When the Loser Wins

Many of us were raised to win.  Win at all costs.  Winners never quit and quitters never win.  Never give up, never surrender.  Everybody loves a winner.

If winning is so all-important, why did I name this post, “When the Loser Wins?”

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Look at some of our presidents.  George Washington led the nation to victory during the war for independence and was chosen to be the first president of the United States.  Ulysses S. Grant preserved the United States when he battled the Confederacy into submission then followed it closely by becoming president.   Dwight D. Eisenhower led the nation’s armed forces during the Second World War and later as commander-in-chief.

Well, one president lost a fight that he struggled hard to win.  He received a serious, permanent injury during the tussle…and it saved his life.

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Theodore Roosevelt was born a sickly baby.  As he grew, he suffered from asthma and was frequently ill.  His parents were told that the boy would struggle his whole life and probably wouldn’t amount to much.

The boy they nicknamed Teddy didn’t agree.  He took part in any sport that piqued his interest, the more rigorous the better.  He especially loved the combat arts, wrestling and boxing.  More than even those, he was a lover of the outdoor sports, fishing, hiking, and hunting.  He travelled across the country to run his family’s Montana cattle ranch and spent a great deal of time exploring the country and hunting big game while he was there.

Roosevelt quickly gained a reputation as a strong, vigorous young man.  He never backed down from a challenge.  His speech was loud and boisterous and he seemed always in a positive mood. 

The only exception to his impressive fitness was his eyesight.  Teddy wore spectacles from an early age.  I can only imagine how many new pairs of glasses his parents had to purchase because of games of football or wrestling matches. 

The boy didn’t like wearing glasses, but his eyesight was bad enough that he couldn’t read without them and he loved to read.  He read many educational books, especially histories. 

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Teddy took on life the same way he faced down his childhood infirmities. After high school he was accepted into Harvard where he excelled both academically and athletically; even making the college’s sculling and boxing teams.  As expected, he did well at those, once even winning the runner-up spot in an intramural boxing tournament.

After graduating, he continued boxing and wrestling as a way to stay fit.

While serving as commissioner of the New York City Police Department he formed boxing clubs and studied the sport under the tutelage of professional boxers.

Later still, as governor of New York State, he continued training for fun and fitness.  He sought permission to install a wrestling mat in the governor’s mansion but was turned down by the comptroller, who said the sport was undignified for a man in his position.

Roosevelt had a good reputation as an honest man but, as president, he did choose to tell what could be called a little white lie.  In a letter to an Olympic Games coordinator in 1903 he said, “I do but little boxing because it seems rather absurd for a President to appear with a black eye or a swollen nose or a cut lip.”

See what I mean?  He didn’t deny boxing at all as president, but who’s to say how much, “but little,” is?  Not that I’m an expert on how to quantify that but I’d say TR boxed a lot.  He was well known to challenge his friends, as well as some military aides, to “box a few rounds” with him.

Of course, as far as the general public knew, those boxing matches were low key, more for fun and exercise than as serious fights.  Like I said, just for fun – nothing serious.

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It seems some of the matches might have been a little more serious than the president let on.  In 1908 Teddy stepped into the ring with a young aide.  Typically, Roosevelt wasn’t worried that he was 19 years senior to aide Dan Tyler Moore.  Fifty-year-old Teddy just shoved his hands into the gloves and climbed into the ring with a 31-year-old.

The two exchanged blows, dodging and feigning.  The older man was holding his own until he missed a block and was tagged with a real haymaker.  He could shake off the pain but the loss of vision in his left eye couldn’t be ignored.  The presidential doctor said there was severe hemorrhaging as well as a detached retina.  Eventually, President Roosevelt lost all vision in that eye.  Yes, he was totally blind in one eye and, of course, he already had poor sight in the other.

Now we find out more about the kind of man TR was.  He told those who knew about the boxing accident, and the severity of the damage, to keep it quiet.  It seems he wasn’t so much worried that others knew, but he was well aware that the general population would think ill of the man who had blinded the president, so he told the three or four people who knew about his loss of vision to keep it “under their hats.”

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Four years later, in 1912, Roosevelt was running for a possible third term in office.  A month before the election TR was set to make a speech in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  As he left the hotel he was staying in, a disgruntled saloon owner named John Schrank stepped from the shadows and fired his .38 into the president’s chest.

The would-be assassin was quickly subdued and Teddy took a moment to make sure he was capable of continuing, then went on to the auditorium.

He what?  After a shot to the chest?  How is that possible?

The assassin’s pistol didn’t misfire.  He didn’t miss his shot.  The revolver was in shooting condition and the ammo behaved as it was designed to.  The slug penetrated Roosevelt’s coat, smashed through his glasses and their case, punched through his speech, and drilled into the President’s chest.

The amazing fact is that TR’s poor vision in his one remaining eye and lack of binocular vision due to the blinded eye made it difficult for him to read normal-sized print.  So the speech was written in large script, requiring it to be written on fifty pages of paper. 

Roosevelt had stuck the speech in the pocket of his coat along with his glasses in their case.

So, you see, when Schrank fired his revolver, the .38 caliber bullet penetrated the cloth of the coat, the glasses in their case, and the dense paper of what amounted to a small book.  It still had enough energy to enter TR’s chest but, when it smashed into his fourth rib, that’s where it stopped. 

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Gutsy President Roosevelt went on to the lecture hall and stepped out onto the stage, still wearing his bloody shirt and carrying an almost-deadly bullet in his chest.  He began his speech with, “Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose. But fortunately I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet—there is where the bullet went through—and it probably saved me from it going into my heart.”

I’ll bet his listeners were glad that he didn’t get to give the, “long speech,” he had originally planned, because he still spoke for 84 minutes before stepping away from the podium to go see a doctor.

There the doctors determined that the bullet had come so close to boring a hole into the president’s chest cavity that removing it was too risky.  They chose not to remove the slug lest the surgery killed him and TR carried it in his chest for the rest of his life.

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You see, if TR had not been blinded in one eye during the boxing match he lost to the young aide, his fifty-page speech would probably have been much smaller.  As it was, the thick speech, along with the other contents of his pocket, slowed the bullet just enough that it couldn’t quite make it through that fourth rib.  Had the speech been written in smaller script, it would have made the document much thinner, as in, fewer pages.  That could have easily made the difference in a wounded Bull Moose who was able to give an 84 minute speech, and another president fallen to the bullet of an assassin.

Like I said earlier, this was one time when losing that boxing match made TR the winner in the long run. Well, except for one thing; Mr. Roosevelt lost the election. Some might say it was a good thing because it saved Americans from having to remember the name of TR’s political party. Believe it or not, it was the “Bull Moose” party.

Really.

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