Unfinished Business

Today my beef is with the ties that have been occurring in the World Cup.

The World Cup tournament started two days ago, yet, I'm already losing my Cup fever. That's because out of the first five matches of the tournament, three ended in ties; South Africa-Mexico was 1-1, Uruguay-France was 0-0, and yesterday the Americans tied the Englishmen 1-1.

In World Cup pool play, there are eight groups with four teams in each. Each team plays the three teams in their group once in a round-robin; a win gets a team three points, a tie gets one, and a loss doesn't garner any points. The two teams with the most points in each group advance to the elimination round, where there are no ties and a champion is decided.

Ties in soccer occur on a regular basis. According to the Washington Post, in 2008, 27.1% of Major League Soccer games ended in a tie, and for the first third of the 2009 season, 40.8% of matches ended the same way. That's 2 out of 5 games where there was no winner, and no loser.

The whole point of a contest is that there's a winner and a loser, and of course as we were all told as children, so that everybody has fun. I just don't see how you can have a game or a match and by the end of it say that nobody won. Isn't that the reason that we watch and play sports, for the intensity and mystery of who will win the contest? If there's no winner or loser than what's the point of even having a game?

I realize that in some of these games, a tie is essentially a win. For teams like South Africa, Uruguay and the United States, who were all pretty big underdogs, the fact that they all at least came away with one point instead of the zero they were supposed to have is certainly a big boost. It's certainly better for them to have come away with at least a point, instead of leaving the game with zero points a big hole to dig themselves out of.

But as a fan, I can't help but feel empty after a tie, like the past few hours had been a total waste of time, as if there is unfinished business, that will never be completed. Individual games aren't meant to be cliffhangers, they're entertainment to be finished in one shot. With the exception of postponements, there aren't sequels to games, there are overtimes which serve both as climaxes and epilogues at the same time, with every moment from the game leading up to the defining moment, the winning play, and the winning play possibly ending the game if it's sudden death.

A game is like a story that one reads, or a movie that one watches. You have all of these scenes leading up to the end, an end that has to answer questions, finish the story. In sports, the finish means defining a winner and a loser. Could you imagine a movie where neither the hero nor villain wins, the movie just ends with a tie between the two? If Batman and the Joker just agreed to a ceasefire, neither evil nor justice prevailing over the other, with justice never being served?

Contests are meant to win and lose. As Herm Edwards once famously said, "The greatest thing about sports is, you play to win the game ... you don't play to just play it!" As I said earlier, a tie for an underdog can be considered a win, but it doesn't mean that team is going to play to tie. The true beauty of sport, is the mystery of who will win and who will go home empty-handed; how the story will end. I don't care about moral victories, I care about the facts, and if the fact is that the game ended in a tie, it doesn't matter who the underdog was, because there was no true winner.

Every story needs an ending, a culmination of everything leading up to the finish, a moment that answers all of our questions, something only a black and white win or loss can provide, not a vague, gray tie.