MORE AMERICAN
THAN APPLE PIE
By Frederick A. Hurst
“Competition”
is more American than apple pie. Competition is why we love our sports and our
sports heroes so much. Our love of it is
why we goad opponents on to victory and applaud the winner and good loser
alike; why we dislike the loser who whines and frown down on the winner who
gloats.
Competition is what makes Tiger Woods and
the Williams Sisters national heroes alongside those who chase their
titles. And it’s what makes us honor and
enshrine past sports heroes—the Magic Johnsons and Larry Birds—and cling to
aging heroes—the Michael Jordans and Jack Nickolases. Even more than our war heroes, our sports
heroes—who free us from the blood and gore of war but not the thrill of
it—symbolize
We were very much aware of the competitive
nature of American business when we decided to publish this newspaper, An Afro-American Point of View. We knew
that we were starting a type of business that would place us in competition
with many other area newspapers and that our performance would be judged in
comparison to them, which is why we tried to find a niche market, produce a
quality newspaper, develop an effective distribution strategy and ask those who
had confidence in us to invest their advertising dollars in us, product
unseen.
Most of our competitors will welcome us to
the arena, wish us luck and, in some cases, step up the competition against us.
A few, whom we have already heard from, will moan, groan, whine and opine about
why we should have stayed out of the arena.
The “few” miss the point (pun intended).
We, at Point of View, identified a
market for something we like to produce and can produce cost-effectively and we
made a business decision to compete for it. It is up to our readers and
advertisers to judge whether or not we made a good or bad business
decision.
We
are pleased by the initial response and welcome competition. We believe that competition
will make us even better serve our market. That’s what makes good sportspeople.
That’s what makes good business. And that’s what