LONDON — The losing is not easy. The losing, in fact, stinks. You can talk about the spirit of the Games, the joy of competition, the sense of deep personal satisfaction achieved by representing your country, and at the end of the day that’s all so much rubbish.
“Losing is frustrating,” Daniel McMillan says, “whether you’re playing checkers or chess or anything else.”
McMillan and his mates have gotten quite used to losing across this first week of the Olympic Games. They play team handball for Great Britain, and every time they enter the Copper Box they have an enormous home-court advantage, 7,000 of their countrymen granting them standing ovations when they arrive, when they score, when they depart.
Just not when they win. Because they haven’t won. Because it’s entirely possible they could be among the worst teams ever to grace an Olympics. In any team sport.
They make the ’62 Mets look like the ’86 Mets, the ’73 76ers look like the ’67 76ers. Their first three games of this tournament, they played France, Sweden and Argentina.
They lost 44-15, 41-19, 32-21.
All they are missing is Marvelous Marv.
“It’s wonderful to hear them cheering for us and chanting for us,” McMillan says. “But it would be better if we gave them a reason to.”
On this morning, they have not done that. They have played Tunisia, another 0-3 team but one whose handball history stretches back well before 2006, which is when Britain’s truly began, and then only because, as the host nation, it received an automatic bid into the Games.
That happened for America in 1996, too, and we’ve never been back. But at least we won two games in Atlanta.
“It’s a minority sport, it’s not football or rugby, it is going to take some time for this to really take off in our country,” says McMillan, a Scot who played American football with the hope of making an NFL Europe team back in the day. “It’s a contact sport, and I think you can see we have an awful lot of fun.”
Fun is good. Fun helps. And it’s true: Britain’s players do look like they are having a hell of a time. It seems they suffer from just two obvious shortcomings: an inability to put the ball in the other team’s net and an inability to keep the other team’s ball out of their net. Other than that …
“It takes time,” says Christopher McDermott, whose father, Paul, was one of the sport’s pioneers in England. “We can get to that level, but it takes time.”
It took the ’62 Mets seven years to become champions. A brief look at England playing Tunisia suggests that might be an ambitious timetable. Tunisia’s best player is Issam Tej, sort of the World B. Free of Tunisian handball, who looks as if he enjoys a beer and a smoke during timeouts and clearly has never met a shot he didn’t like.
Including one he launches from 100 feet out against the Brits. Which beats the napping British goalkeeper.
The game ends 34-17. The Brits get another standing O, and get one more game in group play before handing the sport back to the rest of the world. That’s against Iceland, whose population — 319,000 — is roughly the figure for 10 blocks in London. Iceland, though, was the silver medalist in 2008. This one could be ugly.
“We’ll be ready,” McMillian — Marvelous Mac! — says. “We’ll play hard.”
Which begs the grisly question: What would possibly happen if they didn’t?