Losing concentration and concentrating too much are not synonymous with choking, in my experience. I mean, I think that’s a pretty good explanation of the difference of opinion. I don’t think that is the common usage of the word. I don’t think the OP makes sense under that understanding.
And what about them? You aren’t sufficiently convinced, is the idea? I’m not going to try to prove to you what you mean. It’s obvious to me that when most people call Karl Malone or Lebron or Peyton Manning or whoever else chokers, they aren’t saying that they think too much. They’re calling them cowards. Coward is a moral judgment. You’ve already responded to my saying choker = coward. I get that.
But I would disagree with both of those assessments.
Even if Team A is objectively better by all accounts than Team B, Team B can still beat Team A. Sports are weird like that. And it can all happen without any “choking,” just a funny bounce here or there.
Really strange and rare flukes and referee miscalls aside, I think the team that wins is by definition the better team. Winning is the objective; under anything like normal circumstances, it doesn’t make sense to say that the team that fails is “better” than the team that succeeds, at least on that day that matters.
In short, playing the game is the objective measure.
Well yes, clearly the team that wins was almost always better on that day. But that’s a big difference from arguments about team strength/weakness. The perception of “choking” is when a favored team loses to an underdog (even if both teams play well and the underdog happens to come out on top) or if a team is perceived to have a big advantage during the contest, then manages to lose.
I could beat LeBron James in a game of 1-on-1 if I got super lucky and made a bunch of fallaway jumpers or halfcourt shots. Would anyone say that I was “better” than LeBron?
But I really doubt you believe in all the consequences that ought to stem from that. There is such a thing as the quality of a team that persists from game to game, right? And in a 7 game series that finishes 4-1 with three blowouts, it’s pretty clear that the winning team was the better team. But the other team won one. At the end of that game, I think you still know who the better team is. “They were the better team tonight” has its place as a sports cliche, but it’s not the same as “they are a better team.” And “we lost” isn’t the same as “we choked.”
And if instead of a seven game series, the same teams played a one game championship, the lesser team could win that game. If you were a god capable of reiterating the same game over and over again, the better team would win the majority of the games, but not all, unless it was like professionals vs. schoolkids. And it wouldn’t necessarily be the case that the team that lost lost because they choked. It’s just some shit that happened.
Or, think of it this way. Let’s say the US team was Rick Barry, and all it needed to do to win the final was make a figurative free throw. He’s a 90% shooter, almost. If he misses, there’s no way to tell, unless you’re a god who can make him do it again and again under the same circumstances, whether that was a choke, or just a thing that happens one out of ten times because the universe is a complicated place. Now make it a contest - a 90% shooter vs. a 75% shooter. The better shooter can lose some, and still be a better shooter. Right?
Sometimes the best team loses. You see games where you think if they played 5 times, they would win 4. But this was game 5. There are variables in every athletic contest. There are unlucky breaks, like hitting goal posts and deflecting out, bad calls and great bounces. I think the US team was a more talented team.
Choking in this context I think means outplaying your opponent and losing anyway, or possibly playing well for most of the contest but then much worse at the end. In that sense the Patriots didn’t choke against the Giants in the Superbowl; the Giants legitimately outplayed them for almost the entire game. (Couldn’t let that stand uncontested, heh.)
Regarding the meta-conversation about the term choking itself:
Professional tennis players – even highly ranked ones – are unusually upfront and candid about choking, specifically about matches they have choked. They use the term fairly freely.
I believe I’ve heard Jason Taylor reference the Midnight Miracle as a chokejob by the Dolphins, and I’m pretty sure I’ve heard both Michael Strahan and Tiki Barber reference the 2002 wildcard loss to the 49ers as a chokejob. (That’s the one with the famously embarassing moment of Strahan pointing at the scoreboard just before the Giants’ 24 point lead evaporated.)
I think this is off base. I don’t think it’s a fair representation of either of the definitions I’ve just proposed, either of which I think most people would choose as the definition they understand if given a multiple choice between them and cowardice.
Your first definition suggests that, if you lose a game, it’s better if you choked than if you didn’t. “Choker” would be a compliment, given that you didn’t win. I have never heard anyone use the word like that, and I would love to see a cite of anyone doing it.
And most people would choose that definition over “cracked under pressure in a game they should have won because they were too weak to handle it”? I really doubt it, but I’d love to learn something new today.
Because that’s the structure; that’s the event. Ultimately it’s arbitrary. (Yes, I think it’s an aesthetically better structure than a shorter series, but the reasons the World Series is seven instead of five, or nine or fifteen, aren’t really baseball reasons.) In such cases, the statement about “winning the game” applies to the event as a whole. The 1960 Pirates were the better team, according to the terms of the competition. Because those terms are the objective. If the '60 Series had been nine or fifteen then maybe the Yankees would have been better on those different terms. The 1986 Mets were the better team, whether you think Buckner “choked” or just wasn’t playing well enough.
I do realize that, though I think it’s a silly convention.
Lets imagine a competition in which they flip a coin after the first match to see if it’s best of 1 or best of 3. A wins the first game, but it was a fluke. They were clearly less skilled and athletic. You’re claiming that this coin flip is going to determine if they’re the better team or not?
It’s really a shame that sport has never been able to come up with a neutral, objective, quantifiable way to determine who played a game better, isn’t it?
First, the final score is usually, but not always, indicative of who played the better game. Second, playing the better game is not equivalent to being the better team, which is what spark is claiming.
If you didn’t win, then you must not have played better, and if you didn’t play better, then you’re not demonstrably the better team. It’s pretty simple.
