Tackling first loser myth

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  • Dave Shabaz
    Dave Shabaz
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Phone | 903-919-5989

Email | dave@ssnewstelegram.com

Wednesday, the 22nd of June, at 11:59 pm, the voting for this year’s Best of Hopkins County will come to an end. So please, vote, vote, vote, and then vote some more, because you want your favorite person and/or place to win.

This is my third year overseeing this very popular promotion. The people in Hopkins County are very competitive folk and I love that! But after the first year’s voting ended, I learned something new while I was calling and visiting people to “congratulate” them on winning second place, because we only acknowledge the first and second place people/businesses.

It was then I was told that “Second place is nothing but first loser,” a line made famous in the movie, Talladega Nights. Some of the calls and visits I’ve made in the past two years, while informing people that they won “Second place or Runner-up” as it has also been known, became like condolence calls.

It was like I was letting them know that someone in their family had died. I’ve even been yelled at, scolded for a lack of integrity, and told off by a few people who didn’t get first place in a certain category.

Most of them blamed it on the new way of voting, which started three years ago, basically due to Covid. It wasn’t healthy or safe to have people fill out newspapers and mail them in and have us go through each one of them by hand, so we did what most companies who do promotions such as this now do, we went digital. This allowed people to vote on their phones, computers, laptops, etc. It increased the voting from a total of roughly 3,000 votes to more than 81,000 votes last year.

I was told this new way of voting, “Gave people an unfair advantage.” Well, that’s true only if you and everyone you know and everyone who does business with you, doesn’t own a computer, phone, laptop, etc., and every one of your competitor’s do.

Remember, before we went digital, people used to come in and buy 100, 200 and even 300 newspapers and write their names in all of them. We’ve just made life easier for them and this actually evens out the playing field because not every business owner can afford to buy 300 newspapers. This way, in my opinion, has much more integrity.

So, that was the past two years. This year we made some changes. We went from 181 categories to 132. We eliminated categories that just weren’t getting enough votes and/ or interest. My apologies if your category was deleted, but it had to be done. And this year, since the terms, “Second place and Runner-up,” seem to literally make people upset, we’ve changed the names to: Best and Next Best, so you can at least have the word “Best” in your title. It was that or eliminate the second place winner and I wasn’t about to hurt 132 people/businesses just because of some ridiculous idea that “Second place is just the first loser.” Look everyone, I love

Look everyone, I love Ricky Bobby just as much as you do, but it was a movie, not real life.

Some of our categories get 15-20 different candidates, so to finish in the top two is something to be proud of, especially when we are getting 50,000 to 80,000 votes in.

And if you want to make the job of voting for you easier for your voters, you need to buy our “Easy Vote Button.”

Just ask anyone who’s used it and they’ll tell you it’s so much easier than having to write in all of your info over and over, since you get to vote once every hour, 24 hours a day.

I’ve actually contemplated changing the name of the entire promotion to “Reader’s Choice,” which is what it is named in many parts of the country. But Texans are fiercely competitive, so being named “Best” is very important. More than anything, please remember, this is a fun competition between friendly rivals.

So, keep voting right up until 11:59 pm on Wednesday the 22nd of June. And if you finish “Best or Next Best,” be happy that you are being acknowledged for your great work in our community.