Tag: sports

Demystify This!

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Everything you believe in is some trumped up idea developed to foster your illusions. Don’t believe me, I’ll prove it. Give me something you believe in. Anything. Big or small. What defines you? What drives your passion? What makes you tick? Great, now back up and give me some room, because the shrapnel flies when I start in on dispassionate observations. 

Led Zeppelin was one of the greatest band of all time right? Yeah, they’re frauds, and I was onto them at a very young age. I knew there was no way one guy could come up with all that brilliant music. I know, the other guys came up with some of the music, but most of the credits for writing the compositions go to Jimmy Page. I knew, even at a very young age, that there was no way one man could come up with that much brilliance. I was a dumb kid at the time, so I thought he sold his soul to the devil. I was eventually vindicated when we all found out how much material he stole. They say he only stole some songs and some riffs. I read a report that suggested that of the first four albums, he/they stole ten songs by some measure, debatably, arguably, and whatever qualifiers we need to use to avoid incriminating lawsuits. I say we don’t know the full extent of his/their theft. I say they’re damned thieves who probably stole more than we’ll ever know. Look it up, there are lawsuits all over the place for infringements, unauthorized borrowing, and outright theft. I was so excited when I read that. It was vindication. All you silly idiots who believed that they were geniuses were wrong. Look at you! Are your crying? I enjoy the taste of tears. I don’t know if disappointment makes them extra salty, or if I just enjoy the taste of victory. Do you mind if I lick them off your face?  

Who’s your favorite actor? You know what, don’t answer that. We tell our people our favorite actor with pride. We talk about the best movie from their catalog, and we say that it was their movie. Have you ever seen the list of credits listed in your average movie? There are at least hundreds of names? How many people were responsible for that movie? What percentage of that movie’s success was due to the actor you love? They’re vehicles for the lines, the action, and the drama, but how much time do they sit in vehicles before they’re called upon to do a scene? They don’t call it the-hurry-up-and-wait industry for nothing.

The production crew hates calling the lead actor to the set, so they spend most of their day readying the scene for them. They hire stand-ins to get the shot right, and they work with the screenwriter to make sure the lines won’t cause the actor to have a hissy fit. The actor steps from their trailer, says the lines a couple times, and they all move on. Most actors hate walking onto an ill-prepared set. They don’t want to stand around to make sure the lighting is right, and the scene is perfect, so the production crew stresses each other out to make sure everything is perfect for the entrance of the actor. The actor finally enters and delivers the line, as if it’s on the fly. It’s not my intention to suggest that convincing a group of people that you’re another person is easy, or that I could do it. I’m talking about the audiences reaction to it. I’m talking about how we immerse ourselves in movies to such a degree that we believe they said the line they read. We do that. We all do it. We say, “You know it’s like Jack Nicholson says …” He said it, sure, but he read it. He memorized the line, but he didn’t think it up. A screenwriter thought up that line. Now, Nicholson probably said it with more flair and charisma than the screenwriter could’ve, but how many takes does the production crew have to sit through before he got the line just right? They’re frauds perpetuating a myth that we love.

My favorite recording artist was “hardly there” in the production of my favorite album. “What?” It was largely a creation in the minds of a producer, the guitarist, an expert mixer, and a number of other credited players who helped my favorite artist produce the product I’ve loved for decades. I learned an important lesson the day I read that: Ignorance is bliss. If we want to continue to love an artist, particularly an actor or a musician, we shouldn’t read websites or watch documentaries that dive deep into our favorite artistic creations from them. 

How about Stephen King? Do you read him? Yeah, he stole the idea for one of his most popular books Misery from an Erik Keene’s dead aunt? Our initial inclination is that Erik Keene was a delusional whack job looking for a way to harass King and his family, and while that might be true with Keene, how many struggling writers submit rejected ideas to publishers only to have the core idea of that rejected manuscript show up in that publisher’s favorite author’s library? How many authors simply run out of ideas? How many writer’s blocks have ended with a stolen manuscript? How many big time authors were so frustrated by their writer’s block that they threatened to retire? How many desperate publishers, bent on keeping a big name, help them come up with ideas? Where did they get those ideas? Have they ever sorted through the slush pile of rejected compositions and come up with an idea for your favorite author. I’m saying this happens all the time, I’m not, but has it ever happened? Does it happen more often than we know?  

How about Walter Payton? If you love football, you know he’s declared one of the greatest running backs in NFL history. Have you ever seen the guys from the 70’s and 80’s trying to chase him down and tackle him? They’re so little. With the size, strength, and speed of the NFL today, Walter Payton would probably be a third-down, situational back, nothing more. You might think that’s idiotic, but this is what we do when we attempt to tear down everything you believe in. We take your favorite bands, your favorite authors, and your favorite athletes, and we tear them apart. Nugget by nugget, brick by brick. This is our way of saying we don’t believe in you anymore, and we’ve broken free of any shackles we once had by believing in you. We have nothing to rebel against anymore, all of our parents are dead, so rebelling against you and everything you believe in gives us gas to dispel that feeling of individuality we never strove for in our teens in the manner most kids did.

There’s poetry in baseball, and baseball is poetry, punctuated by plays like “The Catch”. Willie Mays made “The Catch”. It was poetic right? Wrong. I’ve watched that catch so many times over the years, trying to figure out the big deal. I know it happened in the World Series and all that, but people say it was one of the greatest catches of all time. Have you seen that catch? I thought it was barehanded for whatever reason. It wasn’t. It was just a catch, and a catch we probably see a couple of times a year in major league baseball. Hell, I think I did it once in softball. It wasn’t a special catch by any means. 

You might not care about Willie Mays, but do you care about the Nebraska Cornhuskers? Yeah, they’re frauds too. You probably still celebrate the years they won three national championships in four years, but I say the only reason they won them is that they had such an easy schedule. Admit it, they were frauds. Everything you believe in is fraudulent.  

Demystify the past? What are you talking about demystify the past? I’m talking truth here brotha. I have no skin in this game. I want to know the truth? Why don’t you? You and the collective ‘we’ have trumped up these otherwise marginal people and accomplishments, and it sends a tingle up my leg when I’m able to pop a hole in your delusions. You’re all so ridiculous. You believe in things, and it makes you happy. Your passions breed a sense of fulfillment, even when what you know they’re false. That’s why I feel the need to correct the record. I don’t allow myself to believe in false things. Why do you? You can try to turn this back on me, but what are you going to squash? I don’t believe in anything. I have no passions, so good luck. It makes me feel smarter to know more than you and all of your silly idiot friends who believe in things and develop passions.  

The past wasn’t as great as you romantic types thought. It’s a narrative for the romantics. You’re not a romantic? Look at all the silly people you believe in. Why do we believe in people? Why do we trump up their rather routine accomplishments, because they’re about us. We’ve found a way to live vicariously through their accomplishments to idealize who we wish we could be. We treat diminishment of their accomplishments as a personal insult. 

What’s the flip side of the coin? You think that by diminishing others’ accomplishments, I hope to relieve myself of any disappointments I have in my life? All right, I’ll admit that my life didn’t turn out the way I thought it would but who’s has? I have some accomplishments in life, but they pale in comparison to these false gods you worship. They’re silly people. You’re silly, and we’re all quite boring, so we assign poetic majesty to the little things and these little people did who supposedly did big things, so we have something to believe in. 

I see what you’re doing though. You’re trying to find a super-secret part of me to analyze. You’re trying to find my motivation, so you can dismiss my findings. Go for it. Smarter people than you have tried. They were wrong, and you’ll be wrong. This is not about me. It’s about you. I’m a blank slate, an empty vessel, like the actors you adore. Have you ever heard the theory that the more devoid of a core personality an actor is, the better they are at filling that void with a fictional personality? That’s me. I have no motivation, except to prove you, and your fellow romantics, wrong. I find that so satisfying that it quenches a need. I don’t get passionate about silly things. Why do you? Why do you believe in anything? I seek to question that which you believe in, until it leads to an ultimate deconstruction, and I hope to help you ultimately reach a higher sphere of consciousness where nothing is real. It’s about you. It’s not about me. I have no skin in this game. I’m a dispassionate observer who believes that you romantics who seek poetry and majesty in the past are just plain silly. In the battle between mind and heart, most of us know that our passions will not withstand scrutiny. I dismantle these beliefs, because I think intelligence dispels belief. 

A Review of the Netflix Series: Home Game

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Most of us love sports, yet we never bother to ask why. The wide variety of answers for why we love sports might never be apparent to us, until we meet someone who doesn’t. We might not be able to learn why we love sports by watching the Netflix series Home Game, and it won’t curb our appetite for specific sports, but it will show the uncomplicated love some people have for their sport, and it might remind us why we love ours.

Home Game’s documentary about Florence, Italy’s sport of Calico Storico will not satisfy anyone who misses American football or rugby. The documentary about the Kyrgystan sport of Kok Boru will not satisfy anyone who misses basketball or polo, and a horseracing fanatic is probably not going to experience satisfaction watching riders pushing water buffalo through a flooded rice field, in Bali’s sport Makepung Lampit. What we will see are the staples of sport. We’ll see the passion, determination, and the temerity it takes to conquer an opponent. We also see an element of sports that we don’t talk about enough, the arduous, sometimes excruciating training it can take to become a champion. Our initial response might be to view some of the games depicted in these episodes as silly, particularly the Makepung Lampit sport that involves throwing a dead goat in a large, cement vase, but from that vantage point, all sports seem silly. In many first world countries, ten guys try to force a ball through a hoop in basketball. In the third world country of Kyrgyzstan, four guys try to force a dead goat into a large, cement vase. What’s the difference? Would the Kyrgyz or the Balinese people view the idea that first world sports involve crossing lines and putting balls and pucks in goals of various sizes silly too? What would they think of the sport that involves an athlete putting a ball in a can from a great distance, in as few attempts as possible? The point is that we can view all sports as silly on a micro level, but on a macro level they but a vehicle for displaying discipline, temerity, athletic prowess.

We can be sure the documentarians of Home Game did not choose the relatively obscure sports they did to help those sports achieve more popularity, and I doubt the sports will gain a greater following. It’s more likely that they chose the most obscure sports they did to examine the psychology of sports through an alternative lens. When we hear/read interviews of our favorite top tier athletes, they often use boilerplate language that becomes so common we don’t remember much of what they said five minutes after the interview is complete. It might have something to do with the fact that almost all of these episodes deal with sports in different countries, but they appear to give fresh insight into the art of competition, and the desire to win. English is not the native tongue of most of the competitors in the interviews, but we realize that the desire, the will, and the temerity it takes to win and eventually become a champion are a universal language. Most of the episodes require subtitles, and while that might turn some viewers off, it’s equivalent to watching sports with the volume off.

In one episode, we meet a champion named Guyga. Guyga is the champion of West Kinashasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s version of WWF that they call Catch Fetiche. We see kids and teenagers triumphantly run alongside Guyga. We see him train, we hear him talk about his training, and we witness his drive to be the best. After meeting Guyga, the documentarians introduce us to other Catch Fetiche wrestlers, and they engage in similar rhetoric. It’s similar, but for reasons we can’t put our finger on, it’s different. There was something there, and we missed it, so we rewind back to the introduction of Guyga. We see the difference in his walk, this time, and we know we’ve seen that stride before. It’s Mike Tyson entering the ring in the late 80’s, it’s Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan in the 90’s. It’s a champion at his peak. It’s in his shoulders when he walks, and in his stride. When we see Guyga’s face again, we see, without knowing anything else about the sport of Catch Fetiche that Guyga is its champion. In a later shot, Guyga flexes before the camera, and his musculature is impressive, but his face is what we find captivating. He doesn’t appear as thrilled to be on camera as the rest of us are, but he doesn’t shy away from it either. His far off stare suggests he’s seen battle many times before, and he wins far more often than he loses. The Congolese who run with him make a big fuss about him, and again, he doesn’t appear to need their adulation, but he doesn’t shy away from it either. He’s accustomed to it. He’s accustomed to glory. His stride, and his demeanor, reminds us of the quarterback of our state champion high school football team, the Heisman Trophy winner in college, and the MVP in the NFL. We recognize that for all the tangibles we attain from athletic pursuit, an intangible quality reveals itself in the walk and the face of a champion.

If Guyga decided to retire from the Congolese, voodoo version of the WWF, Catch Fetiche, and he moved to America, and worked in a cubicle next to ours, we’d know there was something different about him. “What’s up with you?” we’d say. “You’re the new guy, yet you walk around the office like a rooster in a henhouse.”

“I used to be a champion in the Democratic Republic of Congo,” he’d say. “Have you ever heard of Catch Fetiche? No one around here has, I used to be the champion of it.”

“I knew it,” we’d say. “I knew there was something different about you.”

In the roller derby episode from Austin, Texas, we see some subtle contrasts between Guyga and the Mad Maxican. After witnessing the glory of an individual champion who has it dripping from every pore, we listen to the roller derby team members speak, and we play a game called spot the champion. We might know more about roller derby than we do Catch Fetiche, but we still know very little. After witnessing Guyga, we think we can spot the look of a champion from a mile away. We think we see it on the face of a key player, who calls herself Ninja Please. The meeker Mad Maxican doesn’t quite have the confident/arrogant demeanor about her that Ninja Please did. Yet, when they take the floor, the Mad Maxican thoroughly outperforms Ninja Please. Why were so wrong about the Mad Maxican? Does it have something to do with the elevated expectations we have when someone says all the right things, as the Ninja Please character did? Does it have something to do with the idea that women, in general, are more humble, and harder to read in this sense, or does it have something to do with the difference between a team player and one who achieves individual glory? Is there an unsung player on the Mad Maxican’s team, who makes her success possible? Is this unsung hero equivalent to an all-star guard on the line of an NFL team, without whom the stars on the team couldn’t achieve half the success they do? We don’t know, because the documentarians don’t delve into those particulars. Perhaps, the Mad Maxican has a quiet confidence about her that doesn’t shine through in interviews. Whatever the case is, we see the contrast of individual successes can have on a person like Guyga and the team success the Mad Maxican enjoys.  

In an episode that covers The Highland Games, in Scotland, the documentarians introduce us to a former champion training an individual who wants to become a future champion. We see the faded glory in that former champion’s face. The athletic achievements of his past instill in him an apparent lifelong confidence, but there’s something missing in his face. We see how much he misses the glory of being a champion. We see the “Youth is wasted on the young” Churchill quote personified in the man that suggests the former champion wishes he appreciated his moment in the sun more.

The episode that Netflix used to promote the series and the one that appears to be garnering most of the critical attention is the first episode in the series depicting a sport called Calico Storico (historical football in English). Calico Storico is the equivalent of rugby meets martial arts. There are linemen who fight on the front line, as in American football, and two ball carriers. The ball carriers attempt to drop a ball in a field-length net. Four teams fight to be champions of Florence, Italy. There’s no money involved, just the pride of the players. The prize for victory is a cow. They don’t slaughter the cow to triumphantly eat it. They simply just walk down the street with it, in a victory parade. Some criticize this episode as a bunch of meatheads plowing into each other, but that criticism misses the mark. Those critics don’t see the passion, the will, or the sheer determination these men put into achieving victory. They prefer to see the sport through a political lens. If the documentarians chose to focus on a woman attempting to enter into Calico Storico, these critics would enjoy the episode more, but there is very little politics in any of the documentaries of Home Game. The documentaries choose to place their focus on the simplicity of athletic competition and athletic achievement. As opposed to modern American football players, the athletes in Calico Storico love their ultra-violent sport so much that they want their children to play in it. One athlete chooses to live in a specific part of the country, so his kid would have a chance to play for the team he did. They suffer minor to severe injuries for their sport, but the prospect of such injuries doesn’t diminish their love of the game.  

The beauty of Home Game beauty is that it reminds us of the unadulterated love of sports. Their love of sports calls to mind the prima donnas of most sports who take their status as a top-tier athlete for granted. If some of their athletes depicted in these documentaries play their beloved sport for money, the documentarians do not mention it in the episodes. The conditions of the countries of most of these documentaries suggest that if the athletes make any money, it’s a relatively paltry sum and not the reason they play the game. The documentarians focus each episode on the beauty of sport without much distraction. Almost all of the sports depicted are unique to our experience, but they detail in the faces of fans and athletes alike, that the language of sports is universal.

Dissected properly, just about every episode of Home Game teaches us a different element of sports that we might not have considered before. They provide us an outsider-looking-in perspective of what it means for the athletes to compete, what it takes to win, and what it means, to them, to become a champion. We see the captivated fans in the stands celebrating goals of a game hundreds to thousands years old. As we watch their game, we see the thrill of their favorite team scoring a goal, the disappointment of seeing their team scored on, the thrills they experience after victory and the agony of defeat. We see ourselves, from their perspective, we remember vicariously enjoying and celebrating the athletic accomplishments of others, and we realize how much we miss it. We appreciate their love of sport from a distance, and it touches us in a very familiar place at the same time.

The Other Side of Talent

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“He has a talent,” one person said of another. “I don’t know what it is,” she furthered, “but he has a real knack for taking photos.” The subject of that compliment beamed in the aftermath. The compliment was vague, but she used the ‘T’ word, and very few can avoid the gush that follows having a ‘T’ word thrown at them.

It was a nice photo (not the one pictured here), but the ‘T’ word? The compliment suggested that this photo was but one of a long line of photos that you had to see to believe, but it was still just a photo.

Most of us reserve our use of the ‘T’ word for athletic and artistic accomplishments, but we know that many use it in broad terms. We know, for example, that an engineer can display a wide array of talents for his craft that others may not have, but we often say that that person is good at what he does, a master craftsman, or expertly skilled, but the use of the word talent is not often used in conjunction with most skills.

Some could say that a grown man’s ability to outdo his young peers in a game of hopscotch is a display of talent, but most fellow adults watching this man hop from square to square would suggest that he should consider finding a more constructive use of his abilities, if he wants others to consider him a talent.

Merriam-Webster defines talent as “a special ability that allows someone to do something well.”

Philosopher Ayn Rand steadfastly refused to recognize photography as art, but she did concede that it requires a skill, a technical skill, as opposed to a creative one.

We all know that definitions, such as these, can be broad, but most of us have personal definitions that fall on stricter lines. If the definition of talent is as broad as Merriam-Webster described, and photography requires some technical skill, then we should concede that taking a quality photograph does require some talent. One could also say that a talented photographer uses discretion and selectivity when he selects his shot, but could this ability to capture a moment be nothing more than a right place, right time decision? Some of them don’t even display that. They take ten to twenty photos and display the perfect one.

If one takes a hundred different photographs, and only one of them is of an exceptional quality, is that a display of the photographer’s skill? Yes it is, in a broad sense of the term. If that’s the case, we could say that if a man takes a hundred free throws and only makes one, he has a talent for shooting free throws, if that one free throw is so perfect that it barely touches the net.

If a photographer purchases a top of the line camera, and he uses the best photo-enhancing software available to produce evidence of his prowess, and he lays that photo down on a table next to the photo of another taken with a disposable Walmart camera, and no enhancements are permitted, does his superior photo reveal God-given talent on his part, or does it contribute to the lie that a skilled, talented photographer is artistically talented?

The Truly Talented

We’ve all witnessed the effect truly talented people can have on a room, and this effect often makes us a little sick. “He’s just a human being for God’s sakes!” is one of the snarky, coping mechanisms we’ve developed for dealing with “the gush” to adore the talented.

The adoration of talent varies with the skill required to accomplish the feat, of course, but if you’ve ever met a truly gifted people, you know that most of them are not interested in being better today than they were yesterday. Most of them enjoy the potential they have to be better more than they do the work involved in becoming better. “We’re talking about practice!”

Those that become obsessed with being better, and enjoy the benefits the rigors of practice can produce, often end up having their names etched into something by the time they’re finished. These few don’t necessarily bathe in adulation, they focus on one on one battles. When they get beat, and everyone gets beat, they do things that the overwhelming majority of us avoid to get better. For the overwhelming majority, sports, artistic endeavors, and all the venues that require talent involve moments. The talented enjoy those moments for what they are, when they happen, but the people who will have their names etched into something take it home with them. For these people, their talent is but a starting point and a gift that they end up honing to perfection, but even for these people talent can be a curse and a burden, and it can lead to acceptance, love, worship, and being scrutinized, ostracized, hated, and ridiculed. The idea of their talent, i.e. their potential, can also haunt them when they encounter its limitations.

An edition of 30 for 30 called Of Miracles and Men portrayed the other side of talent. It depicted the other side of the Miracle on Ice story that we all know of a ragtag group of American amateurs defeating the most talented Russian hockey team ever assembled. Some would argue that this Russian team might have been the greatest assemblage of hockey players ever to tie skates on their feet. This team had already won four Olympic gold medals in hockey, by the time they took to the ice against this American team, and some of them would go onto win a fifth after the 1980 defeat. To hear this group of talented men speak of their careers, the 1980 loss to a group of American amateurs, in a medal round, sits in their system like a kidney stone that will never pass. This Russian team beat an assemblage of Canada’s best that included probably the greatest hockey player that ever lived Wayne Gretzky. They also beat the 1980 American team in a match that preceded the 1980 medal round upset, and those two matches were not even close. This team was so dominant that they could not be beat, until they were.

Some would think that such an historic upset might serve to highlight the Russian team’s greatness, if one could say that one defeat in the midst of a record of total annihilation is a blip in the overall dominance this team displayed over the hockey world for two decades. Listening to these men speak, however, the listener gets a taste for the other side of talent when the only story anyone wants to hear from them involves the one time they didn’t succeed, and how that has haunted them since.

The point one could take from this 30 for 30 episode is that these men spent an excruciating amount of hours of their young lives in cold, dank gyms honing their God-given gifts, trying to improve on the smallest details of the game, only to fall to a bunch of ragtag Americans that may not have spent one-fifths the amount of time honing their gifts. Even with five gold medals (including the 1984 Olympics), the only thing we want to talk to them about is that one match they failed to win thirty-five years ago.

If you’re acknowledged as the most talented person anyone you know has ever met, and the only thing anyone wants to discuss is the one time you failed, why would you want to raise their expectations? Why would you want to endure the marathon practice sessions that focused on the minutiae your coach informed was going to be vital when you encountered the wall of your God-given abilities? Why would you want to invest more of your life becoming better at something other people hate you for being so good at? We’re talking about desire here.

We’re talking about the desire to be better today, than you were yesterday. “We’re talking about practice!” We’re talking about preparing for that day, that every talented person experiences, when they meet their personal wall.

The wall, for those that have never read about it, involves going up against other people that were the most talented people anyone they know had ever met. It involves seeing what the gifted person is made of when they encounter the another person loaded with so much talent that talent is afterthought.

To read the former NFL quarterback Kurt Warner’s examination of the natural talents that fail to succeed on the NFL level, it’s about having a coach, or mentor, early on that recognizes the person’s talent level, and challenges them in a brutal, heartless manner, to reach within themselves to find various other methods of succeeding beyond the talent level they’ve always known. This heartless mentor also helps the talented person in question determine if they have the desire to succeed on a level they may not have even considered to that point.

The Less Than Talented

“My talent has always been, and will always be, and it should be written with a capital ‘P’!” –Your Potential once said.

What if your talent has never taken you the places you thought it would, but you’ve always known you had the potential you had to succeed. What if your talent lays somewhere between being as talented as anyone that you’ve ever met, and perhaps more, but that untapped potential to be more has always remained at a frustrating distance?

We spoke of ‘the wall’ that every recognized talent experiences, but there is another wall that can be more formidable: the wall of self-imposed expectations. The talented might encounter this wall in moments considered inconsequential to other participants, and observers, but to the person that has lived with the idea that they’ve always had the potential to succeed it is but another example of their ineptitude. Most of them do not know that this is the source of their frustration, or if they do, they won’t acknowledge it.

As the Kurt Warner story informs us, the primary difference between those who will succeed and those that won’t occurs soon after they experience adversity. Moments of adversity can be large and small, but they all reveal who we are, and who we are going to be.

A young Kurt Warner may have dealt with moments of adversity throughout his largely undocumented young life, but we can guess that none of them would compare to the adversity that the adult Kurt Warner would experience in his adult life. The most talented person in his area received so few scholarship offers that he ended up playing quarterback for the University of Northern Iowa. The NFL draft did not draft him, following that college career, and the only team that gave him a try-out, cut him before the season even started. He ended up stocking shelves for a supermarket chain. He then played quarterback in the Arena Football League, and he had a stint in NFL Europe before an injury to a starter allowed him to start for a NFL team and lead them to a Super Bowl victory. He was MVP of that Super Bowl and MVP for the season. That Super Bowl team cut him a couple seasons later, and he went onto play for another NFL team for a couple of unproductive seasons, and he ended up with a team that he, again, guided to the Super Bowl. After Kurt Warner’s career concluded, he was considered to be the best undrafted free agent to ever play the game.

Kurt Warner’s story is one of not living up to his self-imposed expectations. It’s a story of what he did after failing to succeed on many levels. (After leading the St. Louis Rams to a Super Bowl victory, then a Super Bowl loss, he ended up on a New York Giants team that gave up on him in favor of future Hall of Fame starter Eli Manning. Warner then led the Arizona Cardinals to the Super Bowl.) It’s a story that should be held out as an example to talented people, but for most of those that are more talented than anyone they’ve ever met, talent and work have always been a zero-sum game: The more talent one has, the less work they think they have to do.

Warner states that most coaches and mentors coach to the talent, and they let the talent do what they do well in a manner that the coach hopes will reflect the coach’s ability to harness talent. They coach for the next game. They coach to keep the talent happy.

If we’re talking about practice, however, one of a coach’s duties should be to put talented people in uncomfortable positions to reveal to them what they must do when talent alone may not be enough get them out of moments of adversity.

It also allows those talented people –that have always used their talent as a picket sign to avoid the rigors of practice– to learn how to finesse the minutiae of their abilities and hone their desire.

As anyone who has displayed an ability to do anything knows, there is always a ceiling, and when one hits their head on that ceiling it can be humbling and humiliating. Some of the times, it’s more rewarding to hide in a cloud of potential. Those of us considered lesser-thans don’t understand what it must feel like to have so many consider us a true talent, and we never will, and that can provide the talented a comfortable space between the reality of their talent and the potential we believe they might have.

If you’ve ever witnessed a display of YouTube-worthy temper tantrum in a bowling alley, on a miniature golf course, or at a softball field, and you’ve wondered why a person would attempt to gouge their own eye out after missing a two-foot putt, I can tell you –as a former wild temper tantrum thrower– that there’s something more to it than the idea that the ball doesn’t always go where we want it to go. We thought we spotted something at a very young age, we thought we were going to be a somebody, a contender, and the obnoxious five-pin that will not fall no matter what we do is not just a configuration of rock maple wood to us, it is the eye of fate staring at us, mocking us for not being able to fulfill the potential we thought we saw.

These eye-catching temper tantrums are borne of an inability to deal with even the most inconsequential moments of adversity, because we never had a heartless mentor who cared enough not to care that we were tired, that our feelings were hurt by something they said, or that we wanted to quit the game because “it’s just not fun anymore”. One could read this post, and think it’s all about sports, until they witness a guy who has no capacity for dealing with the obnoxious five-pins of life, and in the moment that captures his frustration in life for all to see, he does something to the ball return that causes parents to shield their kids’ eyes. For an overwhelming majority of those who would have their names etched into something by the time their career is over, their mentors would spend countless hours teaching them how to deal with such adversity, how to overcome walls –self-imposed and otherwise– and how to become successful people, and yes, talented photographers, I guess.