Gloating, sulking: 2 hues of 1 color

Jimmy Rocca was a sore loser - which made him a poor winner. Because of it, playing softball at our rural elementary school, the first row of the neighbor farmer's cornfield marking our outfield grass line, always became a chore.

We've all known sore losers, the kind who sulk and accuse the other side of cheating or getting a lucky call from the ump.

But the poor winner is just as immature. And Jimmy Rocca was a master of immaturity: "Ha! You guys really stunk!" he'd shout as the recess bell rang. "We could've beat you with one hand tied behind our back!"

Most of us wished we could tie one hand over Jimmy's mouth. We could take a teasing, but in Jimmy's case, victory demanded total, unconditional surrender on our part.

"We've never beat you that bad before!" he'd yell as we scrambled down the hallway to our classrooms. "Next time we'll probably beat you by 10 hits!"

Gradually his talk shifted to how incompetently we'd handled even the things we did well during the game. "If you wouldn't have swung so early, that one hit would have shot right into the cornfield, and you could have had a homer instead of just getting to third," he say. "If you would have thrown it to first instead of second, you could've got two outs instead of one."

Whether we said anything to Jimmy didn't matter. He was going to keep talking until he got off the bus.

Some think Jimmy was just overexcited. Sure, you can't blame someone for celebrating. But to get egomaniacal about it? To express the same symptoms as if he'd lost? Hmm ...

(originally published Nov. 7, 2004)