FORT WALTON BEACH, Florida – I couldn’t tell you the game or year or even the sport I was covering at the time for the Northwest Florida Daily News, but a conversation I had, with our photographer, Nick Tomecek, has stuck with me everywhere I’ve gone since.
“I always try to capture the jube and deje,” he said, in the aftermath of whatever it was we were covering, to which I replied, of course.
“The what?”
“The jube and deje: The jubilation and dejection.”
In every sport, after every game, there will be jubilation and dejection, winners celebrating, hands raised, hugging, crying, feeling those enviable sporting highs.
This is the jubilation.
The losers will have their heads bowed. Sometimes they’ll be on their knees. They’ll often be crying, tears of a different sort.
This is the dejection.
The dejection of a loss, captured so well by Mark Rigney / Mark Rigney photo
This is why we play sports, why we watch them with rapt attention: It makes us feel the sort of emotions few other endeavors can.
This is why what Daniel Freitas is doing with our new show, Beyond The Sand, is so powerful.
Our second episode, titled in a nod to Tomecek, is Jubilation and Dejection, as it focuses on the qualifying process of the AVP League.
Here is James Shaw, running through a single-elimination qualifier to punch his ticket into the League. He’s elated – until he’s rueful, as his wife, Molly, finished third. She had only one more opportunity remaining to qualify, and she and Kelly Cheng had an uphill climb to do it.
“We were walking off the beach, I knew Molly was happy for me. I could feel it,” Shaw said. “She really wanted to distance herself and feel like she wasn’t in my way because she knew how sad she was. I think I wanted her to qualify in Huntington more than she did. We both knew how tough it would be if I was playing in the League and she wasn’t and vice versa.”
Two weeks later, she qualified, “and it was just a huge exhale,” James said. “I was the most excited guy on the beach. It felt great to see her in that moment where she could let I all go, be happy; we’re going to be all right.”
And here is Savvy Simo, crying into Abby Van Winkle’s arms, crying into Kylie Deberg’s arms, crying because, again, she was one swing away from qualifying. Again, that swing didn’t go her way. Instead of competing in the U.S.A., Simo and Van Winkle will hit the Beach Pro Tour full time. Not a bad gig at all, but not the $20,000 League payday they had hoped for, not the opportunity to play at home all summer instead of heading directly to China and Poland and Turkey and Switzerland.
She found the bright side, of course. She’d never done a month-long Eurotrip. Should be fun. And hey! They played excellent in China, which set them up well for the rest of the year. But before that silver lining could be found, there was that familiar feeling of dejection on a wound that hadn’t completely scabbed over.
“I cried a lot,” Simo said. “A lot. I have no more tears to give right now.”
And then there is Julia Donlin and Lexy Denaburg, a promising pair who has had a mercurial season, one highlighted by a win at the same single-elimination qualifier Shaw and Chaim Schalk won. Donlin is crying. Denaburg looks as if she has had the weight of the world lifted off her shoulders.
That weight might feel heavier than ever for Tri Bourne. Disenchanted with the Beach Pro Tour, he put all of his proverbial eggs into the AVP League basket. An untimely back injury knocked him and Evan Cory out of the first qualifier, leaving them with no margin for error.
They erred.
They were out.
Both are now unsure of what the rest of the summer – and for Bourne, his career – looks like.
“The mind has just been racing,” Bourne said. “Going through all of the scenarios, the whole career flashing before my eyes. I’m just seeing that the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.”
But it was. It is. Because that’s why he’s played professionally for as long as he has. There is no substitute for sports, for the jubilation of a win and, yes, the price of admission that comes with it: the dejection of a loss.
“Embracing the highs and embracing the lows and being grateful for all of it,” Donlin said. “Without the highs and without the lows, you wouldn’t be experiencing any of it.”
The jubilation and dejection.
