Malcolm Gladwell talks to Bill Simmons on ESPN today; I don’t normally excerpt this much, but this exchange is too good to ignore:
Simmons: …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.