Swish

Facebook has a section called Reels, which posts short video clips on your news feed based on its inscrutable algorithm. I understand some of the choices of what’s shown on mine: clips from “Cheers,” “Seinfeld,” and the “West Wing,” lessons from the Lubavitcher and Rivnitzer rebbes, and amazing baseball plays. I can’t figure out, however, why I get Trump press conferences answers, risqué female comediennes, football touchdowns, and golf holes in one.

But the algorithm does what it does, and none of us can ask any questions or, if we do, expect any answers.

One type of video that recently appeared a few times on my feed are the final seconds of NCAA Final Four championship games that follow a similar story line. With less than two seconds to go in a tied game, Player A on Team X sinks a field goal to put his team ahead by two points. Half the stands erupt in screams of joy while the other half is stunned into silence, and Team X’s cheerleaders turn cartwheels as their players on the bench jump for joy. And then Team Y takes out the ball, a quick pass to midcourt, and Player B heaves a hail Mary three-pointer that goes swish as the buzzer sounds. And suddenly it could be Purim; ve-nahafoch hu (Esther, 9:1) — everything is overturned. The previously subdued half of the arena starts screaming while the other half is silent, tears appear on a cheek or two, and Team X’s shellshocked players slowly walk to the locker room, heads hanging low.

What interests me most in watching these scenes, however, is a question the videos ignore: how does Player A handle all this? When his two-pointer went through, seemingly winning the game, he immediately became a hero, with a shot that will play on rerun tapes for years. He knows he’ll be feted on his return to campus, students standing and cheering when he enters the cafeteria, with his picture appearing not only on the front page of his school newspaper but possibly also in the sports pages of national papers. And then, in an instant, poof; it disappears, all gone, as if it never happened. No more hero, no more adulation. He’s just another very good ballplayer on a very good team that just missed the brass ring. How does he handle this roller coaster of emotions, going from zero to 100-plus to 100-minus in less time than it takes to blink an eye?

If I were a professional sportswriter with a salary and enjoying an expense account, I’d discover the players’ names, investigate their post-game histories, and track them down for interviews. But I’m not, and I don’t, so I won’t. And although AI told me about “rapid emotional reversal” and “lingering frustration” leaving such players mulling over “what if” possibilities for years, AI also told me it “can make mistakes.” And if mistakes are being made, I don’t need AI to make them.

Thus, sitting at my computer sans AI, I wondered whether similar famous cases could help me. I first turned to sports, but the athletes I immediately thought of — Ralph Branca and Bill Buckner — were close but not close enough. While the first’s pitch resulted in the “shot heard ’round the world,” putting the Giants and not the Dodgers into the 1951 World Series, and the second made the error that allowed the Mets, and not the Red Sox, to win the 1986 World Series, neither were ever heroes and both caused their team’s dramatic loss. In sports lingo, they were the goats (and I don’t mean GOATs). Player A had nothing to do with his team’s loss; all he lost was his seconds-long hero status.

I next tried biblical stories. Perhaps Joseph is a template, since he went from being the head of Potifar’s household, in charge of everything his master owned, to being unjustly thrown into jail (Genesis, 39:2-5, 20). Or maybe Moses, brought up as the son of Pharoah’s daughter, who suddenly had to exile himself in far-away Midian in fear for his life (Exodus, 2:10, 15). But those examples also don’t quite work because, unlike Player A, both regained and even exceeded their past high positions.

So I don’t know what happened in real life and I can’t think of a good analogy. What I’ll try to do, therefore, is play pundit, first trying to learn some lessons from these incidents and then, using my imagination, envision how Player A may have dealt with his very fleeting fame.

The first lesson was pointed out to me by my wife, Sharon, who observed that what I considered a disaster might be looked at from a different angle. Not everyone, she noted, wants to be or, indeed, can handle being a hero. Being a hero brings anxiety, creates unfair expectations, adds pressure. You made the winning shot in the championship game? Well, you become the go-to guy to take the last-second shot in every close game. A Michael Jordan can thrive on that, but most of us mortals are not made of whatever Michael Jordan is made of. Some would rather stay in the background, do what they’re doing with skill and competence, without being Michael or Joseph or Moses or Bobby Thompson.

And then there’s the lesson that Gandhi taught us when he said “joy lies in the fight, in the attempt, in the suffering involved, not in the victory itself.” Player A was certainly in the midst of the fight, and his suffering was palpable. So hopefully, despite the final score, there was some joy for Player A in his contribution at the end of the game, though perhaps it took a bit of time for him to feel it. Howard Cosell taught a similar lesson (I wonder whether I’m the first to mention Cosell and Gandhi in the same paragraph) when he noted that “the ultimate victory in competition is derived from the inner satisfaction of knowing that you have done your best and have gotten the most out of what you had to give.”

With these lessons in mind, I like to think that those blink-and-you-missed-it heroes went on to live wonderful lives, with a great story to tell their friends. “You know,” I can hear one say, “I was almost famous, a household name, a perpetual video clip on Wide World of Sports. But a funny thing happened and it lasted” — and here he snaps his fingers — “even shorter than that,” as he then tells the story of those fateful few seconds. “But you know what,” he adds. “I made my shot. I did my job. And that’s what’s important. It would have been nice to win the game, but we can’t control everything.”

Heroes are real. (“Heroes Close to Home”) Chuck Yeager was one. He said that in military flying you do your duty. “You have no control over outcome, no control over pick-and-choose. It’s your duty.”

Sports, indeed much of life, is the same; work and play hard at what you love, try your best, fulfill your obligations, do your duty. Leave being a hero to those who truly deserve it.

Joseph C. Kaplan of Teaneck, a regular columnist for the Jewish Standard and the New Jersey Jewish News and a Rockower Award recipient, is the author of “A Passionate Writing Life: From ‘In my Opinion’ to ‘I’ve Been Thinking.’” He is a retired lawyer; he and his wife, Sharon, have been blessed with four wonderful daughters and six delicious grandchildren.