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Originally Posted by Tim Delles
Wow.................
once again it goes to your views... Honestly, how do you know what every single person at an event is thinking??? have you asked every single person in FIRST what they think the words champions and losers mean?
i doubt it...
This makes me very sad for you, espeically when you say that this is the bottom line. This may be the bottom line for you, but everyone is entitled to their thoughts about the song.
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Honestly how would you celebrate the winners of an event? Because if you don't celebrate them what would make a team want to win? If they don't want to win what would make them want to build the best robot they could? if they don't build the best robot they could why would they build a robot? if they didn't build a robot why would they be in FIRST???
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Tim,
While everyone is entitled to their thoughts, this doesn't make their thoughts interesting, valuable, correct, logical, or valid. How would I celebrate the winners of the regional event? If I had to pick a Queen song (I like Queen, as a matter of fact) I might go with "Don't Stop Me Now" (despite "sex machine ready to reload"). Though I'm sure I'm not as conversant with either Queen or this song as many of the people who have replied to this thread, I can say that to me, this is a high energy song with an extremely positive attitude that does a much better job of celebrating everyone who has participated. Are there better songs? I would bet there are; however, my knowledge of music in written in the last 100 years is overall very lacking, and I wouldn't try to pass myself off as a music expert.
"Don't Stop Me Now" does lack some of the elements that specifically celebrate the winners. I agree (as I said before, which you apparently missed) that creating strong incentives to win the competition is important... but let me ask you this: do you really think these incentives are not in place? Do you honestly think that there are significant numbers of teams who don't want to do as well as they can (and I don't mean being happy/unhappy with their performance)? If you do, I challenge you to provide evidence or stop putting out FIRST doomsday scenarios about teams not caring.
Part of the great strength and great weakness of the "sports world" (if there can be said to exist one) is the idea that winning is everything. You do everything you can to win, because the winners get everything - more money, more fame, more girls. And if this is the way we want FIRST to be, then you're absolutely right, we should have this song.
I think after reading all these replies and thinking about them and discussing them with friends and family for a few days, I've come to realize the problem here. We're all indoctrinated into the cult of gracious professionalism (and I don't mean that pejoratively). This isn't a bad thing, in general. This means that we tend to behave with a lot more sportsmanship and have a lot more fun. However, the problem (which I think we're experiencing now) is that we have become blind to the fact that the world is not actually like FIRST. To me, Bharat's comments earlier in the thread ("If this song had a negative meaning towards the finalist or second place, then I do not think the world of sports would embrace it so much.") are especially indicative of this (though I over-reacted in my response). We're so caught up in our GP bubble that we fail to see that not everyone believes as we do. One doesn't have to reach very far back into sports history to come up with examples of this, but reaching back farther to something that is familiar to most, the Black Sox come to mind.
Jbot, while that may be a question that you would like answered, I just would like to clearly state that that was never the question I was asking. To answer your first question:
Quote:
Originally Posted by JBotAlan
Is it appropriate to celebrate the champions of an event here in FIRST? Does this celebration conflict with GP?
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My answer, as well as FIRST's answer (see Jane's posting about a page or two back) is yes, it is appropriate, and of course not.
Your second question is more complex:
Quote:
Originally Posted by JBotAlan
Should FIRST remove any possible non-GP element from the games?
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While the answer to this question is not as simple, I would again have to say yes, FIRST should remove non-GP elements. Gracious professionalism is such a central tenet of FIRST that the organization should do its best (and in most cases does) to remove non-GP elements. However, if you take another look at Jane's post (specifically her quote of... Woody I think it was?) I hope you can see that gracious professionalism and strong competition are not in conflict.
There's more to say here, but I'm having browser problems and I've talked enough anyway.
-Paul