Intersections

Our job on Saturday was to pack boxes for the Haitian relief effort – boxes of hats and shirts. We were all arrayed at our folding and packing tables, staring at a seeming mountain of broken-down boxes spewing these articles of clothing. And for some reason lost on us, every single box was labeled in huge block letters with “LOSER”.

You see – these boxes were all full of t-shirts and hats printed for major championship sporting events of the past few years. And at every one of those events, both teams are presented with boxes and boxes of celebratory gear before the game – gear proclaiming them the champions so they can wear them for television as soon as the game ends. I guess I’d never thought about all of those boxes of paraphernalia with the wrong winning team on them. It turns out they get donated to charity – like the mountain of clothing we were about to ship to Haiti.

As I worked on preparing all of this stuff, my mind wandered all over the place. I folded t-shirts proclaiming the Texas Longhorns the NCAA Football champs from the recent game in the Rose Bowl – and wondered again if the Horns would have beat Alabama if Colt McCoy could have played that whole game. In the next pile, I was sorting hats proclaiming the Alabama Crimson Tide the SEC champs for 2008 – knowing full well that Florida won that game – and thought for a while about what it must feel like to lose such a hard-fought game and then come back the next year to win it all. And on and on from team to team.

That got me thinking about all of these “losers” we were staring at in these boxes. Every one of them the top teams, playing in the top championship games of the top leagues in the richest country in the world – clearly the smallest of percentage of the best players and teams in the world – and at the end of the day having no other word to use for them but “losers”. If anyone was a winner – if anyone was to thank their God/fate/stars for their good fortune – it would be these kids on these teams. And it would be those of us watching them on our TVs or folding these shirts. And the ones who would be getting these shirts in a few days – they were the ones who had lost – really lost.

Which of course got me thinking about what it would be like to get one of these shirts or hats. To not give a darn if the team on the shirt actually won the game being advertised. Just trying to keep the rain and the sun off when there is nothing else.

And as I stood there folding another stack to go in another box to go on another pallet, I found myself staring at the shirts in front of me. Something kept catching my eye – and it wasn’t the colorful logos or the team names or the sizes (we have lots of XL in the US by the way). And it wasn’t that every one off them was telling a story that, if things had gone different one day, might actually be true. It was the three small words printed on every single shirt, below the size: “made in Haiti”.