Howdy,
This past Sunday, I watched the Cleveland Browns face the New England Patriots in my team's unofficial regular season opener. At one point Trent Green, commentating for CBS, discussed the career of Cleveland Browns RB Isaiah Crowell. An undrafted free agent, Crowell entered the game as one of the NFL's top running backs. His going undrafted, Green speculated, is evidence that the system of scouting and drafting talent is 'a broken process'. (1)
'That's not true,' I announced aloud, almost by reflex. (Sometimes, the nonsensical commentary during these games renders viewers unable to help themselves when something particularly fishy is said).
I calmed down and thought about it for a couple of minutes. I was sure of myself. Finally, I looked up his scouting profile.
Here is the summary for Crowell:
-> Top high school recruit
-> Went to Georgia
-> Leading freshman rusher
-> And...
Three gun charges, two felony following his freshman season at Georgia. Well, then.
So, unless Green thought 'the process' required that teams simply ignore concerns about the character of the individuals involved, what he said was not evidence of a broken system. If anything, it is evidence of a much more important point- that people can make mistakes, recognize their own failures, and make changes to their lives that prove positive in the most significant ways. (2) (3)
That story is not a very popular one, though, is it? Nobody likes hearing about hard work, it seems. The more popular one is a thinly-disguised variant of Cinderella- a player whose inherent talent and skill was overlooked by those annoying step-sisters assembling these rosters shows up on a team and runs right past everyone, carving up defenses like the pumpkin he half-expects to turn into at any moment (and the way some of these football games draaaag on, midnight striking as I drain my last beer is never out of the question).
Everyone loves these stories. Like Harry Potter, we all sit around and wait for someone to hand us a wand and announce that there is real magic here, right HERE, where everyone else sees a poorly dressed Muggle. No one seems to like the stories of people who are told they are not good enough using that feedback as a starting point for changing the trajectory of their careers, dreams, or lives. (4)
I was thinking a little bit about that a few hours later while I went for a walk. My thoughts were drifting, as they tend to do on walks (or blogs) and so I thought about other guys like Crowell, specifically Tom Brady and Draymond Green, two other athletes who significantly outperformed their draft position. Green and Brady have both openly discussed feeling slighted by their low draft position and using that as fuel to work harder as professionals.
At this point, I considered whether Green and Brady were unjustly drafted too low. And, after recalling their respective stories and considering what I knew about their careers, I came to a simple conclusion- no.
Coming out of college, Brady was not considered a top prospect for many very good reasons. For one, he could not consistently throw the ball twenty yards (ask any Patriots fan about all his missed throws- they tend to be those down the seam, about twenty yards downfield. He still can't do it!). That underlined his lacking in the general physical strength required to play football at the NFL level.
Green, too, was probably correctly drafted in the second round. He was overweight and often beaten defensively in one-on-one situations.
So, were both guys really slighted by league decision makers and 'motivated' to become all-world players? It's a cute story. But please, give me a break.
Those two guys getting drafted in those spots should have indicated one thing and one thing only- they were not good enough. Not good enough! And nothing, I imagine, is more motivating than that.
The way I would frame the story is like this- a guy gets drafted later than he thinks he should. He looks objectively at it and concludes- I'm not good enough. And then what? The humble guy would look at that and say, 'OK, this is good feedback. I've never gotten this kind of honest assessment of my ability.' And then they would go out and work hard to get stronger or lose weight or maybe, in some cases, just do a better job of avoiding trouble with the law. To me, that seems just as motivating as anything- get in shape or lose your job- but what do I know, right? (5)
I remember when this sort of thing happened to me. In college, I played on a division three basketball team. The first year was pretty standard for that level. Like Brady when he came into the NFL, I was not quite strong enough and needed to spend time getting my weight lifting up to snuff. Practicing every day was immensely helpful, too, so I could acclimate to the faster pace of the competition.
Year two came with promise but I got injured a couple of days before the season started. I lost a lot of my conditioning. A month out was followed by a bad month of limping around in practice. When I got to January, my knee started to ache, then hurt, then really hurt, and for the first time I was glad when the season finally ended. In the spring, I stopped training entirely and contemplated quitting.
That summer, I went to Japan for nearly two months. I arrived in the country intending to do next to nothing. Japan, right? The opportunity was limited and my thought was to make the most of everything I could do while I was there. Like Gandhi said when he was in England- 'I can learn the violin in India'. So my thought was to come back home and figure out my basketball future then.
When I came back, I was in the best shape of my life. I had lost over twenty pounds. Though I did make the most of my time in Japan, I also ran ten to fifteen kilometers (metric system) almost everyday. A couple of times, I got lost and probably ran twice that distance.
This was a result of a realization that came very early on during my trip. No matter what story I told about my first two years on the team, the only fact of the present moment was that I was not good enough to play college basketball. I was not strong enough, I was not close to the correct weight, and I was two years removed from the last time I practiced well on consecutive days.
One great advantage of sports is the feedback. In life, the type of direct feedback you get in sports is infrequent. If you do get it, sometimes you do not understand in time to make productive use of it.
For me, I realized in Japan that I got the feedback every time we played a game. Some of the guys played in the game and others joined me on the bench. The guys on the bench were not good enough. That was the feedback.
Like those guys I mentioned earlier, I was fortunate to get that feedback in time to do something about it. So, I doubled down on conditioning right away. It was too bad that I was in Japan but that's where I was. You can learn the violin in England, too. Once I got my weight down, I focused on adding strength in the weight room.
It almost came too late. My coach talked to me before the junior season and said, more or less, that I was not good enough to play for the team. This made sense. Though I was not playing in any games that year, I was told that if it was OK with me, I would still be involved with practice and an important part of the team's fabric.
This is the part of the story where I then describe my ascent to all-conference or whatnot, motivated by this slight, fueled to a level of unprecedented excellence by the mere memory of the conversation. But that's not quite what happened.
What actually happened was nearly nothing. This feedback only confirmed what I already knew. So though the feedback was helpful, I just continued doing what I knew would make me better and did my best where I was uncertain.
Eventually, I did end up playing. In my senior year, I totaled exactly three minutes. That's a very poor return on a four year college basketball career. It took about three minutes to type out and proofread this paragraph. But it was also three more minutes than anyone predicted I would play going into the season. I suppose I accomplished something in some way. (6)
It is so easy to point fingers when things go wrong. To blame 'the powers that be' is so easy, to lament about what might happen if things were different is so satisfying, to rue the bad luck that prevented things from going according to those well-crafted plans of ours is so tempting.
The challenge is to examine the stories we tell ourselves. It is only natural to tell stories. Usually, it's how we process and learn from experience. And it's never bad to blow off a little steam now and then. But doing so without taking the appropriate responsibility for what is in our control is a dangerous path to start down.
So, what to really make of these stories? If guys like Brady or Green really feel slighted, then those stories about motivation coming from those slights are definitely true for them. If that story helps them in their workouts or organizes their personal lives to allow maximization of their athletic potential, then all the better. More power to them.
But those guys also did something differently from their other late-draftee counterparts. They recognized the deficiencies that caused them to slip in those drafts. Brady was always the first guy in the weight room. Green lost twenty pounds during his second season. And that spirit of recognizing a shortcoming and taking responsibility for trying everything in their power to improve on it has been a constant in each of their careers so far.
Adult life is generally a big improvement on being a kid. But one area that lacks is in feedback. Perhaps that is why some of these athletes refer to their professions as playing 'a kid's game'. Of course it is- only kids get consistent feedback. Adults get to blame the system, I guess.
How rare it is to get true, honest feedback. It is so rare that you sometimes don't even realize you are getting it. It is hard to recognize what might come and go in the space between heartbeats.
The great gift of my college basketball career was to learn how to respond to feedback when I got it. Soap and water stings but the cut is less likely to become infected. Not everyone is able to wrap their gifts in a neat little package, topped with a bow.
The hardest thing to do is to find the message when it is encased in hurt. That one, I am still trying to work out. I'm getting a little better at it, I think, but many things sting cuts just like soap and water do.
What I can do for now is just like on those ninety degree days in Nagano- do what I know is going to help, for sure, and take it easy on myself when I'm not so sure and only giving it my best.
Thanks for reading. See you all on Monday.
Tim
Footnotes / imagined complaints
1. FOOTBALL SUNDAY!
One of the most rewarding aspects of watching 1pm NFL football games is the rare opportunity for me, a non-TV watcher, to take in all the nonsense served up on TV. This includes the commercials (are the CBS sitcom commercials for their actual shows or parodies of commercials for actual shows?), the announcers (are the CBS commentary teams actual commentary professionals or parodies of commentary professionals?), and the game itself (sorry folks, I couldn't come up with a way to mirror the phrasing for this one).
2. Not a shot at Trent Green!
No, really. He just did not know. He must have simply assumed that the entire league dismissed or misread his ability as a player, leading to his undrafted status.
On the other hand, it is his job to know what he is talking about. Maybe it was a little potshot at Trent Green, after all.
3. Not a vote of support for the system!
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, or something like that. The system is probably broken. But the evidence to support that assertion is not to cite Crowell's story, I'm thinking.
4. Because if we DID prefer these stories...
J.K. Rowling would have written a non-selling children's book called 'Hermione Granger and the Thirty-Seven Galleon Library Overdue Fine'
5. And MJ?
All roads lead to Rome...
If the problem is a lack of motivation to get stronger, leaner, or whatever, then who cares what that specific source of motivation is? I agree with that entirely. The stories we tell about ourselves are often the most powerful force within.
A guy like Michael Jordan, who everyone agrees is the best basketball player ever, was still talking about all the people who doubted or slighted him as he was getting inducted into the hall of fame. The ability to interpret events in a way to fuel that competitive edge was perhaps Jordan's greatest asset in his ascent to the summit of his sport.
6. Well, twenty-five minutes or so.
I did play in the usual bench-warmer roles- late in blowouts. I also played three minutes on Senior Day. Most colleges start their seniors for their final home game and our team was no exception.
