By STEPHEN MARCHE

Published: July 19, 2013 2 Comments

Five days before my father died, I beat him at Ping-Pong. The table was in the lower level of Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario, part of a children’s art center where we could deposit my son for a convenient half-hour. Some administrator at the gallery is obviously a genius: it’s clear to me now that every art gallery in the world should have some means available for playing table tennis. Hitting little white balls with miniature paddles over a waist-high table turns out to be the perfect conclusion to a day spent looking at paintings with rambunctious children in tow.

My father and I knew the terms. First to 21. Win by two points. Best of three games. We started right in, without warm-up. Immediately I knew I was going to beat him. My spin serves devastated with their cleverness. My smashes were paralyzing, my defenses impenetrable. I took the opener 21-9. The second game 21-6. I crushed him; an official drubbing.

My father blamed his recent eye operations, which diminished his depth perception.

“You beat a one-eyed man,” he said.

To me, the idea that my father was blaming health for his defeat was absurd. He went to the gym the day before, and he looked fitter than any 64-year-old man had a right to be.

“You can still drive, can’t you?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“It’s a poor workman who blames his tools,” I concluded, and spent much of the remaining afternoon gloating.

Later that week, my father died of a pulmonary embolism. He had received a diagnosis of lymphoma, but even so, this swift and sudden death was completely unexpected, a turn that nobody, least of all himself, expected.

Could I even name all the games we played together in a lifetime of competitions? Old maid, crazy eights, cribbage, mah-jongg, checkers, chess, nine men’s morris, oh hell, backgammon, Risk, Monopoly, not to mention the many minor competitions, too many to name, that were just part of the routine. Who could find the most spelling mistakes on a menu in a restaurant? Who could name the band and the song on the radio first? All the little races up the stairs of so many hotels. Competition, against each other and against the world, was one primary way we connected.

Shortly after the funeral, one of my cousins brought me a Polaroid photo he had held onto. It was a snapshot of my father, younger at the time of the photograph than I am now, playing mah-jongg while wearing a T-shirt that read, in glittering, round ’70s typography: “I’m good. I’m really good. Damn I’m good.”

If you asked his nephews how they remembered my father, “competitive” might well be the first adjective on their lips. When he wanted to lose weight in middle age, his diet strategy was to make a wager with his brother over who could lose the most weight in three months. My uncle won, by a pound.

I have inherited my father’s competitiveness, without a doubt. Not that I feel the trait is a personal strength. My competitive instincts have mainly been a scourge rather than a benefit, leading to screaming matches with friends over basketball games and writerly envy, the world’s most pointless emotion. Gore Vidal’s famous quote, that “whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies,” is an ancient and common emotion for writers. What’s especially pointless about this brand of competitiveness is that, unlike table tennis, it’s impossible for one person to “win.” Yet now writerly success has been publicly quantified in a way that allows direct daily competition — Facebook likes, retweets, page views, page read-throughs, position on the most-e-mailed list. It’s impossible to turn away from the numbers, even though they are so obviously a path to idiocy: care too much about them, and you’ll wake up one day to find yourself writing “27 cats who look like members of the royal family.” Competitiveness leads to an unhealthful narrowing of vision, at least for me. What could be more toxic to the business of writing than that brand of narrowing?

The process of growing up, of improving and expanding myself, has been in large part about trying to leave behind the instinct to compete. We tend to believe that the competitive instinct leads to success, or so the screaming parents at kids’ soccer games seem to believe. But maybe the opposite is true. One study conducted at the University of Central Florida found that competitiveness in college students correlated negatively to G.P.A., income and overall academic success. It’s a trait that has also been shown to be a risk factor for gambling addiction. The burning in the chest can easily become all-consuming, no matter the arena.

For most of my life, I have felt like a recovering competitor. I had to retreat from team sports for a while. The burden of residual anger versus the benefit of weight loss from exercise was no longer worth the trade-off. Recently, I thought I had cooled down enough to try playing with others again. So I joined a soccer league. I thought I was doing well. I said to the friend who had brought me: “I’m not as competitive as I used to be. I don’t play to win anymore. I just want to score the most beautiful goal.”

He gave me a look. “Don’t you realize how competitive that is?”

I will never entirely escape the urge, I know. Yesterday I was informed that my daughter, 6 months old, was the biggest and most dexterous of all the babies at her Rainbow Songs music group. Hurts, doesn’t it, other parents? What’s that? What did you say? That’s what I thought. My daughter’s going to be a pediatric neurologist when your little brats are clumsily fishing pennies out of fountains.

Many fathers and sons I know cannot play games against each other for fear of spilling over into corrosive competition. (Cue the scene of that person in your family who storms away from the Pictionary board in a rage.) Freud defined the father-son relationship as inherently competitive: sons wanting to destroy their fathers as an essential moment in the transition of generations. My father and I eventually learned to sublimate that instinct by setting impossible goals. When a pool table appeared in our family cottage, we collectively decided that rather than be engaged in an endless series of small struggles, we would start out playing a best-out-of-100 games. This meant that we never had the upsetting conclusion of a result. When dad died he was ahead 42-27. I recall the number precisely.

One reason my father and I could compete so ferociously was that we had so few substantial disagreements. We certainly didn’t agree about politics, but then we were both smart enough to recognize that we weren’t supposed to. We had shared interests, but they were sufficiently weird not to be all-consuming. How many fathers and sons trade articles about Charles Peirce, a father of semiotics? Or plan extravagant bird-watching trips together? That’s why we could go at each other without reserve. The harder we played, the more we were expressing our confidence in our relationship with each other.

I don’t regret beating my father in the days before he died. Nobody ever let anybody else win when I was growing up. That was an unbreakable family rule, maybe the fundamental rule from which all other rules sprang, because at its core was the belief that everyone deserved to be taken seriously, even children, even men who had recent eye surgery. Even, I suppose, men who were about to die unexpectedly.

I cannot play with my father anymore, but I have the next best thing. My son, age 7, is intensely competitive, just like his grandfather. Our house is basically a massive theater for what he calls “the foot game” — whoever manages to step on top of another person’s foot wins. How do I get him to put on his clothes? I time him, and then he tries to beat yesterday’s time. Every walk home from school is a race. He brings games home, too, almost every day. My most recent favorite is a game called “my grandmother’s underwear.” The rules are simple. People call out phrases like “You’re favorite thing to eat is” or “What are you wearing right now?” and you have to answer “My grandmother’s underwear” without laughing. A surprisingly profound game. What makes grandmothers’ undergarments so hilarious? Children are the source of all comic genius.

Curiously, while I dislike the competitive trait in myself, and do what I can to limit its power in my own life, I like the competitiveness in my son and even encourage it. I’ve taken on a vision of family life from the family I grew up in, as we all do. Competition is bonding, and everything can be converted into a game or a contest and thus an excuse to bond. Perhaps my admiration for the competitive drive is mainly in this genetic connection, the sense of part of my father surviving through me to my son.

Family creates eerie temporal echoes — identical laughs separated by generations or the way a boy holds his hands behind his back the same as a dead man once did. Those connections are more than merely physical; they definitely include traits like competitiveness. I recognize that there’s a more basic contradiction in my attitude. I would rather have a boy whose competitive instincts need to be curbed than one without competitive instincts at all. I also recognize that that’s stupid.

Recently, my son has begun to crush me regularly at what I have to assume is a game of pure chance, the SpongeBob SquarePants edition of Uno. (It’s far better than regular Uno because it has a “secret recipe” card that allows you to see your opponent’s hand.) His disdain has become casual now that he keeps beating me, but the first time he was joyous, howling over my defeat. Then he grew suddenly serious. He shook my hand with the dignity that only little boys can muster when they know they’re in the presence of a relevant moment.

“Good game, Dad.”

“Good game.”

I was not happy about losing, I have to admit. I’ll have to get used to it, I know. There’s only one way this can end. The compensation will have to be the game itself.

We play games so that we know we’re on the same team, no matter who wins, no matter what.