It’s not life or death it’s a game and at the end of the game there is going to be a winner and a loser.

Langer frames competitive sport—implicitly golf—as something that should be taken seriously but not treated as existentially catastrophic. By insisting it is “not life or death,” he pushes back against the tendency of athletes, fans, and media to inflate a result into a moral verdict. Calling it “a game” emphasizes perspective: outcomes are structured, rule-bound, and ultimately finite. The blunt reminder that there will be “a winner and a loser” underscores acceptance of competition’s zero-sum reality; maturity lies in preparing well, playing hard, and then living with the result without letting it define one’s worth.