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Introducing Instagram teen accounts, a new way to keep your teen safer as they grow, like making sure they've got the right gear for writing. Knee pads. Check. And helmet. Done. See you, Dad. New Instagram teen accounts, automatic protections for who can contact your teen and the content they can see. I'm Sally Jenkins, and welcome to Washington Post Live.
For over 30 years, I've had a front row seat to the greatest moments in sports and the greatest athletes of our time. They offer case studies in greatness in practice that we can all borrow from, whether we're athletes or not. They teach us that champions are made, not born. They show us how to perform under pressure, and they inspire us to do better after the failures that are inevitable.
I explored all these lessons during my talk at the inaugural event for our new leadership series, The Ship. Keep listening. You might find you have something in common with greats like Steph Curry, Dan Quinn, or Caitlin Clark. What I want to talk to you about today is what do the greats do that we can take home? What is exportable in what they do? One of the great advantages of the job is the proximity to greatness in practice.
And I get the chance while I'm observing that to ask some fairly rude and blunt questions of the competitors. And one day I was able to talk to Steph Curry, the great, great NBA shooter for the Golden State Warriors. And I heard myself asking, I couldn't believe it, but I heard myself asking him, can I feel your hands?
Steph Curry has the softest, most beautiful shot. And he quite obligingly actually held out his palms. And I put my hands right on top of his. And I thought his hands would be soft because of that beautiful fluttering shot. Well, his hands were...
hideous. They were gnarly. They were just slabs of calluses flaking. And I was like, I couldn't believe it. But in that moment, I had a really fundamental realization, which is that the greats are the product of their own agency. They are their greatness in the moment. Their ability to find the right decision and the right action is really a product of their agency. It is earned and it is learned. And if they do that correctly,
If they can earn it and learn it, so can we to a certain extent. And so I began to think about putting together all of the things I've heard from athletes and looking for their commonalities that might be useful to the rest of us. And I was sitting at Wimbledon one day with the great champion Rod Laver. And to this end, I asked Rod Laver, I said, do all the greats have something in common?
And he said, yes, they do. He said they have the ability to bring their best when they most need it. Now, how many of us would love to be able to do that right in any circumstance? I mean, that's what we're all trying to do every day, even those of us who sit at a desk and we work from the neck up. So I want to talk to you about five principles that are basically intersections between all of the greats that I've talked to. And I want to start with with this.
Champions are made. They are not born. They are extremely self-determined, self-fashioned characters. Caitlin Clark, the great shooter in the WNBA, Caitlin Clark spent her entire high school career hoping she would reach six feet tall. She was built like a twig, in the words of her high school coach. She takes 300 shots a day. She takes 100 shots from the three-point arc, and if she doesn't make 70% of them, she has to start all over again.
She takes another 100 shots mid-range, and she has to make 80% of those. Then she takes 100 free throws, and she has to make 90% of those. So Caitlin Clark is an entirely self-fashioned creature. The next thing that you really hear from athletes, all of them, across the board, no matter how far flung their endeavors, is this. Your brain will rob muscles of the energy to function.
Okay, the glucose and all the other nutrients that are going to your brain to create cognitive judgments. They're coming from the rest of your body Okay, so if you think you're not sitting Working very hard sitting at a desk. You're really wrong. This is Magnus Carlsen who's the greatest chess player in the world and There's this great game within a game now at chess tournaments some of these guys wear Fitbits And so we actually understand what's going on with their bodies Grandmaster chess players can burn 6,000 calories at a tournament and
That's as much as a marathoner. You're running a marathon at that desk, whether you know it or not. In a single match over a board, 500 to 600 calories. Fitbits show their heart rates can go to 130. Their blood pressure rises. Their breath rates triple.
Right? And so your brain will rob your muscles of the energy to function. There was a fascinating study at Cambridge University a few years ago where they took great rowers, university rowers, and they gave them a word test.
And then they gave them a rowing power test. And then they did something really, really interesting. They made them do the word test while they were doing the rowing power test. And then they measured the outcome. And their rowing performance suffered while they tried to do word recall. Their brain was trumping their muscles of the energy to do the cognitive functioning. So remember that. And the other thing that they know, what you put into your body is what will come out in the performance.
Magnus Carlsen used to drink orange juice at tournaments and he realized that he was having fatigue late in matches and he went to the Norwegian Olympic Training Center and they said, "Stop with the orange juice, you're having sugar crashes." That leads me to the next thing, which is that athletes are really aware of what's happening to them while they're competing. This is Steph Curry doing a drill.
And the goggles that he has on are vision occluding. They're actually obscuring his vision. He's trying to catch the tennis ball and dribble the basketball because he's trying to anticipate all the multiple stimulus and yet the obstructions he's gonna have to face on a basketball court. And he's trying to get the messaging from his cognitive to his body much more efficient.
And so this drill, among other things, what he's doing is he's anticipating the areas where he might have a performative collapse, right? He's actually trying to anticipate all the problems he's going to be facing in the moment when he's really trying to make micro decisions, what pass to make, what shot to make, when to take the shot.
one of the things that he's working on are his unconscious incompetencies because you can't see yourself in the moment of the performance, right? And so you really have to understand where are those, you have to have a much more informed understanding of where are those areas where I might not do as well as I would like to do when I am under pressure. And that brings me to the next concept that all athletes talk about. They practice for pressure, right?
They understand what's going to be coming at them and they prepare for that in ways that are much, much more thorough and much more interesting than we tend to. Pressure is physical. You felt it, I've felt it. And pressure really comes from fight or flight. Okay, when you are stressed,
You have your fight or flight response, right? Well, what's happening in your body when that happens? Well, Peyton Manning and I talked about this. And Peyton explained to me, he said, you know, everybody forgets that my third year in the league, I was just a 500 quarterback.
His record was 32 and 32. He was not a Hall of Famer yet and far from it. In fact, he'd led the league in interceptions two of his first three years, throwing 30 interceptions or more in a season. And Peyton did sort of what Steph Curry did, right? He looked for his unconscious incompetencies. Him and his coach, Tony Dungy, they sat down and they watched videotape of every interception he'd ever thrown.
those three seasons and then they went a little deeper they looked at tape of all the balls that he threw that should have been intercepted but they weren't just because he got a little lucky maybe a receiver made a great catch or maybe a defender just dropped the ball and they look for the patterns and one thing they saw was that Peyton was really not reacting great under pressure when defensive linemen were diving at his feet and his knees his feet got really really unsteady well one thing
that was happening in the fight or flight response, here's what your body does. It shunts blood from your small muscle groups to your large muscle groups, preparing you to fight or fly. That means you're losing fine motor control. So if you're sitting trying to type on deadline and it feels harder, that's because it is harder. You've lost blood in your hands. It's much harder for me to type on deadline at a Super Bowl. Same thing happens to athletes, okay? What they do is they learn to mitigate it.
So Peyton and his coaches designed a drill. And in practice, his coaches would hurl heavy sandbags at his feet to simulate big men coming at his knees. And over time, over practice, having these heavy sandbags thrown at him time and time again, his feet got more stable.
The next year, he only threw 10 interceptions. He never threw more than 10 interceptions again in his career, goes on to become a Hall of Fame quarterback and the person who wins two Super Bowls and the quarterback we know today. But it was an incredibly self-defining exercise that he went through.
Diana Nyad, the great swimmer who swam from Florida, from Cuba to Florida on her fourth attempt at the age of 60, told me a really interesting thing about practicing for pressure. Her biggest obstacle was fatigue. She had to practice for fatigue. And during her practice swim, she would do something that I think is something any of us can take home. She would, at the end of her workout, she would tell herself, "Go five more minutes."
Just five more minutes. When she was really, really tired, sometimes her trainer, Bonnie Stahl, would say, just five more strokes, Diana. But she just tried to do five more of whatever it was. And that five more minutes is really the thing that finally propelled her from Cuba to Florida. The final concept that they all talk to me about is failure. Failure is an essential precondition for success. Great athletes and coaches have the minds of engineers in this respect.
and entrepreneurs. They actually are much more tolerant of failure than the rest of us. The rest of us really hate this big L loser on our forehead, right? We really, it's pejorative about it. You can't believe how much more tolerant Tara Vanderveer who's gonna come out, she coached 38 seasons, she won three championships, right? 35 of those years, she went home nominally a loser. So it's not really what they do, right? Winning is just a fractional part of what the greats do.
Failure is the most interesting diagnostic in the world. The great coach Dan Quinn, we have this wonderful, phenomenal coach now, Dan Quinn, of the Commanders, this past season had an extraordinary year. And Dan Quinn told me that
Everyone really is forgetting now that just four or five years ago, he got fired as head coach of the Atlanta Falcons. He had led the Falcons to a Super Bowl, but they lost in what's arguably the most embarrassing Super Bowl game of all time when the New England Patriots came from three touchdowns to win in overtime. They made up 21 points in the fourth quarter, and the Falcons are the losers.
They go home, the team falls apart, the Falcons aren't very good the next couple of years and Dan Quinn gets fired.
Right. And he's out of work for several months. And what does he do? Well, he did what Peyton Manning did and what Steph Curry did. He looks at tape of all of his games and he's thinking, where did I go wrong? What happened? Well, one of the things that happened was he got passed by in his practices. Right. His defensive schemes were a little predictable. One of the reasons the Patriots were able to come back was because they kind of knew what he was going to do defensively.
He gets picked up by the Dallas Cowboys who hire him as an assistant and much lower title, much lower pay. But he now has a whole new scheme. He makes the Cowboys one of the top defenses in the country, which then sets him up to be hired by the Washington Commanders just in time to draft probably the greatest young quarterback any of us has ever seen, Jaden Daniels. So failure is an imperative precondition for success.
The other story that I love to tell about this, every year at the Super Bowl, I love to go through the rosters of the two teams that make it to the Super Bowl. And I look for how many players are on those rosters who were cut by other teams. It's a fascinating exercise. Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the year they won the Super Bowl, they had 22 players on their roster who'd been rated two stars or less in high school.
who college scouts thought couldn't play at a high level, and now they're in the Super Bowl. But Brian Dable is head coach of the New York Giants now, but he did a fascinating exercise when he was an assistant with the Buffalo Bills. And in a preseason meeting, he said, everybody stand up. And then he said, any player who's been cut or traded, sit down. Two-thirds of the room, sit down. And then he said, any player who wasn't drafted coming out of college, sit down. Rest of the players, sit down.
And then he said, any coach who's ever been fired, sit down. Whole coaching staff sits down, including him. There's one guy left standing, and it's Josh Allen, their great young quarterback. And Dable says, Josh, how many scholarship offers did you have coming out of high school? And Josh Allen says, none. And Dable says, sit down.
And so everyone in the room now knows that great teams and great organizations are not made up of sublime talents with unbroken records of successes, but they are made up of people who have suffered reverse after reverse after reverse and have simply had the resilience to learn from those failures and get better.
So I want to leave you with a final thought, which I got from my father, Dan Jenkins, who was a great sports writer for Sports Illustrated magazine for about 20 years. And when I was a girl, I heard my father ask a rhetorical question that I've really been trying to answer ever since. My father said, who can explain the athletic heart?
And the way he asked it, it basically made me feel like if you could explain that question, if you could answer that question, you could answer almost everything about human behavior. And I really, I think that's what I've been trying to do all these years. Who can explain the athletic heart? And to me, the athletic heart is the silent pact that you make with yourself, that you are improvable at any stage, in any endeavor,
We spend a lot of money and a lot of time watching these sports. Are we watching them just to be odd?
Are we watching them just for entertainment? I don't think so. We spend $65 billion in public monies on athletic stadiums in this country. We spend enormous monies out of our own wallets buying tickets to these games. I think we feel there's something very profound going on there. And I think the profundity that we are sensing is the athletic heart. The silent pact, what you're watching in athletes is the silent pact that we are improvable to a magical degree.
And so I would ask you today to leave here with maybe a little bit more of an athletic heart than the one that you walked in with. Thank you. - Thanks for listening. For more conversations like these, be sure to follow our Washington Post Live podcast page on Spotify and stay tuned every Friday for our weekly episodes. I'm Sally Jenkins, signing off for Washington Post Live. I'm Sally Jenkins and I'm a sports columnist and feature writer for the Washington Post.
My job entails pulling the curtain on really big sports events at what is going on in locker rooms, what's going on in the stadium tunnel, most importantly, what's going on in the minds of the athletes that I cover.
I think that we have an instinct that sports are really important in some primal way. We pay a lot of money for them. We build really big stadiums for them. And I think that athletics really gets us in touch with aspiration and teach something very, very important about accountability, about self-determination. And so my job is to really make those links explicit for readers and users.
Subscriptions support this work and the people behind it. Find out more at subscribe.washingtonpost.com. I'm Sally Jenkins, and I'm one of the people behind The Post.