Imagine this: you are playing in the semi-finals of a tennis tournament against a lower seed. This player is someone you often have trouble with because he never seems to hit the ball cleanly. Today is no different, and you feel your game is off.
To make matters worse, the wind is blowing fairly heavily, and you don’t like the wind. After about an hour, you are on serve, but down 5-6 and 15-30. After playing a very long point where you finally work him out of position, he makes a desperate retrieve off the end of his racquet, and the ball hits the net… and trickles over. How are you feeling?
I remember reading a scenario close to this out of a sports psychology workbook while I was in college. I know exactly how I felt as I read the passage, for I had faced similar situations all too often in junior tennis. I felt like the fates were against me, and my frustration became palpable.
The workbook went on to talk about two different reactions that top athletes had to reading the passage. Most had reactions similar to mine, but there was another group who had a completely different take. First, they smiled. Then each of them said something to the effect of: “That’s the only thing that can beat me today: luck. I am overcoming everything that can be thrown at me, and we are even. When just a few things start to go my way, this match is over.”
This was a revelation to me. In a sense, it is the old glass-half-full-or-glass-half-empty argument, but at the time, it was for me a new way of looking at the world. And then I realized that the best hardball player of all time had exactly this attitude.
But first, let’s change the scene slightly. Same basic set-up except it is squash: semi-finals, close match, things tight and going against you. You play a tough point and instead of your opponent getting a lucky shot, they play a double bounce. You know it, but the referee did not see it. What do you do?
Or how about this: the match is close, your opponent has played a number of questionable bounces, and the referee has not seen them. Now you are at a crucial point. Your opponent hits a great drop shot and you make the get, but you know that it was on two bounces. You also know that the referee would have been unlikely to see it. What do you do?
In baseball, you play the calls whether they are for you or against you. Players who know they were out don’t volunteer the information to the umpire. In the long run, the theory goes, the calls likely even out. In golf, on the other hand, you are expected to call anything against yourself regardless of whether anyone saw it other than you. Even when hundreds of thousands of dollars are on the line.
A father of a ten-year-old soccer player told me about a recent conversation he was having with his son. The boy had been telling his father about his frustration at being fouled repeatedly during a game, and the father was offering some advice on what to do about it. “You have to let the other guy know that you are not going to take it. So, when the referee is not looking, you should give the other boy something to think about.”
Apparently the boy was resistant to the idea, “But Dad, that would be against the rules.” The father went on to tell the boy that breaking the rules is a part of many sports. And yet, the same father went on to tell me how much he admired Tom Kite for having called movement on a putt after he had grounded his club (he didn’t cause the movement, and no one else saw it, but he called it and lost $97,000 – the difference between first and second place).
Why the discrepancy? It may have to do with the tradition of the games. Golf has a strong tradition of self-policing that is reinforced through peer pressure. Baseball goes the other way. And what about squash? Good question.
In the heyday of hardball, there were a couple of top players who were known for playing the referee’s calls – good and bad. Other players were adopting the golf credo, and the resentment between the two groups of players often became heated. What do you do if you are calling everything against yourself but your opponent is playing the referee’s calls?
I have no idea if he read the sports psychology handbook that I did, but Mark Talbott basically decided that he was going to play the game by the golf credo and take each person’s attempt to do otherwise as a personal challenge. The story has been told by others better than I, but after Mark decided to play that way, he went on to become the most dominant player in the history of hardball.
Not a bad argument for playing fair.
