The previous post was mostly about the potentially ill effects that a coach's erroneous belief systems often have on athletes. This one takes us back to the athletes themselves and how critically important the athlete's own beliefs are. Central to this is the natural tendency of animals, including and even especially humans, to accept pecking orders. As I write this I find myself working very hard to come up with any redeeming usefulness for pecking orders in athletics. I almost had my mind around one (something to do with orderliness and anarchy, I think) but then it vanished and I was left with the conviction with which I began, which is that the acceptance of a pecking order by athletes is nothing but a voluntary acceptance of limitations. A willful shackling of oneself to mediocrity. You might as well tie a small anchor to your stern and drag it while racing.
We've all observed it before: an athlete says something like "Oh, I could never beat her - she's amazing." I once heard one of the most fluid, graceful scullers I've ever seen say "Nobody's going to beat Michelle Guerette." There were some unspoken qualifiers in the statement; she clearly meant no one in the United States this year and so forth, but even so, I bristled at the idea that this athlete had not only accepted her own place in the pecking order, but she had consigned EVERYONE to a place below Michelle Guerette. And if you really believe that racing ought to be an absolutely pure expression of the highest abilities of everyone involved, when you get down to it there's an insult to Michelle implicit in the intended compliment to her greatness. To place her at the top of a pecking order and assert that she cannot be defeated is to accept defeat before the race is even rowed. I can't speak for Michelle or anyone else about whom someone has said "no one's going to beat her" but I can assert that I'd much rather race people who are truly gunning for me with the belief that they can, in fact, get there faster than I can than to race people who have already decided that outcome in advance. Having overheard one of the rowers from our first novice eight say something like "I hope Miami catches a crab in the final," Will Scoggins saw pre-race anxiety for what it was and put it this way: "Bullshit. You want a hollow victory? You've got to want your opponent to row the best race of his life and still whip his ass." We can debate the idea of whether racing is really about whipping anybody's ass, but it hits the core idea of what a race really ought to be. Wanting anything but the best effort from those who oppose you is a subtle form of cowardice - accepting one's place in the pecking order while simultaneously desiring to have others see you as higher up in it than you actually are. Scoggins had another particularly memorable way of describing the most noble way of racing. It was "Just make the boat go fast all the way down the course, and when you're sure you're across the finish line, look up and see how you did."
I knew a guy in high school named John (okay, so everybody did - but not this one). We were both on the wrestling team. We had a 157 pound state champion, several conference champions, and quite a few kids who were just generally tough, hard-nosed wrestlers. John had no such reputation. As a freshman, he was a little doughy and never made much impression on anybody. He was a warm body who could weigh in and take forfeits when the other team didn't have an athlete of the appropriate weight class or get pinned if they did. He had come to wrestling late - most of the guys had wrestled in middle school or even elementary school. John wasn't supposed to be good. He was supposed to accept his place among the warm bodies in the pecking order. John showed up as a sophomore about five pounds lighter and fit as hell and started giving the guys in the lighter weight classes on the team all they could handle. He wound up being our 128 pound starter and winning quite a few matches, and in the process, guys went from saying things like "what's going on? How did he lose to JOHN?" to being delighted that a young Atlas had picked up the earth and juggled with it for a little while. And that's the mindset that we're talking about.
Maybe that's were I've been headed from the start of this post - to the idea that acceptance of one's supposed place in a pecking order is basically ignoble, and the will to defy, confound, or destroy the pecking order is not only admirable and praiseworthy but beneficial to the system. Nothing produces complacency more reliably than the security of knowing that everyone thinks you can't be defeated. Find the better angels of your nature. Race with the curiosity of wondering how fast you can go rather than the certainty that you're not as fast as that "amazing" sculler you've deified. And if you meet the Buddha on the race course, kill him.
No comments:
Post a Comment