competition.
The competition came. Kim finished second.
She then said the following.
“I think, for so long, I won events doing the same run over and over and over again,” Kim said. “I think seeing this new shift in progression has inspired me to push my limits and try things I’ve never done before.”
She also thanked her peers for pushing her, stating, “I just want to say to the entire women’s field: Thank you so much for giving me that opportunity. Because if they didn’t push me, I wouldn’t have been able to see how far I could go as a snowboarder.”
This is Vince Lombardi. He is widely regarded as the greatest coach in the history of professional football. Lombardi won five NFL championships and 73 percent of his games in ten years leading Green Bay (for nine) and Washington (for one).
The most quoted line of Lombardi’s career was, “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.”
Through the last sixty years, that quote has been used to emphasize the importance of victory.
What many people don’t realize is Lombardi meant something different. Late in his life he lamented the following to Jerry Izenberg, a legendary sports writer who spent his career working in the New York area.
He told me one day, “I wish to hell I’d never said that.” I said, “Well, don’t you believe it?” He said, “What I believe is, if you go out on a football field Sunday, or any other endeavor in life, and you leave every fiber of what you have on that field, when the game finally ends, then you’ve won, and to me that tells a lot more than the final score. And I never made that clear.”
On the surface, you probably wouldn’t say Lombardi has much in common with Kim or Johnson. If you had to choose, you might say he has more in common with Johnson since they occupy the same league in the same sport.
I think, however, it’s easy to see how Kim’s performance in the Olympics embodies Lombardi’s message.
Look I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on snowboarding. An evergreen joke of mine watching the Winter Olympics is how every few minutes something like this happens:
(Winter Olympics athlete does something in a competition.)
Me: Wow, that was incredible.
NBC Annoncer: What a colossal blunder.
But I would have to say that in context Chloe Kim winning a silver medal fighting through an injury that cut short her ability to train and perhaps impacted her performance was incredibly impressive.
More than that, I look at the way she praised her competitors for upping their respective games. Kim stated that her competition has improved tremendously, and that has pushed her to become better. It’s entirely possible that Kim is performance at a higher level now than she was when winning gold eight and four years ago.
A few days ago I would have told you that I’m enjoying the Winter Olympics for the reason I stated above.
People moving fast on ice/snow = exciting.
That’s surely part of it. So is generally wanting to support the athletes representing our country.
I think there’s something else to it, though. These events are a rare oasis from how toxic our sports landscape has become.
I genuinely hate the First Take-ization of sports culture today. The analysis of every major event has to be condensed into outrage either over a high profile player messing up, a coach making a bad decision, or an official blowing a call.
Take the AFC Championship Game. Did Sean Payton make the wrong decision passing up a field goal that would have put his team up 10-0 in the second quarter by going for it on a fourth day? I can understand why someone might argue that. (I can also understand the case for going for it.)
You can disagree with Payton’s decision. You can even say it was a factor in the team losing. Did it really deserve 80 percent of the attention in days following the game to explain why Denver lost? In a championship game decided by a field goal, there are lots of reasons one team won and the other lost. The Broncos had a backup quarterback playing who made major errors. Denver missed two subsequent field goals in the game. A major snowstorm arrived in the second half that had a major impact on game conditions. In a situation that wasn’t completely dissimilar, New England went for it on a fourth down later in the game and was awarded a first down on a questionable spot.
These are but some of the reasons New England won. Railing about Payton nonstop generates outrage and attention, though.
What’s nice about these Olympics sports is our resident hot take artists don’t care enough to grace us with rants about athletes coming up small and settling for silver.
We can instead celebrate Chloe Kim pushing herself to the limit and finishing second.
The truth is nobody can win all the time, even the best of the best. Tom Brady lost three Super Bowl. LeBron James has lost in the NBA Finals six times. Sidney Crosby lost his first time in the Stanley Cup Final. Novak Djokovic has lost 14 Grand Slam Finals.
Even the all-time greats who didn’t lose in the championship round lack unblemished records. Joe Montana famously won all four of his Super Bowls, but he lost three times as the starting quarterback in the conference championship round. Michael Jordan might have been 6-0 in the NBA Finals, but before any of those he suffered a pair of bitter losses to the hated Detroit Pistons in the Eastern Conference Finals.
Bill Russell is the greatest winner in American team sports history. He won 11 times in NBA Finals. He did, however, lose in 1958 to the St. Louis Hawks. Russell battled through an ankle injury but was too compromised to lead his team to victory.
I’m sure if ESPN covered Olympic snowboarding the way it covers professional football, we would be subject to wall-to-wall panels screaming at each other about Kim falling short this time and debating whether her Olympic window is closed.
It’s better that we don’t have that. The greats don’t always win, but they do give it their all seeking victory. It was true of Russell back in 1958. It was true of Kim this week. If that’s good enough for Vince Lombardi, it should be good enough for the rest of us.
That brings us to Woody Johnson. Players and coaches aren’t the only ones who should be relentlessly pursuing greatness. In professional sports, the owner must set the standard.
Each year the NFL Players Association asks players to grade their team in numerous areas. The areas subject to grading are the quality of the locker room, training staff, weight room, dining area, travel arrangements, and other matters.
The grades have traditionally been publicized.
The grades don’t predict how successful a franchise will be on the field. A year ago the Miami Dolphins came away as the highest graded team in the league. The Kansas City Chiefs finished 26th, mainly driven by the team’s outdated facilities. If you have to choose between a nice locker room or Patrick Mahomes, you’re going to choose Mahomes every time. A great quarterback leads to more wins than a great facility of a great cafeteria.
Still, these report cards have use. The players are directly telling their teams ways they can improve. For the Chiefs 26th was an improvement over the previous year when they finished 31st. Kansas City’s organization took criticism from the previous year to heart and implemented some of the changes recommended by the players.
It drew a great deal of attention a year ago when Jets players were the only team in the league to give their owner an F grade on the report card.
- Owner Woody Johnson’s average rating for perceived willingness to invest in the facilities is 5.58 out of 10 from Jets players, a ranking of 32 out of 32 owners in the league.
- The players feel that Johnson does not contribute to a positive team culture, a rank of 32 out of 32.
- The players feel that Johnson is somewhat committed to building a competitive team, a rank of 31 of the 32 NFL owners.
It isn’t hard to see why players felt that way. Johnson’s erratic and hands on management style led the Jets to disaster in 2024 as the team stumbled to an embarrassing 5-12 record.
You might think a losing season would cause the owner to do some serious self-reflection and vow to change for the better, committing to pursue victory. After all, the 2024 season wasn’t just a one off. It was the fourteenth straight year the Jets had missed the Playoffs.
Johnson went in the opposite direction. He called the grade “bogus.” His players told him they need him to be better. He scoffed at their feedback.
Woody eventually took things a step further,reportedly spearheading an effort to make the NFLPA suppress the grades. Yes, Woody Johnson’s response to constructive criticism in the face of failure isn’t to think hard about how he can improve. It’s to prevent the criticism from being publicized.
The Jets’ owner apparently was victorious in this endeavor as yesterday reports surfaced that an arbitrator ruled that the NFLPA cannot make the results of future report cards public.
Woody Johnson has never shied away from publicly criticizing a player he feels is underperforming. Evidently owners are allowed to rip players who don’t perform well, but player complaints about owners can never see the light of day.
Whether or not the results of the NFLPA’s report cards are released to the public, the problems with Johnson’s management remain. This is not a man with a single-minded focus on doing everything he personally can to help his team win. He is focused on stifling criticism and deflecting blame to others when things go wrong.
There is an old saying that a broken clock is right twice a day. For the most part, the First Take-ization of our sports media leads to unfair narratives. Great athletes and great teams get roasted when they don’t deserve it. Just think back to this past NFL season. How many times did a show on ESPN ask what was wrong with the Chiefs? Has Andy Reid run out of magic? Has Patrick Mahomes declined? Is the title window closed?
The reality is that it’s really hard to stay at the top year after year after year. We really should have asked how it was possible the Chiefs were able to make the AFC Championship Game seven straight times before finally having a bad year.
Occasionally, though, First Take and its numerous knockoffs get it right. Woody Johnson truly deserves the outrage that comes his way. He does everything the wrong way and then gets indignant when anybody points it out. There is no focus on winning or fixing what is wrong with his team. There is only focus on evading blame and placing it on others.
Chloe Kim might not have won gold in Milan, but her response to defeat shows why she is one of the biggest winners in sports.
Woody Johnson has run the NFL’s least successful franchise of the last decade and a half, and his response to defeat shows why he’s the biggest loser in sports.
If Coach Lombardi was still with us, I bet he’d agree.
