So on my drive home from Ithaca, I was listening to a Bill Simmons podcast with Dan LeBatard as a guest. I've been a huge fan of Simmons since his days as the Boston Sports Guy, and while I only know LeBatard from some of his work guest hosting PTI, I really like what I've heard from him so far.
What got me thinking about selfishness was their discussion of how the sports media seems to create the same nice storylines to describe the winning team. For example, Simmons points out in a great column about Kobe the belief that in 2009 suddenly Kobe "gets it" (where "it" has something to do with teamwork, passing, or camaraderie), when in fact his performance in the finals was statistically the same in 2009 as it was in 2008. What primarily changed is that his teammates shot 40% from behind the three point line in 2009 and thus his team won. Kobe didn't change, or at least his numbers didn't change, but the storyline has changed, all because of the scoreboard.
LeBatard points out that the year Allen Iverson's 76ers made it to the finals, casual fans were convinced by pundits that Iverson had learned how to be a better teammate, when in reality his team outlasted a weak eastern conference to make the finals. Iverson hadn't changed, his team just won, and that changed his storyline.
This got me thinking about The Wages of Wins, three economists take on sports. They concluded that Kevin Garnett has been the league MVP for many of his years in the league, in that he has had the same extremely high statistical performance for many season. Until he got traded to Boston, he was labeled as a guy who can't get it done in the playoffs, when statistically, he played with well below average teammates. The year his Timberwolves team made the conference finals, Sam Cassell and Latrell Sprewell played extremely well, and Garnett's numbers were at essentially the same excellent level they had been every other season.
I'm also reminded of a classic conundrum in sports about how much quality, high-character role-players matter. If your team wins, it's easy to point to the "good chemistry" provided by your basketball team's 10th man who plays hard in practice, or by your baseball team's prankster utility infielder. But if your team loses, suddenly the lack of size on your bench or the .225 average from your backups matters a lot more. Do we create storylines about chemistry because it gives us something to talk about? For that matter, how much does chemistry really matter? The Mets won the world series in 1986, and the Yankees win with Reggie Jackson. Those teams had no chemistry. The Spurs in the 2000s had great chemistry, but they also had great players. I don't know if chemistry matters, but I suspect it matters a lot less than sportswriters say that it does. Good chemistry comes from the scoreboard. Chemistry is revisionist.
So what does this have to do with selfishness? Well, LeBatard brought up another good point: whatever job you work at, are you happy if you are underpaid and underappreciated but the company does well? I teach at Colgate; how likely am I to take less money so that the school can hire extra personnel and do better? I'll tell you this: If Swarthmore offers me a 25% pay raise to do the same job, I promise I will shed at least one tear as the emerald green campus disappears in my rearview mirror, but I'm moving back to Philly. Well, I'd have to see if the move made sense for me and for my family, and maybe I'd conclude the pulling the (hypothetical future) kids out of school and having my (future) wife switch jobs isn't worth the extra money. Fine. But throw in enough extra money, and I wouldn't even slow the J-Train down on my way south. It would still be a calculation of what's best for me.
How exactly is it that athletes shouldn't take these factors into account? How on earth was the city of Boston so mad when Johnny Damon took more money to play for the Yankees? They offerd to pay him a lot more money, both teams were good, and in NY he can do the talk show circuit and host SNL. How can fans criticize him for making a perfectly rational decision? The same fans that have no problem giving running backs their walking papers with their 30th birthday cake?
Anyway, how does this all tie back into selfishness? Well, fans don't want athletes to be selfish about money or personal success. We want our athletes to respect winning and not be greedy and play the game the right way. But sports fans secretly love and respect selfishness. Even if the don't know it.
Why? Well, what makes great athletes great? Selfishness. Athletes focus on only one thing in their life, usually to the exclusion of everything else. If they don't do this, we complain that they lack the passion for the game. They we engage in some kind of psycho-babble, then go back to surfing the web at work.
For many great athletes, their whole life is their career. Do you think Tiger woods gets up at 3am to change his children's diapers? Do you think Brett Favre does his own laundry? Do you think LeBron James picks up his suits at the dry cleaners and then heads to the bank and the post-office on the way home from practice? I remember hearing a (possibly apocryphal) story that when Eisenhower first got out of office, he picked up a phone and told the dial-tone "Granite-two-four" because he hadn't made a phone call since 1951. People doing high-pressure, highly-sought after jobs don't have time for minute details.
And as fans, we love this about our athletes. Sure, in our own lives, we may not like obsessive, narrow-minded, hyper-competitive people who only think or talk about work... But we love the results when it comes to athletes. And most casual sports fans don't really care if athletes are good people or even if they are interesting people. We want them to sacrifice everything else in their lives for our enjoyment, just like we want from our artists and actors and entertainers.
I read a really interesting article from The Economist about autism that had one image I can't get out of my head: Autistic children will watch things like spinning coins or dripping water for hours on end, and where I would get bored quicker than a freshman who thinks that they're going to learn how to use excel in computer science 101, autists instead become experts on dripping water or spinning coins or counting toothpicks, and learn to spot subtle differences. They become connoisseurs of these seemingly identical events.
Now, I'm not claiming that athletes are autistic, but they certainly devote quite a lot of effort getting really good at one thing, typically to the exclusion of nearly everything else. With athletes we call this passion; with our neighbors we call this OCD and we try to run into the house before they can engage us in coversation.
Seriously, how well-balanced is Tom Brady really? Don't get me wrong, I admit without a trace of shame that I have a man-crush on Brady, and I've even been lobbying my girlfriend to put him on her "list" (from Friends). But I'm afraid that if I met him it would crush my illusions, because I'll bet he's pretty boring. Now, his profession is fascinating, and I'd gush like the middle-school boy who gets to help the hot substitute teacher wash the chalkboard after math class if Brady watched some game film with me... But come on, if he worked those kind of obsessive, meticulous hours at almost any other job, there's no way he'd be the coolest dude in the room. What if Tom Brady were a customer service rep, or an actuary, or a paralegal, and all he talked about was work? His friends would be all, "Tom, goddamit, nobody wants to hear about new innovations for modeling life expectancy!" But because his job is awesome and we want the Patriots to win another superbowl and put those Steelers fans back in their place, we are willing to excuse what could be called selfish, obsessive behavior.
(Plus if I met Brady, all the cultural reference points I've got that help me be the life of the nerd party would be useless---wow, you're in magazines and married to a supermodel and have three superbowl rings? Yeah, I just scored a silver medal on the lighthouse level of Left 4 Dead, so you know, I know a think or two about excellence as well. And there's no way that he can code. If Brady can hack Java, I'll cheer for the Cowboys. And don't tell me he took a Basic course in high school or something---I played football in high school but that doesn't make me a jock.)
The point is that sports fans like excellence, which comes from selfish, hyper-specialized athletes, but we want to read certain stories about chemistry, and players "getting it", and playing the game the right way, so sportswriters feed us stories about the winning team that probably aren't true in the least.
I'd like to read a book about the place of selfishness in sports. I'll bet a lot of top athletes are pretty obsessive about their craft, and I'd like to read more about this aspect of sports. I'm sure there are some biographies I need to look up.
In a related note, a lot of top scientists are incredibly narrowly-focused people as well, but that's a blog post for a different time.
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