“When lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler gamester is the soonest winner.” -- William Shakespeare, “Henry V”

The story that resonated most with me from today’s headlines was the one about a part-time Lambeau Field maintenance man who was fired earlier this month for making a disputed comment to Packers head coach Mike McCarthy. The remark that 53-year-old Mike Wood, who had worked on game days at Lambeau for at least 22 years, made was either “Let’s get the boys ready to kick some butt this weekend,” if you believe Wood, or something about “not laying an egg,” if you believe McCarthy.

No matter what was said, as long as it wasn’t about McCarthy’s mother, it should have been forgotten. I’ll be the first to admit I have a temper and have called out people, especially ones I saw as subordinate, for making comments that I deemed out of line. But one of the things that being on the planet 45 years has taught me, along with weakening muscles and the inability to read small type, is what battles I should pick. This is one that no NFL coach making a salary in the multiple millions can ever win or should ever fight.

Sun Tzu didn’t say it in “The Art of War,” but he understood the concept, so I will say it as clearly as possible: Never pick a fight with somebody so far down on the food chain as to be invisible. The same goes for responding to fans, and we’ll let former Browns GM Phil Savage guest lecture on that one.

There is no book on how to be a successful coach in the NFL, but if there were, it would contain the following advice: “Ignore it. Laugh it off. Go home to your big house, in your leather-upholstered SUV, the one with the nice sound system. Look at your bank balance and admire your good fortune. If you are still in doubt, call your agent. But don’t retaliate or you may ultimately join that guy on the unemployment line. We as a culture love our winners but hate bullies.”

But let’s face it, this overreaction is a sure sign that McCarthy’s skin is a bit thinner because he’s feeling pressure. My colleague Michael Lombardi wrote last week about comments made by Packers president Mark Murphy that undermined McCarthy. A coach who’s 7-1 probably never hears those comments, but if he did, he never says a word. A coach who is 1-7 probably laughs it off, saying, “Why should this week be any different?”

Keeping one’s cool isn’t easy, and this guy Wood may have been completely out of line and piled on the pressure already on McCarthy. But today Wood and his story are another headache for McCarthy. Maybe Wood is not as big a problem as Brett Favre and Minnesota being 7-1, but he’s a problem just the same. Every coach needs to remember, especially now with seasons hanging in the balance, that while they get paid to teach, coach and win, they are in the entertainment business. It’s why they get multimillion-dollar salaries. Things are just a bit hotter for McCarthy now, and whether he was right or wrong is irrelevant.

Whether it’s Plato, the Bible or the “Andy Griffith Show” teaching it -- and they all did -- making sure you take extra time to care about the least important people and never treating them to an unnecessary show of power will mark you a bigger winner in the game of life. And it just may just get you the benefit of the doubt in an 8-8 season.