Some sportswriters called it a Harbaughism. Except it wasn’t a Harbaughism. It was a Hemingwayism.
And you’re missing the point if you ask “What team did he coach?” Ernest Hemingway, of course, was a Pulitzer and Nobel prize winner in literature, an author who’s been dead for 50 years but whose work is still studied in high schools and universities throughout the world and revered by aficionados of original, groundbreaking fiction.
This was news, a coach quoting a literary giant. It’s not every day that a jock type gets all bookish in public.
Paul Westhead, the former pro and college basketball coach, was an exception. He used to quote Shakespeare to his players. Magic Johnson famously interpreted one such exhortation by saying something to the effect, “You mean, get it to the big man, coach,” referring to Kareem Abdul Jabbar.
And Marv Levy, the former college and pro football coach, had degrees in English literature and history and was known to offer historical analogies to his players, although he forthrightly rejected war/football metaphors, an example all athletes and coaches should follow. Referring to the Super Bowl (to which he led the Buffalo Bills four consecutive years) Levy once was quoted: “This is not a must-win. World War II was a must-win.”
But leave it to the intense, competition-addicted, testosterone-fueled 49ers coach Jim Harbaugh to skip the Bard and world history and go instead to Papa Hemingway, the most publicly macho American author of all-time, Norman Mailer notwithstanding.
“This team is not defeated by any stretch of the imagination. A man can be destroyed but he can’t be defeated as long as he knows that there’s hope,” Harbaugh told the media in the wake of last Sunday’s excruciating disappointment, a 20-17 overtime loss to the New York Giants in the Winner Goes to the Super Bowl game.
“A man can be destroyed but not defeated .<TH>.<TH>.” is from Hemingway’s late-career masterwork, “The Old Man and The Sea,” a short, lyrical novel crammed with observations on what it takes to aspire to, and achieve, a transcendent dignity despite results the rest of the world deem failures.
It’s curious that roughly half of the sportswriters who quoted Harbaugh quoting Hemingway didn’t know or didn’t acknowledge “The Old Man and the Sea” reference and instead intimated he was dazed or in shock or just plain nuts. The other half correctly named Hemingway as the source of the quote but left it at that. No elaboration. Maybe the whole thing seemed too bizarre.
Granted, it’s a strange quote. One sports editor for a major metropolitan Northern California daily newspaper was certain that it was so strange, Harbaugh must have gotten it backward. After all, “man can be defeated but not destroyed” would seem to make more sense, and that’s what this editor wrote before correcting it in a later edition, although in an email he admitted he still thought Harbaugh had gotten it wrong.
He didn’t
In “The Old Man and the Sea,” Santiago, an old fisherman who hasn’t had success in ages, dares to go farther out to sea than anyone else and, lo and behold, he hooks a marlin, huge and magnificent, and the against-all-odds struggle becomes epic. The Super Bowl of fishing, if you will, is suddenly within the realm of possibility for someone who previously was thought to have no chance.
But after the sharks strike the marlin, it’s clear to Santiago that sooner or later there won’t be much left to show for his heroic efforts. That’s when Hemingway has the old man realize that “man can be destroyed but not defeated,” meaning that defeat, real defeat, is something that must be yielded. His will cannot be defeated unless he allows it, unless he acknowledges defeat. A mere losing result is not necessarily defeat. Greater forces may destroy him. He has no control of that. He does have control over his spiritual nobility, his willpower.
Santiago won’t allow his will to be broken.
Neither will Harbaugh.
By the time Santiago gets his prize to shore, it is nothing but a skeleton. In a literary sense, the old man has been destroyed — all that monumental effort for nothing. But it’s not for nothing. Effort, dedication, willpower — those are the ingredients that enrich life’s experiences with dignity.
One popular interpretation of “The Old Man and the Sea” is that Hemingway himself was the fisherman, the catch was his achievement in creating timeless literature, and the skeletal remains symbolize what’s left after the critics are done.
Maybe to Harbaugh, Hemingway’s sharks in “The Old Man and the Sea” symbolize a modern breed of shark — the sports media.
On the other hand, perhaps Harbaugh should seek alternative inspiration. After all, Hemingway, physically and emotionally defeated, ended up blowing his brains out.
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