malcolm gladwell on page 2
Curious Guy: Malcolm Gladwell
By Bill Simmons
Page 2
Welcome to "The Curious Guy," where I e-mail questions to somebody successful -- whether it's a baseball pitcher, an author, a creator of a TV show, another writer or whomever -- and we trade e-mails for the rest of the week. Previous editions featured Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, Mavs owner Mark Cuban, author Chuck Klosterman, "OC" creator Josh Schwartz and NBA commissioner David Stern (transcript of an in-person interview).
This week's exchange is with Malcolm Gladwell, the best-selling author of "Blink" and "Tipping Point" as well as the longtime cleanup hitter for the New Yorker. You would never think that the most successful nonfiction writer alive would double as a huge sports fan ... but he does. So I couldn't resist the chance to exchange e-mails with him intermittently over the past six weeks. Because of the length of the transcript, we're breaking it up into two parts. Here's section No. 1:
Simmons: When I started reading you back in the mid-'90s, I remember being discouraged because you made writing seem so easy -- technically, you were almost flawless, and since I knew I couldn't write that well, you were one of those visible writers who made me feel like I was going to be bartending my whole life. You never waste a word. You come up with cool arguments and angles for your pieces, then you systematically prove/dismantle those same arguments and angles, and you do it in an entertaining, thoughtful, logical way. You never allow your biases to get in the way. You're better at writing than me in every way. Basically, I hate you.
So I always thought to myself, "Well, maybe he kicks my ass as a writer, but I guarantee he's a huge dork who knows nothing about sports and couldn't talk to a girl to save his life." Then we went out for drinks in New York City in December, argued about basketball and football for three hours, and then some smoking-hot bartender started hitting on you at the end of the night. She was giving off that same vibe that the 25 girls give the "Bachelor" during the first episode when he has, like, only four or five minutes to meet everyone, so everyone has to hit on him at warp speed. Now I have decided that you need to die. It's like that "Saturday Night Live" skit when the teleprompter for the morning show stops working, chaos ensues, then Will Ferrell and David Alan Grier fight to the death because Grier's weatherman character felt threatened. Well, I feel threatened by you. And if you weren't Canadian, I would probably have you killed. But I have a soft spot for all Canadians and Australians -- I have never met anyone from either country who wasn't entertaining in some way.
Leading me to my first two questions: First, why wouldn't this be your third book? There is clearly something happening in Canada and Australia that makes their citizens more friendly and entertaining than anyone from any other country. You need to figure out the reason, and only because that book sounds like the logical successor to "Tipping Point" and "Blink." And second, how did you learn to...
A. write so well
B. care about sports other than hockey
C. appreciate pop culture
...while you were freezing your butt off in Canada as a kid? Why weren't you cranking cheesy Bryan Adams songs, choking up over the Gretzky-Jones wedding and watching "Youngblood" twice a week like everyone else your age?
Gladwell: Let's get one thing straight. At the time the bartender came up to us, it was not at all clear that I was the object of her attention, and the fact that my first words to her ("See that guy over there. He's a famous sportswriter") only muddied the waters further. For all I knew, she was a Red Sox fan wanting to trade Oil Can Boyd stories with you. (By the way, amidst all the talk about the misguided Reggie Bush lateral after the Rose Bowl, why nothing on the equally problematic romantic lateral? It just never works, even though -- in the thick of things -- you're always convinced it will.) Secondly, even if she was hitting on me, let's also be clear that this never happens. You were the Martian who came down to earth, saw Kelly Holcomb throw for 300 yards against the Bengals, and went back to your planet convinced you'd seen the future of this strange earthling game "football."
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? Once, when I was in high school, Bobby Smith -- the great natural "athlete" of my hometown -- tried a dunk during a game and a great collective cry of amazement came up over the crowd, as if Bobby had just whipped out a scalpel and was attempting an on-court appendectomy. (I should point out that Bobby came up a little short, and the ball caromed on the rim about 40 feet. The locals are still talking about it). Rural Ontario is not, exactly, a hotbed of athletic ability. I think I read somewhere that Jason Williams (the point guard) and Randy Moss went to the same high school. How is that even possible? If Brian Scalabrine went to my high school, it would now be called the Brian Scalabrine Memorial High School.
As for your (very kind) question about my writing, I'm not sure I can answer that either, except to say that I really love writing, in a totally uncomplicated way. When I was in high school, I ran track and in the beginning I thought of training as a kind of necessary evil on the way to racing. But then, the more I ran, the more I realized that what I loved was running, and it didn't much matter to me whether it came in the training form or the racing form. I feel the same way about writing. 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.
Speaking of Gretzky, my six degrees of separation with him is that I was a contemporary of his little sister Kim, in the age-class Ontario track-and-field circuits of the late '70s. And no, she never hit on me.
Simmons: Wait, I'm still reeling from the fact that you became an NBA fan just from reading back issues of "Sports Illustrated" in a Canadian library. I became a sports fan because my father was carrying me into the Boston Garden to see the eventual '74 and '76 world champions ... meanwhile, you were stuck in the middle of nowhere reading about these games after the fact. And yet, we like sports just as much. I find this amazing. Have you ever written about this? You were like the sports fan's equivalent of John Travolta in the "Boy in the Plastic Bubble." What happened when you finally got TV? Did you not leave your house for, like, three weeks? You need to start filming something for those ESPN "SportsCentury" shows where they talk about stuff that happened 25-30 years ago -- to cover every segment, you could just say, "I remember reading about that in Sports Illustrated in my local Ontario library and being totally amazed." And then they could plug that little sound bite into, like, 58 shows about anyone from 1975-81.
On Mickelson and Sports Lent, I remember watching one of those 20/20-Dateline-type pieces about him once, and he was adamant about remaining a family man, taking breaks from golf and never letting the sport consume him ... and I remember thinking to myself, "Right now Tiger is watching this and thinking, 'I got him. Cross Phil off the list. This guy will never pass me.'" The great ones aren't just great, they enjoy what they're doing -- that's why MJ's first retirement always seemed genuine to me. He had pretty much mastered his craft, and the media was wearing him down, and then his father was murdered, and for the first time in his life, basketball was looming as a chore for him. And he was smart enough to get away and recharge his batteries. I always respected him for that. Well, unless the real reason he "retired" was because of his gambling problems and an ominous "You screwed up, you're gonna walk away for 18 months, and we're gonna pretend this entire discussion never happened" ultimatum from commissioner Stern.
But I think there's a certain amount of professionalism that needs to be there, as well, because there will always be days when you don't feel like doing your job, and those are always the true tests. Halberstam has a great quote about this: "Being a professional is doing your job on the days you don't feel like doing it." I love that quote and mutter it to myself every time I don't feel like writing because my allergies are bothering me, or my back hurts, or my head hurts, or there's some random dog barking, or any of the other excuses I use when I'm procrastinating from pumping out something. So how easy is the writing process for you? Are you one of those guys who writes from different locations or does everything at one desk? Do you keep hammering out drafts and tinkering with what you wrote, or does it all come out in one felt swoop? Do you ever get writer's block? How long does it take you to finish one of your New Yorker features after everything is researched?
(And just for the record, if you say something like, "I usually write a first draft in about 5-6 hours, then go back over it the next morning, fix the typos and send it right in," I'm making a Gladwell voodoo doll and jamming 50 safety pins into it.)
Gladwell: 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.
To me, this is what Peyton Manning's problem is. He has the work habits and dedication and obsessiveness of Jordan and Tiger Woods. But he can't deal with the accompanying preparation anxiety. The Manning face is the look of someone who has just faced up to a sobering fact: I am in complete control of this offense. I prepare for games like no other quarterback in the NFL. I am in the best shape of my life. I have done everything I can to succeed -- and I'm losing. Ohmigod. I'm not that good. (Under the same circumstances, Ben Roethlisberger is thinking: maybe next time I stop after five beers). I don't know if I've ever felt sorrier for someone than I did for Manning at the end of that Pittsburgh playoff game.
So do I work hard on my writing? Well, yes. But not that hard. I'm a five- or six-draft kind of person, not a 10- or 12-draft kind of person. Plus, I write for the New Yorker, so I have an entire army of high-IQ fact checkers, and editors and copy editors working with me. To stretch the quarterback analogy here, I'm Jake Plummer: I work in an offensive system designed to make me look way better than I actually am. Speaking of which, how fascinating was the Plummer meltdown in the Pittsburgh game? People have been beating up on Plummer, saying that his true colors emerged in that game. I prefer to look at it the other way. Shanahan managed to put in place an offensive system so brilliant and so precisely tailored to his quarterback that he could make Plummer -- Plummer! -- look like a great quarterback for 17 consecutive games. That's pretty remarkable. The Plummer story is not about the frailty of individuals. It's about the redemptive power of environments. As I said, I think I'm Plummer.
Simmons: Wait, I know Jake Plummer, I watched Jake Plummer, I wagered on Jake Plummer ... you, sir, are no Jake Plummer. Shanahan's system was predicated on the Broncos' jumping out to leads, then protecting those leads in the second half with their running game and Jake's occasional play-action passes (which were always wide open because their running game was so good). The catch was that they could never fall behind in any important game; there was no way Jake could be effective under those circumstances, and only because Shanahan inadvertently undermined his confidence (by creating the "Now don't screw this up, Jake!" offense), so Plummer's meltdown against the Steelers became a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. If the Patriots had gone to halftime with a 6-0 lead, it would have happened a week earlier. But it was going to happen. You can't make it through a 20-week season without your QB carrying the team at some point. It's impossible.
I sincerely doubt that the New Yorker carries you like the Broncos carried Plummer all those weeks. Besides, you could never grow one of those lead-singer-of-the-Black-Crowes-level beards like the one Jake has been working on.
Gladwell: You're probably right. But imagine Plummer was drafted by Shanahan and came to maturity in the NFL entirely within a conservative, run-first offense. Imagine, as well, that the Broncos were every bit as successful in those years as they were in the pre-Plummer era. What would we think of Plummer? We'd say that he was an efficient, intelligent quarterback. We'd call him an adept game-manager. We'd marvel at his discipline. John Madden would go on and on about how the value of a quarterback who doesn't make mistakes has been vastly underestimated, and if Plummer occasionally imploded while playing catch-up in a big game we'd say that the one problem with a Shanahan offense is that it can't score in a hurry. We'd blame Shanahan, in other words, not Plummer. Plummer would still be Plummer. But inside of a very structured system -- one that played to his strengths -- he would seem to us like a totally different quarterback. And after five or six years or so with Shanahan, he really would be different: all vestiges of the old swashbuckling Jake the Snake would largely be obliterated.
My point is its almost impossible to know where the person ends and their environment begins, and the longer someone is in a particular environment the blurrier that line gets. More specifically, you can't make definitive judgments about the personal characteristics of people who come from structured environments. What does it mean to say that a Marine is brave? It might mean that a Marine is an inherently brave person. It may also be that the culture of the Marine Corps is so powerful, and the training so intensive, and the supporting pressure of other Marines so empowering, that even a coward would behave bravely in that context. That's what I mean when I say I'm Plummer: I'm working in a such a supportive and structured environment that I no longer know where my own abilities end and where the beneficial effects of the environment begin. Just think if you were a New Yorker writer, Bill. Suddenly your editors would be asking you to make your stories longer. You spend the summers at a writer's colony in New England, working on a historical novel based loosely on Freud's famous falling-out with Adler. And girls would hit on you in bars because they would think of you as cute in that nerdy, bookish way. But you'd still be Simmons, wouldn't you?
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, incidentally, is why I'm such a fan of yours. I think that reading you on the Red Sox is more fun than actually watching the Red Sox. And before anyone objects, I would point out that there are lots of other human experiences that fall into this category. When you hear a ghost story as a child, or watch a war movie, or read a particularly powerful novel, you don't want to be in the story. You don't even want to be in the stands when the war is going on or the ghost is scaring the bejesus out of people. What you want is to be told the story. Right?
Simmons: I can totally see your point on that. My favorite Red Sox regular season was 1986, and only because I was stuck living in Connecticut before the days of DirecTV and the Internet. We did have Channel 38 on our cable system back then, but they didn't show that many of the Red Sox games, so either I had to climb on my roof to catch a static-filled radio broadcast or wait for "SportsCenter" and Warner Wolf highlights on Channel 2. (That was a big year for me and Warner because he also announced the Drago-Creed fight in "Rocky 4.") Still, I appreciated the season more than if I had lived in Massachusetts and watched the games -- every telecast was a treat, every radio broadcast was an effort, every highlight felt like a special gift, every box score was studied and analyzed, every phone call from my dad felt like a live report. It's crazy, I remember more about that '86 season than any other season. And I missed most of it.
But I'm going to disagree with you on one thing: There isn't anything more exciting than watching a big baseball game in person. Football has all the TV timeouts, basketball has too many stops down the stretch, and hockey can't be exciting beyond a certain level because there just aren't enough people that care. (At this point, it's Arena Football on skates.) But when the stakes rise in baseball, and you're sitting there in the park waiting to see what unfolds, there's nothing else like it.
For example, the more time passes, the more I'm starting to realize that being there for Games 4 and 5 of the 2004 ALCS at Fenway can't be topped, that I peaked as a sports fan on those two nights. The Pats-Rams Super Bowl was unbelievable, obviously -- you can't top the experience of watching your football team win its first championship as a 14-point underdog -- and I was fortunate enough to attend most of the relevant games of the Larry Bird Era. But nothing compared to enduring 26 innings over 30 hours to stay alive against the Yankees in freezing weather that October. The other games were incredible events; that Game 4/5 combination was a life experience. Grueling. Nerve-racking. Emotional. Physically draining. Unbelievably rewarding. They wouldn't have won without us. We just wouldn't let them lose. And if you watch those games again, the number of twists and turns over those two nights was almost incomprehensible. I still can't believe what happened, I can't believe how each of those games unfolded, I can't believe I was lucky enough to be there with my father ... and only 36,000 other people know what I mean. That was one of the great memories of my life. I can honestly say that. And anyone who was there for Games 4 and 5 of the 2001 World Series, Game 6 of the '86 World Series, Gibson's homer in 1988, or any other baseball game in that class knows what I mean.
As for your Curry/Mickelson point about athletes failing to motivate themselves out of fear more than weakness, I would argue that Eddy Curry comes to camp overweight because he can't stop eating. But I agreed with everything else. Which leads me to a question that's definitely in your wheelhouse: Can you explain the Contract Year phenomenon for me? What is it about the mentality of professional athletes where they sign huge contracts, then they either mail in the rest of their careers, or it takes them the requisite, "All right, I just made a crapload of money, maybe I don't have to try as hard" year before they bounce back in the second year? It's gotten to the point where I specifically avoid picking players for my fantasy teams who just signed huge contracts -- it's one of my steadfast drafting rules, right up there with "never take a player who just spent more than 90 days in prison" and "never take anyone older than me." But this only seems to happen in sports.
So what's the cause? And why does this happen mostly in the NBA, and almost always with tall centers? Do they fold from the weight of the contract and the expectations that come with it? Do they lack a certain amount of professional pride? Would most Americans do this if they were guaranteed copious amounts of money regardless of the quality of their work? I mean, imagine having a friend tell you, "Good news, I just signed a big deal to stay with my law firm ... I'm going to completely mail in the next three years, this is gonna be great! Wow, did I dupe them!" Would that ever happen? I'm convinced that it's a phenomenon unique to sports. Maybe you should follow Erick Dampier, Mark Blount, Jerome James, Scot Pollard, Juwan Howard and Kwame Brown around for three months for a book called, "The Dipping Point," with special forwards from Jim McIlvaine, Calvin Booth, Shawn Bradley and Michael Stewart.
Gladwell: 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.)
In the context of sports, none of us have any problem with any of these conclusions. But now let's think about it in the context of education. An inner city high school student fails his classes and does abysmally on his SATs. No college will take him, and he's basically locked out of the best part of the job market. Why? Because we think that grades and SATs tell us something fundamental about that kid's talent and ability -- or, in this case, lack of it.
But wait: what are the lessons of the contract year? A big part of talent is effort. Maybe this kid is plenty smart enough, and he's just not trying. More to the point, how can we say he isn't smart. If talent doesn't really mean that much in the case of Dampier -- if basketball ability is incredibly variable -- why don't we think of ability in the case of this kid as being incredibly variable? And finally, what does the kid need? In the NBA, we'd say he needed Phil Jackson or Hubie Brown or maybe just a short-term contract. We'd think that we could play a really important role in getting Dampier to play harder. So why don't we think that in the case of the kid? I realize I'm being a bit of a sloppy liberal here. 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.
Simmons: You brought up Phil Jackson. ... Isn't it strange that NBA teams keep hiring and firing the same types of coaches -- either former players who end up being overmatched or college coaches who fail for a few years, then run back to college with their tails between their legs? And yet, someone like Jackson -- and Gregg Popovich, to a lesser degree -- has shown that the best NBA coaches are always the ones who:
A. trust their players and allow them to think on their own
B. know how to manage egos
C. keep things as simple as possible
D. are smart enough to avoid having head cases and bad apples around who could potentially undermine them
E. seem to connect with their players on a level beyond just player-and-coach?
Being a great NBA coach is like being a great college professor -- the best professors challenge their students intellectually, figure out ways to connect with them individually and have enough charisma that students rarely tune them out but, at the same time, those students still have to get the work done. And yet, there's something in those great professors that makes the students want to do the work. You rarely see that dynamic with NBA coaches and players, and I'm not sure why.
In Phil Jackson's case, there's no rational reason why the rest of the Lakers are playing so hard when everything revolves around Kobe, but he has most of them killing themselves on the court like worker bees, and none of them seem to mind except for Odom. Some of that is happening because of his reputation -- when you have succeeded in the past, that builds a certain level of trust from the people currently around you -- and some of that is happening because he puts players in positions where they have to worry only about doing things in their wheelhouse. At the same time, someone like Kwame Brown is going through the motions this season, which could mean that he's completely unredeemable (very possible), that he still needs to find a team more suited for his skills (also possible), that MJ inflicted enough mental damage on him in his formative years that he simply can't bounce back (far-fetched, but not implausible), or that Jackson hasn't gotten through to him yet. Anyone who can put up a 30/19 in an NBA game has talent. We know that much. And you know it's killing Jackson -- he's probably going home every night thinking, "There has to be a way I can get to this kid. ... What can I do? ... What can I do?"
Which brings me to my next question: Is it that difficult to coach an NBA team, or is this one of those professions where 95 percent of the people approach it the wrong way? For instance, let's say Larry Brown called you and said, "I want to change some of my coaching methods, how do you think I can get through to my crappy team?"
What would you tell him? Should NBA coaches be approaching their job from a more intellectual standpoint? Should they be consulting with well-known psychiatrists and sociologists searching for any tidbits that could make their jobs easier?
Gladwell: Is it just the coach? Or should we also think about the other players? The big insight in child psychology recently has been, for instance, that parents matter less in how we turn out than we think and peers matter more. That doesn't mean I don't think coaches are critical; they are. But I think we underestimate the role that teammates and peers can play. I think Larry Brown, for instance, got way too much credit in Detroit. The Pistons' success is a peer effect. The core of that team, I suspect, is just incredibly grounded and mutually supportive, and something about the combination of players that Dumars put together brings out the best in all of them. How can you play on a team with Ben Wallace and Rip Hamilton and not try hard? You'd have to be a sociopath not to be infected by their enthusiasm and work ethic. That's why I think (much as I hate to admit it) that Darko is irredeemable. If he didn't try while he was on the Pistons, he's not going to try in Orlando. He's like the kid in Jamie Escalante's class who still manages to fail calculus. Kwame Brown's problem is that the Wizards made a prediction about his basketball abilities when he was 18. When I asked an Ivy league admissions officer why the SAT is such a lousy predictor of how good a student is going to end up being, he said to me (memorably): "People take the SAT when they're 18. When you're 18, we can't even predict what you're going to be like three hours from now."
Back to your question. I love the notion of good coaches being like good college professors. But I slightly disagree with you that we know what makes someone a good college professor: The most striking thing about the teachers I loved the most, in retrospect, was how different they all were. It's like when people ask you what your romantic "type" is: If we're really honest, we have to admit that we don't have a type -- that there are all kinds of combinations of strengths, weaknesses, eccentricities, shapes and sizes that can win our hearts. Bill Cowher is obviously a great coach. And so is Phil Jackson. And so is Bobby Knight. But Cowher, Jackson and Knight really couldn't be more different, and the kinds of feelings that they inspire in their players are probably quite different too. If I were an NBA general manager, I'm not sure where I'd go to find a good coach. I'd probably hire a retread, fire him 30 games into the season and then take over and guide the team to an 0-52 conclusion.
Simmons: While we're on the subject of the Knicks, please enlighten the readers on your convoluted theory about why Isiah Thomas is a terrible GM, because he's one of my favorites.
Gladwell: Here's the real question. If I was GM of the Knicks, would I be doing a better job of managing the team than Thomas? I believe, somewhat immodestly, that the answer is yes. And I say this even though it is abundantly clear that Thomas knows several thousand times more about basketball than I do. I've never picked up a basketball. I couldn't diagram a play to save my life. I would put my level of basketball knowledge, among hard core fans, in the 25th percentile.
So why do I think I would be better? There's a famous experiment done by a wonderful psychologist at Columbia University named Dan Goldstein. He goes to a class of American college students and asks them which city they think is bigger -- San Antonio or San Diego. The students are divided. Then he goes to an equivalent class of German college students and asks the same question. This time the class votes overwhelmingly for San Diego. The right answer? San Diego. So the Germans are smarter, at least on this question, than the American kids. But that's not because they know more about American geography. It's because they know less. They've never heard of San Antonio. But they've heard of San Diego and using only that rule of thumb, they figure San Diego must be bigger. The American students know way more. They know all about San Antonio. They know it's in Texas and that Texas is booming. They know it has a pro basketball team, so it must be a pretty big market. Some of them may have been in San Antonio and taken forever to drive from one side of town to another -- and that, and a thousand other stray facts about Texas and San Antonio, have the effect of muddling their judgment and preventing them from getting the right answer.
I'd be the equivalent of the German student. I know nothing about basketball, so I'd make only the safest, most obvious decisions. I'd read John Hollinger and Chad Ford and I'd print out your mid-season NBA roundup and post it on my blackboard. I'd look at the box scores every morning, and watch Charles Barkley and Kenny Smith on TNT. Would I have made the disastrous Marbury trade? Of course not. I'd wonder why Jerry Colangelo -- who I know is a lot smarter than I am -- was so willing to part with him.
Would I have traded for Curry? Are you kidding? All I know is that Chicago is scared of his attitude and his health, and Paxson knows way more about basketball -- and about Eddy Curry -- than I do. Trade for Jalen Rose? No way. One of the few simple facts that basketball dummies like me know is that players in their early thirties are pretty much over the hill. And Jerome James? Please. I have no idea how to evaluate a player's potential. But I'd look up his stastistics on NBA.com and see that's he's been pretty dreadful his whole career, and then I'd tell his agent to take a hike.
Now would I be as good as GM as Jerry West or Joe Dumars? Of course not. But just by sitting on my hands, and being scared of looking like a fool, and taking only the safest, most conservative steps, and drafting only solid players that everybody agrees are a can't miss, I could make the Knicks a vastly better team than they are today -- as could any reasonably cautious and uninformed fan. (The big exception, of course, would be you. You would draft the starting point guard from Holy Cross, a handful of short Irish guys from the South End, and various members of Larry Bird's extended family -- and then try to package them to Milwaukee for Bobby Simmons). The point is that knowledge and the ability to make a good decision correlate only sporadically, and there are plenty of times when knowledge gets in the way of judgement. That's Thomas in a nutshell: He knows so much about basketball that he believes that he knows more than anyone else about the potential of previously undistinguished players. He thinks he can see into the true basketball soul of Jerome James. The truth is, of course, that James doesn't have a basketball soul.
By the way, while we're on this topic, let's play a real world application of this. Let's say I'm so dumb about basketball that all I know is that the best college programs in the country are Duke and UConn, and so as a GM my rule is only draft and/or trade for the first and second team players, in any given year, from those two schools. So I fire all my scouts. I disband my front office, and basically say that I cede my basketball judgment to Jim Calhoun and Mike K. What's my team? It's some combination of Elton Brand, Emeka Okafor, Ben Gordon, Luol Deng, Shane Battier, Mike Dunleavy, Rip Hamilton, Corey Maggette, Jay Williams, Caron Butler, Donyell Marshall and Grant Hill -- which is a really wonderful team. Now, of course, in the real world I couldn't get all those people, because lots of them were really high draft picks. But let's say I got Brand in a trade, after Chicago soured on him, and I was lucky enough to be in the lottery for Okafor. Maggette was a 13; Hamilton and Deng were 7s; and Butler was a 10 -- so at least some of them are doable, particularly since in off-years for Duke and UConn I can trade down and stockpile picks. Battier I wine and dine in the free agent market, because who wants to be stuck in Memphis? Ditto for Gordon, who, it seems, Chicago is thinking of moving anyway. Is that the best team in the league? No. It is better than the Knicks? Absolutely. The point is that clinging to a very simple rule of thumb here -- that doesn't require knowing much about basketball -- can leave you looking pretty smart.
Simmons: I'm just glad that you passed me on Isiah's "smug writers whose asses I want to kick" list. My biggest problem with NBA GMs (and I go crazy about this every June) is how they ignore hardcore results and get seduced by potential; it's like they out-think themselves. Chris Paul and Dwyane Wade are the ultimate examples why this league is so screwed up: Wade was incredible in the 2003 NCAA Tournament, and Paul was so talented at Wake Forest, his teammates almost couldn't handle playing with him because they weren't on his level, but scouts discounted them because they were 2-3 inches shorter than the prototypical heights for their respective positions. Wade ended up falling to fifth (three spots behind Darko) and Paul to fourth (two spots behind Marvin Williams, one behind Deron Williams).
In retrospect, two things were amazing about this:
1. In the past three decades alone, guys like Ben Wallace, Dave Cowens, Paul Silas, Tim Hardaway, Dennis Rodman, Charles Barkley, Adrian Dantley, John Stockton, Isiah and others have proven that you should never, ever, ever, ever, EVER use somebody's height as a determining factor for whether you should draft someone. If you're good, you're good. And yet, three teams passed on Paul (four if you include Portland) when he was the most talented, NBA-ready product with the best chance to succeed.
2. Using your college analogy, someone drafting Darko over Carmelo/Wade or Williams over Paul would be like Yale accepting a kid with 1500 SATs, a 3.1 GPA at a subpar public school and no extracurricular activites whatsoever, over a kid with 1350 SATs and a 3.9 GPA at a competitive private school who captained three sports teams, served as class president and ran the school newspaper. How can you justify taking the first kid over the second kid? There's no way.
And the same goes with the NBA draft. I think it's more fun for GMs to hit a home run with a risky pick over a safe pick. For instance, Portland could have taken Paul and traded Sebastian Telfair, since Telfair could best be described as "someone with the potential to be as good as Chris Paul." Instead, they traded DOWN three spots, then rolled the dice with another high schooler (Martell Webster). But Blazers GM John Nash didn't care about the risks -- if that Webster-Telfair backcourt emerges into something special, he becomes the Red Auerbach of this decade, right? So he swung for the fences. And within the next two years, he will be unemployed.
Here's the ironic thing: Fans complain about this mentality, then we pull the same crap in fantasy leagues, where guys with potential always go higher than proven guys. Just look at last year's draft: It was much more seductive to take someone like Nate Burleson in the third round over someone like Hines Ward; you know what you're getting with Ward, but Burleson was replacing Moss in Minnesota, and there was a decent chance that he could have exploded for 1500 yards and 15 TDs. That made him more appealing. So what happened? Burleson stunk and Ward had another typically good season. (And by the way, I was one of the idiots who took Burleson over Ward.) Which brings me to my next question: What do you think of the fantasy sports boom? Do you participate in any leagues? Did you ever think that fans would care just as much about their fake teams as their real teams? Are you amused by the whole thing? Delighted? Confused? Disgusted?
Gladwell: You're right. It is profoundly weird that GMs take such incredible chances with their draft picks. The biggest complaint or observation that is made of executives of large organizations is that they tend to be overly conservative when it comes to high-stakes decisions like that. General Motors would never draft Darko. The effect of working for a bureaucratic organization is to enforce a level of accountability in decision making, and the need for accountability generally biases decisions in an conservative direction. Are professional sports franchises not bureaucratic enough, then? Perhaps. I think both of us are of the mind that GMs would do better if they simply played it safer, so maybe what's needed in the NBA and the NFL is the introduction of more traditional corporate organizational structure. That's why I'm such a fan of the "Moneyball" generation of baseball GMs: It's not so much that their analytical tools are brilliant ways of predicting baseball success (and I have my doubts, sometimes), it's simply that they have an analytical tool. And when it comes to personnel evaluation, any tool is better than no tool, especially if your last name is Thomas.
Speaking of Thomases, I loved your recent Atrocious GM Summit column, although I think that you flatter Isiah Thomas far too much by suggesting that he is merely one of a number of atrocious GMs. The truth is that Rob Babcock and Billy King are Einstein next to him. The mess he is creating right now in New York will be studied by business school students 50 years from now alongside Enron and pets.com. But wait, is it enough to say that GMs behave this way because it's more fun? An economist would say that people pursue high-risk strategies when they are protected against the consequences of failure. The technical term for this is "moral hazard": When the federal government agreed to guarantee the safety of deposits in savings and loans, the savings and loan industry in the 1980's went crazy and made tens of billions of dollars in ridiculous loans. Their thinking was: If we score, we score big. If we lose, the government bails us out. That's the moral hazard of insurance. Don't general managers have the same kind of moral hazard problem? If you hit a home run, you're a genius. If you screw up, the dumb owner you worked for prior to the dumb owner you work for now will always give you another chance. So why not just always swing for the fences? It's the old boys club in the front offices that causes the problem. Somebody out there is going to give Thomas and Babcock another chance, and so long as that's true there's no incentive for any GM to behave better.
Fantasy leagues? I used to do rotisserie baseball for a few years, and loved it -- until I had my baseball meltdown and gave up on the sport. I worried, though, that it began to erode my sense of team. I mean, the great appeal of watching sports is that you have a commitment to a team, and the players become secondary players in that love affair. I fell for the Buffalo Bills when they had Jim Kelly and Thurman Thomas and went to four Super Bowls, and I'm still in love with the Buffalo Bills even though not a single vestige of that original team remains; even though, in fact, the very thing that attracted me to the Bills in the first place -- that thrilling offense -- has completely disappeared. Sports team loyalty is really an extraordinary act of unconditional love. Suppose, for instance, that I love BMWs and have loved them all my life. There is a meaningful connection between the three series car I might be driving now and the 2002 I first drove 25 years ago -- not just in the feel of the cars and the engineering and the look, but also, I'm quite sure some of the same people helped to build both cars.
Sports teams demand the same loyalty from us. But where's the continuity? The uniforms change. The stadiums change. The owners and players and coaches and styles of play change. All that's constant is some ineffable and fragile sense of the team as a meaningful psychological entity. Now fantasy leagues come along and allow us to junk that concept as well. So I worry. Of course, it's conceivable I've over-thought this. I've been known to do that in the past.
Simmons: I love your "moral hazard" theory and have always believed that teams should hold general managers more accountable for their mistakes. What if Orlando's John Weisbrod wanted to trade Tracy McGrady to Houston two summers ago, and Orlando's owner told him, "All right, I'll sign off on the deal, but if you're wrong, and we win fewer games than we did the previous year, and the media and the fans are killing us for making the trade next summer, you have to give me back your entire 2004-05 salary"? Would Weisbrod still pull the trigger? Or would he try a little harder to work it out with T-Mac? And when you think about it, it's really too bad that we didn't have professional sports in its current form back in the 1700s and 1800s -- instead of getting fired, not only would failed GMs have been routinely beheaded or hung, but it's entirely possible that Shaq and Kobe would have reenacted the Hamilton-Burr duel.
(And while we're on the subject, I think my favorite random sports theory of yours is the one about how NFL quarterbacks should be trained the same way Gavin DeBecker trains the bodyguards for his security agency -- by putting them through these terrifying exercises where he fires bullets at them or turns angry pit bulls on them, then continuing to do them until their heart rate drops. You made the point that, if you were running an NFL team, you would put your QBs through DeBecker's program and live-fire exercises at Quantico, and you would even have them work with a trauma team in South Central L.A. I loved this idea for two reasons: First, it makes total sense as a training tool, especially for someone like Peyton Manning, who practically craps himself during any big game. And second, the thought of guys like Gus Frerotte or Tommy Maddox dodging pit bulls and gunfire ... at the very least, even if it doesn't work for football purposes, it would make a helluva show for the NFL Network.)
All right, a few more quick questions and then I'll let you go back to reading your Sports Illustrated collection from the 1970s. First, what was your baseball meltdown?
Gladwell: It came after the Blue Jays (my team) won the second of their World Series titles. Economic reality hit, and they basically stopped trying to compete at the top level, and I wondered to myself: Why do I care so much about a sport where some teams have $200 million to spend and some teams have $20 million to spend? I know, I know -- as Rob Neyer and others point out -- that there is no necessary correlation between payroll and success. It is possible, as "Moneyball" reminds us, to win with less by being smarter. But the point is not that if you have more money than someone else you automatically win more games. The point is that if you have more money that someone else you're playing a different game than they are. Wal-mart is not competing against mom-and-pop corner stores. They're in a different business. And it isn't fun, at the end of the day, to watch a mom-and-pop compete against Wal-mart. It's painful and pointless.
I loved "Moneyball." I thought it was one of the best books of the past decade. I think it should be taught in psychology classes and business schools as a treatise on the subtle effects of bias on expert decision-making. But do you think that Billy Beane, for a moment, wouldn't trade his situation with Theo Epstein or Cashman? To me, the hard cap in football -- and, to a lesser extent, the soft cap in basketball -- are what makes those sports so interesting. It's what makes them sports. Contests where one player has significantly more resources than another are not sports. They are marketplaces. To root for the Yankees or the Red Sox is the functional equivalent of rooting for Microsoft or General Electric. No thanks.
Gladwell: Where to start? You get there. You can't get a cab. Last time I waited 30 minutes in line at the airport. You get to your hotel, you wait another 45 minutes to check in. It's 120 degrees outside, and inside it's 45 degrees and all you can think about is there's about to be a epidemic of Legionnaires Disease. The food is terrible. Everyone loses money -- everyone. The amount of plastic surgery is terrifying. There are large packs of enormous, glassy-eyed people in stretch pants, pulling the levers on slot machines. (By the way, greatest and most under-appreciated gambling story ever: William Bennett, he of one best seller after another lecturing Americans on moral values and virtue and the bankruptcy of our culture, turns out not only to be a degenerate gambler, but a gambler who only played the slots. The slots! Had he been a great poker player -- even a decent poker player -- I'm in his corner. But the slots?) I digress. Back to Vegas: Why would I want to see Celine Dion, ever (and I'm Canadian)? Or white mutant tigers? Or the Village People? Or Tony Orlando and Dawn? I have more fun walking to the laundromat from my apartment in New York than I do in Vegas.
Simmons: And the final question ... in one of my mailbags from last year, I wrote about when athletes reach "I'm Keith Hernandez" status (like the "Seinfeld" episode where he decided to make a move on Eliane simply because he was Keith Hernandez) and their confidence swells to impossible heights. Like when MJ kept making 3s in Game 1 of the 1992 Finals, then shrugged to the announcers, that was his Keith Hernandez moment. So given that you have written two monster best sellers, and you're writing for the most respected magazine in the country, haven't you entered Keith Hernandez territory here? For instance, have you ever pitched a ridiculous story idea with limited appeal to the New Yorker, just to see if you could get away with it? Do you walk into the offices and tell them, "You know what? I'm writing 20,000 words about Eddy Curry this week and you guys are gonna LIKE IT!" And by the way, I don't care what the answer is, as long as you don't switch to writing about rocks for the next 20 years like John McPhee did.
Gladwell: Wait, is anyone still reading at this point? This has gone on longer than one of Rickey Henderson's at-bats. All I can say is that if I asked David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, if I could do 20,000 words on Eddy Curry he'd probably say yes. But not because there's anything special about me. David is a huge sports fan. For an intellectual, he's got a great low-post game, serious length, and the kind of upside you just don't see in fortyish Pulitzer Prize winners. How long do you think before Isiah Thomas signs him?
By Bill Simmons
Page 2
Welcome to "The Curious Guy," where I e-mail questions to somebody successful -- whether it's a baseball pitcher, an author, a creator of a TV show, another writer or whomever -- and we trade e-mails for the rest of the week. Previous editions featured Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, Mavs owner Mark Cuban, author Chuck Klosterman, "OC" creator Josh Schwartz and NBA commissioner David Stern (transcript of an in-person interview).
This week's exchange is with Malcolm Gladwell, the best-selling author of "Blink" and "Tipping Point" as well as the longtime cleanup hitter for the New Yorker. You would never think that the most successful nonfiction writer alive would double as a huge sports fan ... but he does. So I couldn't resist the chance to exchange e-mails with him intermittently over the past six weeks. Because of the length of the transcript, we're breaking it up into two parts. Here's section No. 1:
Simmons: When I started reading you back in the mid-'90s, I remember being discouraged because you made writing seem so easy -- technically, you were almost flawless, and since I knew I couldn't write that well, you were one of those visible writers who made me feel like I was going to be bartending my whole life. You never waste a word. You come up with cool arguments and angles for your pieces, then you systematically prove/dismantle those same arguments and angles, and you do it in an entertaining, thoughtful, logical way. You never allow your biases to get in the way. You're better at writing than me in every way. Basically, I hate you.
So I always thought to myself, "Well, maybe he kicks my ass as a writer, but I guarantee he's a huge dork who knows nothing about sports and couldn't talk to a girl to save his life." Then we went out for drinks in New York City in December, argued about basketball and football for three hours, and then some smoking-hot bartender started hitting on you at the end of the night. She was giving off that same vibe that the 25 girls give the "Bachelor" during the first episode when he has, like, only four or five minutes to meet everyone, so everyone has to hit on him at warp speed. Now I have decided that you need to die. It's like that "Saturday Night Live" skit when the teleprompter for the morning show stops working, chaos ensues, then Will Ferrell and David Alan Grier fight to the death because Grier's weatherman character felt threatened. Well, I feel threatened by you. And if you weren't Canadian, I would probably have you killed. But I have a soft spot for all Canadians and Australians -- I have never met anyone from either country who wasn't entertaining in some way.
Leading me to my first two questions: First, why wouldn't this be your third book? There is clearly something happening in Canada and Australia that makes their citizens more friendly and entertaining than anyone from any other country. You need to figure out the reason, and only because that book sounds like the logical successor to "Tipping Point" and "Blink." And second, how did you learn to...
A. write so well
B. care about sports other than hockey
C. appreciate pop culture
...while you were freezing your butt off in Canada as a kid? Why weren't you cranking cheesy Bryan Adams songs, choking up over the Gretzky-Jones wedding and watching "Youngblood" twice a week like everyone else your age?
Gladwell: Let's get one thing straight. At the time the bartender came up to us, it was not at all clear that I was the object of her attention, and the fact that my first words to her ("See that guy over there. He's a famous sportswriter") only muddied the waters further. For all I knew, she was a Red Sox fan wanting to trade Oil Can Boyd stories with you. (By the way, amidst all the talk about the misguided Reggie Bush lateral after the Rose Bowl, why nothing on the equally problematic romantic lateral? It just never works, even though -- in the thick of things -- you're always convinced it will.) Secondly, even if she was hitting on me, let's also be clear that this never happens. You were the Martian who came down to earth, saw Kelly Holcomb throw for 300 yards against the Bengals, and went back to your planet convinced you'd seen the future of this strange earthling game "football."
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? Once, when I was in high school, Bobby Smith -- the great natural "athlete" of my hometown -- tried a dunk during a game and a great collective cry of amazement came up over the crowd, as if Bobby had just whipped out a scalpel and was attempting an on-court appendectomy. (I should point out that Bobby came up a little short, and the ball caromed on the rim about 40 feet. The locals are still talking about it). Rural Ontario is not, exactly, a hotbed of athletic ability. I think I read somewhere that Jason Williams (the point guard) and Randy Moss went to the same high school. How is that even possible? If Brian Scalabrine went to my high school, it would now be called the Brian Scalabrine Memorial High School.
As for your (very kind) question about my writing, I'm not sure I can answer that either, except to say that I really love writing, in a totally uncomplicated way. When I was in high school, I ran track and in the beginning I thought of training as a kind of necessary evil on the way to racing. But then, the more I ran, the more I realized that what I loved was running, and it didn't much matter to me whether it came in the training form or the racing form. I feel the same way about writing. 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.
Speaking of Gretzky, my six degrees of separation with him is that I was a contemporary of his little sister Kim, in the age-class Ontario track-and-field circuits of the late '70s. And no, she never hit on me.
Simmons: Wait, I'm still reeling from the fact that you became an NBA fan just from reading back issues of "Sports Illustrated" in a Canadian library. I became a sports fan because my father was carrying me into the Boston Garden to see the eventual '74 and '76 world champions ... meanwhile, you were stuck in the middle of nowhere reading about these games after the fact. And yet, we like sports just as much. I find this amazing. Have you ever written about this? You were like the sports fan's equivalent of John Travolta in the "Boy in the Plastic Bubble." What happened when you finally got TV? Did you not leave your house for, like, three weeks? You need to start filming something for those ESPN "SportsCentury" shows where they talk about stuff that happened 25-30 years ago -- to cover every segment, you could just say, "I remember reading about that in Sports Illustrated in my local Ontario library and being totally amazed." And then they could plug that little sound bite into, like, 58 shows about anyone from 1975-81.
On Mickelson and Sports Lent, I remember watching one of those 20/20-Dateline-type pieces about him once, and he was adamant about remaining a family man, taking breaks from golf and never letting the sport consume him ... and I remember thinking to myself, "Right now Tiger is watching this and thinking, 'I got him. Cross Phil off the list. This guy will never pass me.'" The great ones aren't just great, they enjoy what they're doing -- that's why MJ's first retirement always seemed genuine to me. He had pretty much mastered his craft, and the media was wearing him down, and then his father was murdered, and for the first time in his life, basketball was looming as a chore for him. And he was smart enough to get away and recharge his batteries. I always respected him for that. Well, unless the real reason he "retired" was because of his gambling problems and an ominous "You screwed up, you're gonna walk away for 18 months, and we're gonna pretend this entire discussion never happened" ultimatum from commissioner Stern.
But I think there's a certain amount of professionalism that needs to be there, as well, because there will always be days when you don't feel like doing your job, and those are always the true tests. Halberstam has a great quote about this: "Being a professional is doing your job on the days you don't feel like doing it." I love that quote and mutter it to myself every time I don't feel like writing because my allergies are bothering me, or my back hurts, or my head hurts, or there's some random dog barking, or any of the other excuses I use when I'm procrastinating from pumping out something. So how easy is the writing process for you? Are you one of those guys who writes from different locations or does everything at one desk? Do you keep hammering out drafts and tinkering with what you wrote, or does it all come out in one felt swoop? Do you ever get writer's block? How long does it take you to finish one of your New Yorker features after everything is researched?
(And just for the record, if you say something like, "I usually write a first draft in about 5-6 hours, then go back over it the next morning, fix the typos and send it right in," I'm making a Gladwell voodoo doll and jamming 50 safety pins into it.)
Gladwell: 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.
To me, this is what Peyton Manning's problem is. He has the work habits and dedication and obsessiveness of Jordan and Tiger Woods. But he can't deal with the accompanying preparation anxiety. The Manning face is the look of someone who has just faced up to a sobering fact: I am in complete control of this offense. I prepare for games like no other quarterback in the NFL. I am in the best shape of my life. I have done everything I can to succeed -- and I'm losing. Ohmigod. I'm not that good. (Under the same circumstances, Ben Roethlisberger is thinking: maybe next time I stop after five beers). I don't know if I've ever felt sorrier for someone than I did for Manning at the end of that Pittsburgh playoff game.
So do I work hard on my writing? Well, yes. But not that hard. I'm a five- or six-draft kind of person, not a 10- or 12-draft kind of person. Plus, I write for the New Yorker, so I have an entire army of high-IQ fact checkers, and editors and copy editors working with me. To stretch the quarterback analogy here, I'm Jake Plummer: I work in an offensive system designed to make me look way better than I actually am. Speaking of which, how fascinating was the Plummer meltdown in the Pittsburgh game? People have been beating up on Plummer, saying that his true colors emerged in that game. I prefer to look at it the other way. Shanahan managed to put in place an offensive system so brilliant and so precisely tailored to his quarterback that he could make Plummer -- Plummer! -- look like a great quarterback for 17 consecutive games. That's pretty remarkable. The Plummer story is not about the frailty of individuals. It's about the redemptive power of environments. As I said, I think I'm Plummer.
Simmons: Wait, I know Jake Plummer, I watched Jake Plummer, I wagered on Jake Plummer ... you, sir, are no Jake Plummer. Shanahan's system was predicated on the Broncos' jumping out to leads, then protecting those leads in the second half with their running game and Jake's occasional play-action passes (which were always wide open because their running game was so good). The catch was that they could never fall behind in any important game; there was no way Jake could be effective under those circumstances, and only because Shanahan inadvertently undermined his confidence (by creating the "Now don't screw this up, Jake!" offense), so Plummer's meltdown against the Steelers became a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. If the Patriots had gone to halftime with a 6-0 lead, it would have happened a week earlier. But it was going to happen. You can't make it through a 20-week season without your QB carrying the team at some point. It's impossible.
I sincerely doubt that the New Yorker carries you like the Broncos carried Plummer all those weeks. Besides, you could never grow one of those lead-singer-of-the-Black-Crowes-level beards like the one Jake has been working on.
Gladwell: You're probably right. But imagine Plummer was drafted by Shanahan and came to maturity in the NFL entirely within a conservative, run-first offense. Imagine, as well, that the Broncos were every bit as successful in those years as they were in the pre-Plummer era. What would we think of Plummer? We'd say that he was an efficient, intelligent quarterback. We'd call him an adept game-manager. We'd marvel at his discipline. John Madden would go on and on about how the value of a quarterback who doesn't make mistakes has been vastly underestimated, and if Plummer occasionally imploded while playing catch-up in a big game we'd say that the one problem with a Shanahan offense is that it can't score in a hurry. We'd blame Shanahan, in other words, not Plummer. Plummer would still be Plummer. But inside of a very structured system -- one that played to his strengths -- he would seem to us like a totally different quarterback. And after five or six years or so with Shanahan, he really would be different: all vestiges of the old swashbuckling Jake the Snake would largely be obliterated.
My point is its almost impossible to know where the person ends and their environment begins, and the longer someone is in a particular environment the blurrier that line gets. More specifically, you can't make definitive judgments about the personal characteristics of people who come from structured environments. What does it mean to say that a Marine is brave? It might mean that a Marine is an inherently brave person. It may also be that the culture of the Marine Corps is so powerful, and the training so intensive, and the supporting pressure of other Marines so empowering, that even a coward would behave bravely in that context. That's what I mean when I say I'm Plummer: I'm working in a such a supportive and structured environment that I no longer know where my own abilities end and where the beneficial effects of the environment begin. Just think if you were a New Yorker writer, Bill. Suddenly your editors would be asking you to make your stories longer. You spend the summers at a writer's colony in New England, working on a historical novel based loosely on Freud's famous falling-out with Adler. And girls would hit on you in bars because they would think of you as cute in that nerdy, bookish way. But you'd still be Simmons, wouldn't you?
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, incidentally, is why I'm such a fan of yours. I think that reading you on the Red Sox is more fun than actually watching the Red Sox. And before anyone objects, I would point out that there are lots of other human experiences that fall into this category. When you hear a ghost story as a child, or watch a war movie, or read a particularly powerful novel, you don't want to be in the story. You don't even want to be in the stands when the war is going on or the ghost is scaring the bejesus out of people. What you want is to be told the story. Right?
Simmons: I can totally see your point on that. My favorite Red Sox regular season was 1986, and only because I was stuck living in Connecticut before the days of DirecTV and the Internet. We did have Channel 38 on our cable system back then, but they didn't show that many of the Red Sox games, so either I had to climb on my roof to catch a static-filled radio broadcast or wait for "SportsCenter" and Warner Wolf highlights on Channel 2. (That was a big year for me and Warner because he also announced the Drago-Creed fight in "Rocky 4.") Still, I appreciated the season more than if I had lived in Massachusetts and watched the games -- every telecast was a treat, every radio broadcast was an effort, every highlight felt like a special gift, every box score was studied and analyzed, every phone call from my dad felt like a live report. It's crazy, I remember more about that '86 season than any other season. And I missed most of it.
But I'm going to disagree with you on one thing: There isn't anything more exciting than watching a big baseball game in person. Football has all the TV timeouts, basketball has too many stops down the stretch, and hockey can't be exciting beyond a certain level because there just aren't enough people that care. (At this point, it's Arena Football on skates.) But when the stakes rise in baseball, and you're sitting there in the park waiting to see what unfolds, there's nothing else like it.
For example, the more time passes, the more I'm starting to realize that being there for Games 4 and 5 of the 2004 ALCS at Fenway can't be topped, that I peaked as a sports fan on those two nights. The Pats-Rams Super Bowl was unbelievable, obviously -- you can't top the experience of watching your football team win its first championship as a 14-point underdog -- and I was fortunate enough to attend most of the relevant games of the Larry Bird Era. But nothing compared to enduring 26 innings over 30 hours to stay alive against the Yankees in freezing weather that October. The other games were incredible events; that Game 4/5 combination was a life experience. Grueling. Nerve-racking. Emotional. Physically draining. Unbelievably rewarding. They wouldn't have won without us. We just wouldn't let them lose. And if you watch those games again, the number of twists and turns over those two nights was almost incomprehensible. I still can't believe what happened, I can't believe how each of those games unfolded, I can't believe I was lucky enough to be there with my father ... and only 36,000 other people know what I mean. That was one of the great memories of my life. I can honestly say that. And anyone who was there for Games 4 and 5 of the 2001 World Series, Game 6 of the '86 World Series, Gibson's homer in 1988, or any other baseball game in that class knows what I mean.
As for your Curry/Mickelson point about athletes failing to motivate themselves out of fear more than weakness, I would argue that Eddy Curry comes to camp overweight because he can't stop eating. But I agreed with everything else. Which leads me to a question that's definitely in your wheelhouse: Can you explain the Contract Year phenomenon for me? What is it about the mentality of professional athletes where they sign huge contracts, then they either mail in the rest of their careers, or it takes them the requisite, "All right, I just made a crapload of money, maybe I don't have to try as hard" year before they bounce back in the second year? It's gotten to the point where I specifically avoid picking players for my fantasy teams who just signed huge contracts -- it's one of my steadfast drafting rules, right up there with "never take a player who just spent more than 90 days in prison" and "never take anyone older than me." But this only seems to happen in sports.
So what's the cause? And why does this happen mostly in the NBA, and almost always with tall centers? Do they fold from the weight of the contract and the expectations that come with it? Do they lack a certain amount of professional pride? Would most Americans do this if they were guaranteed copious amounts of money regardless of the quality of their work? I mean, imagine having a friend tell you, "Good news, I just signed a big deal to stay with my law firm ... I'm going to completely mail in the next three years, this is gonna be great! Wow, did I dupe them!" Would that ever happen? I'm convinced that it's a phenomenon unique to sports. Maybe you should follow Erick Dampier, Mark Blount, Jerome James, Scot Pollard, Juwan Howard and Kwame Brown around for three months for a book called, "The Dipping Point," with special forwards from Jim McIlvaine, Calvin Booth, Shawn Bradley and Michael Stewart.
Gladwell: 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.)
In the context of sports, none of us have any problem with any of these conclusions. But now let's think about it in the context of education. An inner city high school student fails his classes and does abysmally on his SATs. No college will take him, and he's basically locked out of the best part of the job market. Why? Because we think that grades and SATs tell us something fundamental about that kid's talent and ability -- or, in this case, lack of it.
But wait: what are the lessons of the contract year? A big part of talent is effort. Maybe this kid is plenty smart enough, and he's just not trying. More to the point, how can we say he isn't smart. If talent doesn't really mean that much in the case of Dampier -- if basketball ability is incredibly variable -- why don't we think of ability in the case of this kid as being incredibly variable? And finally, what does the kid need? In the NBA, we'd say he needed Phil Jackson or Hubie Brown or maybe just a short-term contract. We'd think that we could play a really important role in getting Dampier to play harder. So why don't we think that in the case of the kid? I realize I'm being a bit of a sloppy liberal here. 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.
Simmons: You brought up Phil Jackson. ... Isn't it strange that NBA teams keep hiring and firing the same types of coaches -- either former players who end up being overmatched or college coaches who fail for a few years, then run back to college with their tails between their legs? And yet, someone like Jackson -- and Gregg Popovich, to a lesser degree -- has shown that the best NBA coaches are always the ones who:
A. trust their players and allow them to think on their own
B. know how to manage egos
C. keep things as simple as possible
D. are smart enough to avoid having head cases and bad apples around who could potentially undermine them
E. seem to connect with their players on a level beyond just player-and-coach?
Being a great NBA coach is like being a great college professor -- the best professors challenge their students intellectually, figure out ways to connect with them individually and have enough charisma that students rarely tune them out but, at the same time, those students still have to get the work done. And yet, there's something in those great professors that makes the students want to do the work. You rarely see that dynamic with NBA coaches and players, and I'm not sure why.
In Phil Jackson's case, there's no rational reason why the rest of the Lakers are playing so hard when everything revolves around Kobe, but he has most of them killing themselves on the court like worker bees, and none of them seem to mind except for Odom. Some of that is happening because of his reputation -- when you have succeeded in the past, that builds a certain level of trust from the people currently around you -- and some of that is happening because he puts players in positions where they have to worry only about doing things in their wheelhouse. At the same time, someone like Kwame Brown is going through the motions this season, which could mean that he's completely unredeemable (very possible), that he still needs to find a team more suited for his skills (also possible), that MJ inflicted enough mental damage on him in his formative years that he simply can't bounce back (far-fetched, but not implausible), or that Jackson hasn't gotten through to him yet. Anyone who can put up a 30/19 in an NBA game has talent. We know that much. And you know it's killing Jackson -- he's probably going home every night thinking, "There has to be a way I can get to this kid. ... What can I do? ... What can I do?"
Which brings me to my next question: Is it that difficult to coach an NBA team, or is this one of those professions where 95 percent of the people approach it the wrong way? For instance, let's say Larry Brown called you and said, "I want to change some of my coaching methods, how do you think I can get through to my crappy team?"
What would you tell him? Should NBA coaches be approaching their job from a more intellectual standpoint? Should they be consulting with well-known psychiatrists and sociologists searching for any tidbits that could make their jobs easier?
Gladwell: Is it just the coach? Or should we also think about the other players? The big insight in child psychology recently has been, for instance, that parents matter less in how we turn out than we think and peers matter more. That doesn't mean I don't think coaches are critical; they are. But I think we underestimate the role that teammates and peers can play. I think Larry Brown, for instance, got way too much credit in Detroit. The Pistons' success is a peer effect. The core of that team, I suspect, is just incredibly grounded and mutually supportive, and something about the combination of players that Dumars put together brings out the best in all of them. How can you play on a team with Ben Wallace and Rip Hamilton and not try hard? You'd have to be a sociopath not to be infected by their enthusiasm and work ethic. That's why I think (much as I hate to admit it) that Darko is irredeemable. If he didn't try while he was on the Pistons, he's not going to try in Orlando. He's like the kid in Jamie Escalante's class who still manages to fail calculus. Kwame Brown's problem is that the Wizards made a prediction about his basketball abilities when he was 18. When I asked an Ivy league admissions officer why the SAT is such a lousy predictor of how good a student is going to end up being, he said to me (memorably): "People take the SAT when they're 18. When you're 18, we can't even predict what you're going to be like three hours from now."
Back to your question. I love the notion of good coaches being like good college professors. But I slightly disagree with you that we know what makes someone a good college professor: The most striking thing about the teachers I loved the most, in retrospect, was how different they all were. It's like when people ask you what your romantic "type" is: If we're really honest, we have to admit that we don't have a type -- that there are all kinds of combinations of strengths, weaknesses, eccentricities, shapes and sizes that can win our hearts. Bill Cowher is obviously a great coach. And so is Phil Jackson. And so is Bobby Knight. But Cowher, Jackson and Knight really couldn't be more different, and the kinds of feelings that they inspire in their players are probably quite different too. If I were an NBA general manager, I'm not sure where I'd go to find a good coach. I'd probably hire a retread, fire him 30 games into the season and then take over and guide the team to an 0-52 conclusion.
Simmons: While we're on the subject of the Knicks, please enlighten the readers on your convoluted theory about why Isiah Thomas is a terrible GM, because he's one of my favorites.
Gladwell: Here's the real question. If I was GM of the Knicks, would I be doing a better job of managing the team than Thomas? I believe, somewhat immodestly, that the answer is yes. And I say this even though it is abundantly clear that Thomas knows several thousand times more about basketball than I do. I've never picked up a basketball. I couldn't diagram a play to save my life. I would put my level of basketball knowledge, among hard core fans, in the 25th percentile.
So why do I think I would be better? There's a famous experiment done by a wonderful psychologist at Columbia University named Dan Goldstein. He goes to a class of American college students and asks them which city they think is bigger -- San Antonio or San Diego. The students are divided. Then he goes to an equivalent class of German college students and asks the same question. This time the class votes overwhelmingly for San Diego. The right answer? San Diego. So the Germans are smarter, at least on this question, than the American kids. But that's not because they know more about American geography. It's because they know less. They've never heard of San Antonio. But they've heard of San Diego and using only that rule of thumb, they figure San Diego must be bigger. The American students know way more. They know all about San Antonio. They know it's in Texas and that Texas is booming. They know it has a pro basketball team, so it must be a pretty big market. Some of them may have been in San Antonio and taken forever to drive from one side of town to another -- and that, and a thousand other stray facts about Texas and San Antonio, have the effect of muddling their judgment and preventing them from getting the right answer.
I'd be the equivalent of the German student. I know nothing about basketball, so I'd make only the safest, most obvious decisions. I'd read John Hollinger and Chad Ford and I'd print out your mid-season NBA roundup and post it on my blackboard. I'd look at the box scores every morning, and watch Charles Barkley and Kenny Smith on TNT. Would I have made the disastrous Marbury trade? Of course not. I'd wonder why Jerry Colangelo -- who I know is a lot smarter than I am -- was so willing to part with him.
Would I have traded for Curry? Are you kidding? All I know is that Chicago is scared of his attitude and his health, and Paxson knows way more about basketball -- and about Eddy Curry -- than I do. Trade for Jalen Rose? No way. One of the few simple facts that basketball dummies like me know is that players in their early thirties are pretty much over the hill. And Jerome James? Please. I have no idea how to evaluate a player's potential. But I'd look up his stastistics on NBA.com and see that's he's been pretty dreadful his whole career, and then I'd tell his agent to take a hike.
Now would I be as good as GM as Jerry West or Joe Dumars? Of course not. But just by sitting on my hands, and being scared of looking like a fool, and taking only the safest, most conservative steps, and drafting only solid players that everybody agrees are a can't miss, I could make the Knicks a vastly better team than they are today -- as could any reasonably cautious and uninformed fan. (The big exception, of course, would be you. You would draft the starting point guard from Holy Cross, a handful of short Irish guys from the South End, and various members of Larry Bird's extended family -- and then try to package them to Milwaukee for Bobby Simmons). The point is that knowledge and the ability to make a good decision correlate only sporadically, and there are plenty of times when knowledge gets in the way of judgement. That's Thomas in a nutshell: He knows so much about basketball that he believes that he knows more than anyone else about the potential of previously undistinguished players. He thinks he can see into the true basketball soul of Jerome James. The truth is, of course, that James doesn't have a basketball soul.
By the way, while we're on this topic, let's play a real world application of this. Let's say I'm so dumb about basketball that all I know is that the best college programs in the country are Duke and UConn, and so as a GM my rule is only draft and/or trade for the first and second team players, in any given year, from those two schools. So I fire all my scouts. I disband my front office, and basically say that I cede my basketball judgment to Jim Calhoun and Mike K. What's my team? It's some combination of Elton Brand, Emeka Okafor, Ben Gordon, Luol Deng, Shane Battier, Mike Dunleavy, Rip Hamilton, Corey Maggette, Jay Williams, Caron Butler, Donyell Marshall and Grant Hill -- which is a really wonderful team. Now, of course, in the real world I couldn't get all those people, because lots of them were really high draft picks. But let's say I got Brand in a trade, after Chicago soured on him, and I was lucky enough to be in the lottery for Okafor. Maggette was a 13; Hamilton and Deng were 7s; and Butler was a 10 -- so at least some of them are doable, particularly since in off-years for Duke and UConn I can trade down and stockpile picks. Battier I wine and dine in the free agent market, because who wants to be stuck in Memphis? Ditto for Gordon, who, it seems, Chicago is thinking of moving anyway. Is that the best team in the league? No. It is better than the Knicks? Absolutely. The point is that clinging to a very simple rule of thumb here -- that doesn't require knowing much about basketball -- can leave you looking pretty smart.
Simmons: I'm just glad that you passed me on Isiah's "smug writers whose asses I want to kick" list. My biggest problem with NBA GMs (and I go crazy about this every June) is how they ignore hardcore results and get seduced by potential; it's like they out-think themselves. Chris Paul and Dwyane Wade are the ultimate examples why this league is so screwed up: Wade was incredible in the 2003 NCAA Tournament, and Paul was so talented at Wake Forest, his teammates almost couldn't handle playing with him because they weren't on his level, but scouts discounted them because they were 2-3 inches shorter than the prototypical heights for their respective positions. Wade ended up falling to fifth (three spots behind Darko) and Paul to fourth (two spots behind Marvin Williams, one behind Deron Williams).
In retrospect, two things were amazing about this:
1. In the past three decades alone, guys like Ben Wallace, Dave Cowens, Paul Silas, Tim Hardaway, Dennis Rodman, Charles Barkley, Adrian Dantley, John Stockton, Isiah and others have proven that you should never, ever, ever, ever, EVER use somebody's height as a determining factor for whether you should draft someone. If you're good, you're good. And yet, three teams passed on Paul (four if you include Portland) when he was the most talented, NBA-ready product with the best chance to succeed.
2. Using your college analogy, someone drafting Darko over Carmelo/Wade or Williams over Paul would be like Yale accepting a kid with 1500 SATs, a 3.1 GPA at a subpar public school and no extracurricular activites whatsoever, over a kid with 1350 SATs and a 3.9 GPA at a competitive private school who captained three sports teams, served as class president and ran the school newspaper. How can you justify taking the first kid over the second kid? There's no way.
And the same goes with the NBA draft. I think it's more fun for GMs to hit a home run with a risky pick over a safe pick. For instance, Portland could have taken Paul and traded Sebastian Telfair, since Telfair could best be described as "someone with the potential to be as good as Chris Paul." Instead, they traded DOWN three spots, then rolled the dice with another high schooler (Martell Webster). But Blazers GM John Nash didn't care about the risks -- if that Webster-Telfair backcourt emerges into something special, he becomes the Red Auerbach of this decade, right? So he swung for the fences. And within the next two years, he will be unemployed.
Here's the ironic thing: Fans complain about this mentality, then we pull the same crap in fantasy leagues, where guys with potential always go higher than proven guys. Just look at last year's draft: It was much more seductive to take someone like Nate Burleson in the third round over someone like Hines Ward; you know what you're getting with Ward, but Burleson was replacing Moss in Minnesota, and there was a decent chance that he could have exploded for 1500 yards and 15 TDs. That made him more appealing. So what happened? Burleson stunk and Ward had another typically good season. (And by the way, I was one of the idiots who took Burleson over Ward.) Which brings me to my next question: What do you think of the fantasy sports boom? Do you participate in any leagues? Did you ever think that fans would care just as much about their fake teams as their real teams? Are you amused by the whole thing? Delighted? Confused? Disgusted?
Gladwell: You're right. It is profoundly weird that GMs take such incredible chances with their draft picks. The biggest complaint or observation that is made of executives of large organizations is that they tend to be overly conservative when it comes to high-stakes decisions like that. General Motors would never draft Darko. The effect of working for a bureaucratic organization is to enforce a level of accountability in decision making, and the need for accountability generally biases decisions in an conservative direction. Are professional sports franchises not bureaucratic enough, then? Perhaps. I think both of us are of the mind that GMs would do better if they simply played it safer, so maybe what's needed in the NBA and the NFL is the introduction of more traditional corporate organizational structure. That's why I'm such a fan of the "Moneyball" generation of baseball GMs: It's not so much that their analytical tools are brilliant ways of predicting baseball success (and I have my doubts, sometimes), it's simply that they have an analytical tool. And when it comes to personnel evaluation, any tool is better than no tool, especially if your last name is Thomas.
Speaking of Thomases, I loved your recent Atrocious GM Summit column, although I think that you flatter Isiah Thomas far too much by suggesting that he is merely one of a number of atrocious GMs. The truth is that Rob Babcock and Billy King are Einstein next to him. The mess he is creating right now in New York will be studied by business school students 50 years from now alongside Enron and pets.com. But wait, is it enough to say that GMs behave this way because it's more fun? An economist would say that people pursue high-risk strategies when they are protected against the consequences of failure. The technical term for this is "moral hazard": When the federal government agreed to guarantee the safety of deposits in savings and loans, the savings and loan industry in the 1980's went crazy and made tens of billions of dollars in ridiculous loans. Their thinking was: If we score, we score big. If we lose, the government bails us out. That's the moral hazard of insurance. Don't general managers have the same kind of moral hazard problem? If you hit a home run, you're a genius. If you screw up, the dumb owner you worked for prior to the dumb owner you work for now will always give you another chance. So why not just always swing for the fences? It's the old boys club in the front offices that causes the problem. Somebody out there is going to give Thomas and Babcock another chance, and so long as that's true there's no incentive for any GM to behave better.
Fantasy leagues? I used to do rotisserie baseball for a few years, and loved it -- until I had my baseball meltdown and gave up on the sport. I worried, though, that it began to erode my sense of team. I mean, the great appeal of watching sports is that you have a commitment to a team, and the players become secondary players in that love affair. I fell for the Buffalo Bills when they had Jim Kelly and Thurman Thomas and went to four Super Bowls, and I'm still in love with the Buffalo Bills even though not a single vestige of that original team remains; even though, in fact, the very thing that attracted me to the Bills in the first place -- that thrilling offense -- has completely disappeared. Sports team loyalty is really an extraordinary act of unconditional love. Suppose, for instance, that I love BMWs and have loved them all my life. There is a meaningful connection between the three series car I might be driving now and the 2002 I first drove 25 years ago -- not just in the feel of the cars and the engineering and the look, but also, I'm quite sure some of the same people helped to build both cars.
Sports teams demand the same loyalty from us. But where's the continuity? The uniforms change. The stadiums change. The owners and players and coaches and styles of play change. All that's constant is some ineffable and fragile sense of the team as a meaningful psychological entity. Now fantasy leagues come along and allow us to junk that concept as well. So I worry. Of course, it's conceivable I've over-thought this. I've been known to do that in the past.
Simmons: I love your "moral hazard" theory and have always believed that teams should hold general managers more accountable for their mistakes. What if Orlando's John Weisbrod wanted to trade Tracy McGrady to Houston two summers ago, and Orlando's owner told him, "All right, I'll sign off on the deal, but if you're wrong, and we win fewer games than we did the previous year, and the media and the fans are killing us for making the trade next summer, you have to give me back your entire 2004-05 salary"? Would Weisbrod still pull the trigger? Or would he try a little harder to work it out with T-Mac? And when you think about it, it's really too bad that we didn't have professional sports in its current form back in the 1700s and 1800s -- instead of getting fired, not only would failed GMs have been routinely beheaded or hung, but it's entirely possible that Shaq and Kobe would have reenacted the Hamilton-Burr duel.
(And while we're on the subject, I think my favorite random sports theory of yours is the one about how NFL quarterbacks should be trained the same way Gavin DeBecker trains the bodyguards for his security agency -- by putting them through these terrifying exercises where he fires bullets at them or turns angry pit bulls on them, then continuing to do them until their heart rate drops. You made the point that, if you were running an NFL team, you would put your QBs through DeBecker's program and live-fire exercises at Quantico, and you would even have them work with a trauma team in South Central L.A. I loved this idea for two reasons: First, it makes total sense as a training tool, especially for someone like Peyton Manning, who practically craps himself during any big game. And second, the thought of guys like Gus Frerotte or Tommy Maddox dodging pit bulls and gunfire ... at the very least, even if it doesn't work for football purposes, it would make a helluva show for the NFL Network.)
All right, a few more quick questions and then I'll let you go back to reading your Sports Illustrated collection from the 1970s. First, what was your baseball meltdown?
Gladwell: It came after the Blue Jays (my team) won the second of their World Series titles. Economic reality hit, and they basically stopped trying to compete at the top level, and I wondered to myself: Why do I care so much about a sport where some teams have $200 million to spend and some teams have $20 million to spend? I know, I know -- as Rob Neyer and others point out -- that there is no necessary correlation between payroll and success. It is possible, as "Moneyball" reminds us, to win with less by being smarter. But the point is not that if you have more money than someone else you automatically win more games. The point is that if you have more money that someone else you're playing a different game than they are. Wal-mart is not competing against mom-and-pop corner stores. They're in a different business. And it isn't fun, at the end of the day, to watch a mom-and-pop compete against Wal-mart. It's painful and pointless.
I loved "Moneyball." I thought it was one of the best books of the past decade. I think it should be taught in psychology classes and business schools as a treatise on the subtle effects of bias on expert decision-making. But do you think that Billy Beane, for a moment, wouldn't trade his situation with Theo Epstein or Cashman? To me, the hard cap in football -- and, to a lesser extent, the soft cap in basketball -- are what makes those sports so interesting. It's what makes them sports. Contests where one player has significantly more resources than another are not sports. They are marketplaces. To root for the Yankees or the Red Sox is the functional equivalent of rooting for Microsoft or General Electric. No thanks.
Gladwell: Where to start? You get there. You can't get a cab. Last time I waited 30 minutes in line at the airport. You get to your hotel, you wait another 45 minutes to check in. It's 120 degrees outside, and inside it's 45 degrees and all you can think about is there's about to be a epidemic of Legionnaires Disease. The food is terrible. Everyone loses money -- everyone. The amount of plastic surgery is terrifying. There are large packs of enormous, glassy-eyed people in stretch pants, pulling the levers on slot machines. (By the way, greatest and most under-appreciated gambling story ever: William Bennett, he of one best seller after another lecturing Americans on moral values and virtue and the bankruptcy of our culture, turns out not only to be a degenerate gambler, but a gambler who only played the slots. The slots! Had he been a great poker player -- even a decent poker player -- I'm in his corner. But the slots?) I digress. Back to Vegas: Why would I want to see Celine Dion, ever (and I'm Canadian)? Or white mutant tigers? Or the Village People? Or Tony Orlando and Dawn? I have more fun walking to the laundromat from my apartment in New York than I do in Vegas.
Simmons: And the final question ... in one of my mailbags from last year, I wrote about when athletes reach "I'm Keith Hernandez" status (like the "Seinfeld" episode where he decided to make a move on Eliane simply because he was Keith Hernandez) and their confidence swells to impossible heights. Like when MJ kept making 3s in Game 1 of the 1992 Finals, then shrugged to the announcers, that was his Keith Hernandez moment. So given that you have written two monster best sellers, and you're writing for the most respected magazine in the country, haven't you entered Keith Hernandez territory here? For instance, have you ever pitched a ridiculous story idea with limited appeal to the New Yorker, just to see if you could get away with it? Do you walk into the offices and tell them, "You know what? I'm writing 20,000 words about Eddy Curry this week and you guys are gonna LIKE IT!" And by the way, I don't care what the answer is, as long as you don't switch to writing about rocks for the next 20 years like John McPhee did.
Gladwell: Wait, is anyone still reading at this point? This has gone on longer than one of Rickey Henderson's at-bats. All I can say is that if I asked David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, if I could do 20,000 words on Eddy Curry he'd probably say yes. But not because there's anything special about me. David is a huge sports fan. For an intellectual, he's got a great low-post game, serious length, and the kind of upside you just don't see in fortyish Pulitzer Prize winners. How long do you think before Isiah Thomas signs him?
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