Sports and me

Bill Simmons' The Curious Guy email interviews

Malcolm Gladwell: Why am I a sports fan? I'm not sure. I grew up in small-town rural southern Ontario. Neither of my parents or my brothers are sports fans, and we never had a television growing up. (In fact, my parents still don't have one, which means that when I go home I'm reduced to trying to catch the AM broadcasts of NFL games from the other side of Lake Erie). I don't think I saw a televised professional sports contest until I was a senior in high school. Everything I know came from Sports Illustrated, which I read at the town library. For some reason, I was a huge fan of the Spurs. I had a George Gervin poster above my bed, and I can talk quite knowledgeably to this day about James Silas, Larry Kenon, Billy Paultz and all the others -- even though I never saw any of those guys play and I'm not even sure (with the exception of Gervin) what any of them looked like. (Surely, with the nickname "Special K" Larry Kenon was black.) Do you know how hard it is to understand what finger rolls are -- or even dunks -- if all you've ever done is read about them in magazines? ...

I'm happy writing anywhere and under any circumstances and in fact I'm now to the point where I'm suspicious of people who don't love what they do in the same way. I was watching golf, before Christmas, and the announcer said of Phil Mickelson that the tournament was the first time he'd picked up a golf club in five weeks. Assuming that's true, isn't that profoundly weird? How can you be one of the top two or three golfers of your generation and go five weeks without doing the thing you love? Did Mickelson also not have sex with his wife for five weeks? Did he give up chocolate for five weeks? Is this some weird golfer's version of Lent that I'm unaware of? They say that Wayne Gretzky, as a 2-year-old, would cry when the Saturday night hockey game on TV was over, because it seemed to him at that age unbearably sad that something he loved so much had to come to end, and I've always thought that was the simplest explanation for why Gretzky was Gretzky. And surely it's the explanation as well for why Mickelson will never be Tiger Woods. ...

This is actually a question I'm obsessed with: Why don't people work hard when it's in their best interest to do so? Why does Eddy Curry come to camp every year overweight?

The (short) answer is that it's really risky to work hard, because then if you fail you can no longer say that you failed because you didn't work hard. It's a form of self-protection. I swear that's why Mickelson has that almost absurdly calm demeanor. If he loses, he can always say: Well, I could have practiced more, and maybe next year I will and I'll win then. When Tiger loses, what does he tell himself? He worked as hard as he possibly could. He prepared like no one else in the game and he still lost. That has to be devastating, and dealing with that kind of conclusion takes a very special and rare kind of resilience. Most of the psychological research on this is focused on why some kids don't study for tests -- which is a much more serious version of the same problem. If you get drunk the night before an exam instead of studying and you fail, then the problem is that you got drunk. If you do study and you fail, the problem is that you're stupid -- and stupid, for a student, is a death sentence. The point is that it is far more psychologically dangerous and difficult to prepare for a task than not to prepare. People think that Tiger is tougher than Mickelson because he works harder. Wrong: Tiger is tougher than Mickelson and because of that he works harder. ...

Switching gears, I have one last point on the fact I never really watched sports on TV until I was in college. That's not as crazy as it sounds. I would grade major professional sports in terms of their TV/live watchability in the following order:

NFL: A-plus televised. B-minus live.
NBA: B-plus televised. A live.
NHL: C-minus televised. A-plus live.
PGA: A-televised. D live.

So what do you miss by not having a TV? Really just a great NFL experience, and some golf. You will notice that I've left out baseball and that's because I don't believe that actually watching baseball under any circumstances enhances your appreciation of the game. As a kid, I read Bill James and Thomas Boswell and Roger Angell and followed the game through newspaper box scores, and I was a far more dedicated fan back than I am today. Baseball is a great idea, and a great story. But is watching it a great experience? Frankly I prefer the way the game was played in my imagination. ...

This is one of my favorite topics. Let's do Erick Dampier. In his contract year at Golden State, he essentially doubles his rebounds and increases his scoring by 50 percent. Then, after he signs with Dallas, he goes back to the player he was before. What can we conclude from this? The obvious answer is that effort plays a much larger role in athletic performance than we care to admit. When he tries, Dampier is one of the top centers in the league. When he doesn't try, he's mediocre. So a big part of talent is effort. The second obvious answer is that performance (at least in centers) is incredibly variable. The same person can be a mediocre center one year and a top 10 center the next just based on how motivated he is. So is Dampier a top 10 player or a mediocre player? There is no way to answer that. It depends. He's not inherently good or bad. He's both. The third obvious answer is that coaching matters. If you are a coach who can get Dampier to try, you can turn a mediocre center into a top 10 center. And you, the coach, will be enormously valuable. (This is why Phil Jackson is worth millions of dollars a year.) If you are a coach who can't get Dampier to try, then you're not that useful. (You may want to insert the name Doc Rivers at this point.) ...

But one of the fascinating things about sports, it seems to me, is that when it comes the way we think about professional athletes, we're all liberals (without meaning to be, of course). We give people lots of chances. (Think Jeff George). We go to extraordinary lengths to help players reach their potential. We're forgiving of mistakes. When the big man needs help with his footwork, we ship him off to Pete Newell for the summer. We hold players accountable for their actions. But we also believe, as a matter of principle, that players need supportive environments in order to flourish. It would be nice if we were as generous and as patient with the rest of society's underachievers.

I like Malcolm--and actually, I think he was even sitting at the next table during brunch in the West Village this weekend (it was a mixed white/black guy with an afro wearing a Canada shirt, not sure how many people fit that profile in the world)--but was surprised at how funny he is. Blink had nothing like this--his series of email exchanges with Simmons, who's probably my favorite sports columnist right now, was consistently hilarious and also right-on thought provoking.

People who have no interest in sports don't understand how it's a microcasm of the human condition and, especially in America, can be daily shorthand for understanding a country (especially now that female athletics have taken off). It's harder in this day and age to see people unguarded, vulnerable, and non-ironic--but you get that in pretty much any sporting event. Not to mention talented, passionate, and heartbreakingly tragic.

Interesting reading this article on the eve of March Madness, which in my opinion is the greatest American sporting event of all. Young kids playing for their schools, cheered on by crazy fans, in a game where emotion, luck and that elusive momentum can trump talent, pedigree and expectations.

And if you're lucky, it all happens in multiple games at the same time, leading to that annual wonderful first sign of spring (along with shamrock shakes): the first CBS four-way split-screen!

Photo of Malcolm Gladwell by Brooke Williams via Gladwell.com.

Photo of UCLA fans by Brian Bahr/ Allsport via Dick Vitale on ESPN.com.