"WINNING isn't everything," Vince Lombardi famously said. "It's the only thing."
For a particular group of competitors, Lombardi's one-liner is less a wry comment on cutthroat athletic competition than a simple fact of life. In boardrooms and bedrooms, in playing fields and universities, the hypercompetitive person appears -- transforming even the most trivial transaction into a ruthless face-off with a winner and a loser.
We know it when we see it. The squash champion father who introduces his 12-year-old son to the game by beating him 15 to 0, three games in a row. The ruthless queen bee who dominates her social group with cattiness and designer everything. The out-of-control soccer mom berating the referee from the sidelines; the husband banned from playing family board games because he ruins the game when he wins -- and ruins the entire evening when he loses.
Today, a broad array of recent psychological research has led some researchers to conclude that hypercompetitiveness resembles a diagnosable mental disorder -- a volatile alchemy of obsessive compulsiveness, narcissism, neurosis and sometimes a dose of paranoia.
Psychologists have even linked the hypercompetitive personality to such seemingly disparate conditions and behaviors as road rage, drunk driving, eating disorders, addiction and depression.
It's a style and temperament that affects all other relationships and which, over time, becomes fundamentally impairing, causing fractured families, social isolation and even the disintegration of careers.
Psychologists, therapists and psychiatrists are examining the forces that may create these personalities, and trying to figure out ways to better help them.
Such win-at-all-costs behavior may be unsettling but, truth be told, it's not so very far from what our culture views as laudable.
"We define the American dream as people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps," says Steven Eickelberg, a Paradise Valley, Ariz., psychiatrist who specializes in the psychology of high-performance competitors and whose clients include high-profile athletes and business executives. "But how many people do we walk over to be successful? When is this kind of competition admirable, and when is it pathological?"
Nearly every day a story appears about a hypercompetitor dragging a company, or a team, or simply himself into a terrible mess.
