Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist

I have a series of posts that are all linked in some way in my head, and are all in various states of incompletion. I’m going to dive right in and start posting and hope that it comes together as I go along. Or maybe I’ll just confuse people.

Last month, at the Yankees game, my non-baseball-fan coworker asked me why I was booing A-Rod so much. I had to stop and think about it - it was just one of those things I had internalized. A couple weeks later, ESPN.com ran an article asking the same question: Why do we hate this guy? My answer was partly that he had sold out for the money (for those of you who don’t follow sports, he broke into the major leagues with Seattle, and then left them when he got the Rangers to sign him to a 10 year, $250 million contract), and partly because he never performed in the clutch (which is unforgivable given his contract). He’s immensely talented, he piles up huge numbers, but when the game is on the line, he doesn’t strike fear into his opponents. He never rises to the occasion unlike his teammate, Derek Jeter, who always seems to be in the right place (the 2001 flip being a great example).

Examples abound throughout sports. Peyton Manning is like A-Rod, putting up the stats when it doesn’t matter and choking when it does. Tom Brady is like Jeter, unflappable in the clutch. In golf, Mickelson quails, Tiger Woods steps up (this past weekend, Tiger won his 12th major championship - after the third round, he was tied for the lead, and he broke away from the pack with a birdie on the first hole of the final round and ended up winning by five strokes). In the NBA, Karl Malone was the choker, Michael Jordan the legendary closer. Jordan was unbelievable in the clutch. Everyone in the stadium (heck, everyone in the world) knew who the ball was going to, he’d get it, and still manage to will his way to a score.

I think such feats are tremendously inspiring. There’s something about watching somebody who doesn’t just survive, but excels, when the pressure is at its highest. They have a sense of The Moment, when their legacy will be defined, which will inspire stories for years afterwards. I still have a newspaper picture of Jordan rising up for a jump shot in his last playoffs series against the Jazz, which I captioned with “I believe I can fly”, the tagline for one of his commercials at the time.

And such feats are not confined to the area of sports. In real life, there are those who go out and perform, who achieve, who step up, who seize The Moment and make it theirs. And then there are those who let life pass them by, who always let The Moment slip through their fingers. I’ve been fortunate to know a bunch of people in the former category. They are inspiring, as well as intimidating. They give me hope that such feats are possible, even as they make me feel inadequate for not having achieved them myself.

I’ve been thinking about what separates those who seize The Moment from those who don’t. One of the differences is that those who do want the responsibility of those moments. Jordan rarely let anybody else take the final shot. But when he took it and missed, he didn’t blame anybody but himself. He wanted the glory, and he accepted the responsibility that came with it.

Peyton Manning is the opposite - he wants the glory of the victory, but he doesn’t want the responsibility. Whenever the Colts lose, it’s never his fault in his mind; he blames his linemen for not providing good protection, his receivers for dropping the ball, or his coaches for the game plan. For instance, I’ll quote from an ESPN.com article after last year’s playoff loss:

“I’m looking for a safe word here, I don’t want to be a bad teammate,” Manning said when asked about Indianapolis’ blown blocking assignments.

Way to stand up for your teammates there, Peyton.

A-Rod is the same way - he doesn’t want the responsibility for the team’s losses, and thus always seems tentative in the clutch. And I think there is something karmic here. Nobody wants to be on a team with a guy who’s only focused on himself (I’m saying guy here because, honestly, guys are more likely to be individually focused). We like teammates who look out for us, who cover for us, who make us better. We’ll put up with teammates who are individually brilliant because they do their job well, but we always know in the back of our mind that they’d desert us if it came down to us or them. Successful teams are those where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. When individuals consider themselves to be more important than the team, the team suffers. And because they don’t trust their teammates, they suffer karmically and never achieve as much as they could otherwise.

Jordan actually provides a great example of this in the evolution of his career. At the beginning of his career, he was the individual superstar, scoring lots of points and piling up the accolades; in the playoffs in his second season, he scored 63 points against the Celtics prompting Larry Bird to comment afterwards that “I think it’s just God disguised as Michael Jordan.” Of course, people remember the quote and forget that the Bulls lost that game. It wasn’t until years later that Jordan realized that despite his amazing talent, he could not win without his teammates. Once he figured that out, he went on to become the greatest basketball player of all time. And, in fact, the codicil to his career, where he unretired and played two more years with the Washington Wizards, only serves to reinforce the point; by that point, it was more about him than his team, and it showed in the results.

Why am I rambling on about sports and teams and taking responsibility and seizing The Moment? I think there are parallels to management and life somewhere in here. I’ll start to get into that tomorrow.

I went skiing yesterday. It was awesome. Fresh snow, knee-deep powder in places, and no lift lines despite it being Saturday of a holiday weekend.

The part which never fails to astonish me is that I can still ski. I hadn’t been skiing in probably close to three years. And skiing is not like any other activity that I do - it’s not like I get practice with strapping long boards to my feet while walking down the street or sitting in a cubicle. And yet I got off the lift at the top of the mountain, started down the steep run (yes, I cleverly chose a black diamond run for my first run of the day/year), and had an awful hundred yards or so, where I was out of control and sliding all over the slope. Then the muscle memory kicked in. By halfway down the run, I was back in control, making smooth and short turns, facing my torso down the fall line and concentrating on keeping my weight forward. And I only got better from there.

It’s bizarre when I think about it. Where is this information stored? It’s got to be in my brain someplace, some pattern-building that was done when I learned to ski. But that knowledge sits there completely dormant, unused until the right set of contextual cues arise. Then, boom, the knowledge is loaded up and it’s right there and available to be accessed.

It makes me wonder whether I could leverage the equivalent of muscle memory in other aspects of life. I think this is probably the principle behind the Memory Palace, but I’ve never really experimented with it. I think they’re similar because it’s like the equivalent of mental tagging, like del.icio.us, using mental contextual cues to elicit the appropriate memories, where muscle memory depends on physical environmental cues.

The other observation of the day was that when I get the technique right, things are so easy. There were a few points during the day when I got the rhythm down, everything working together as I went down the hill. And it was almost effortless - it just felt right. And this immediate feedback is another neat thing about sports - when you do it right, you know. When I played volleyball, the balls which I hit the hardest were the ones that it felt effortless to hit - when my technique was good, everything in the body aligned and all of my wound-up energy exploded into the ball. When I was a little bit off-center or my timing was off, I could hit the ball, but there was a greater impact on my body (there were times when I felt like I almost tore my shoulder off).

Nothing deep, I know. But it’s kind of humbling to realize how well our bodies work sometimes, that we can learn some move, put it away for years, and break it out again when we want it.

P.S. As an aside, I’m a bit less worried about the cold of New York now. It was 20 degrees at the bottom of the mountain, less than 10 at the top, and I was unzipping my jacket during the day because I was too warm. Yay layers. Well, layers and hard work.

I played ultimate yesterday in my typical league. Even though our team eventually lost 15-13, I think I scored something like 8 or 9 of our points. Some of them I sky-ed over my defender, jumping up and snatching the disc at the highest point of my leap. A few I got because of great throws by my teammates, putting it to the open part of the field as I ran to the disc.

And I made one catch where time slowed down, inspired, no doubt, by my incessant consumption of sports on TV, where the slow-motion replay is a key device. My teammate had the disc about 10 yards out of the end zone. I made a poor cut, so I didn’t have much separation from my defender, maybe a couple feet, but my teammate decided to try to force the disc in there anyway with a hammer throw. It gets away from him, and it’s well behind me. My defender jumps and tips it further away from me. I’ve stopped, and jumped backwards at this point. And as I jump, time slows down. I see the disc start to float down, I see my hand reach out slowly to snatch the disc up away from the ground as I’m drifting horizontally towards it, I realize I shouldn’t land with the disc first because I might drop it, so I twist in mid-air to land on my back with the disc thrust triumphantly upwards, and time speeds up again.

It was a somewhat surreal experience - everything just stopped, and there was nothing in the world but me, floating through the air, and the disc spinning ahead of me. I can only remember two other occasions on which I’ve had it happen, so I think that makes this catch one of my top three most spectacular catches ever. The first time I remember it happening was in a Palo Alto hat tournament where the throw was terrible, several feet out of my reach in the end zone, but I dove and reached out full length to sneak my hand under the disc inches above the grass to grab it for the score. The other time was another one where it was way out of reach, and I just went to full extension layout with my left hand, grabbing it and tumbling several times.

So that was pretty satisfying. Even though we lost. Grr. Next week.

After reading this Pro Football Weekly article on possible trade scenarios for Randy Moss of the Minnesota Vikings, I wrote back to the author with one of my own. And, well, since I have a blog, I’ll share it here. On the off chance it actually happens, it’d be cool to say that I called it.

My hoped-for destination for Randy Moss is the Atlanta Falcons. It works for Randy Moss, because he works best in a playground offense - “I’ll go deep, and you throw it up high for me”. Michael Vick, the quarterback for the Falcons, also works best in a playground offense - “I’ll run around back here until somebody gets open, and then I’ll launch it 70 yards through the air”. (for those of you who don’t watch football, Vick is the most absurdly gifted athlete in the league right now - he’s faster than anybody on the field, and can throw the ball further than pretty much any other quarterback).

The Falcons desperately need a deep threat receiver. I came up with this scenario last week, but today’s game against the Eagles just proved it. The Eagles were able to put 9 defenders in the box (normally it’s 7), because the Falcons receivers just aren’t threats - they can’t get open. Now picture adding Randy Moss, the single most dangerous deep threat in the NFL. All of a sudden, you have to drop the safety back to protect against Vick flinging it 60 yards through the air to a streaking Moss in stride. Peerless Price, the current lead receiver, goes back to the #2 role that he’s more comfortable in (his best year as a pro was playing opposite Eric Moulds in Buffalo), because he can often beat the #2 cornerback on a defense. The running game opens up, because the defense can’t stack the box with defenders any more (this is even more significant because the Falcons already had the #1 rushing offense in the NFL this season partially due to Vick). The defense has to respect the pass _and_ the rush. And that opens up all sorts of playcalling possibilities. Play action becomes a brutal option, where Vick fakes to Dunn going into the line, the linebackers and safeties take two steps in to stop the run, then realize Vick still has the ball, and that Randy Moss has gotten behind them. Vick stops, launches it, and it’s a touchdown. It would be simply devastating.

I don’t think the Falcons have enough to interest the Vikings in a trade, but if I were them, I’d consider giving up a first round pick and some of their defensive line depth (maybe Chad Lavalais, a second year defensive tackle who’d be affordable for the Vikings).

I highly doubt it would happen, because, well, it’d be too much fun. A source did reveal today that the Vikings were leaning 60/40 towards trading Moss, according to ESPN.com, so we may get some fun trade scenarios this offseason. He’ll probably end up with Baltimore, because they’re even more desperate for a receiver than Atlanta. But Kyle Boller isn’t nearly as exciting as Vick (although he does have the arm strength - Boller turned into a high first round draft pick when he demonstrated to scouts that he could throw a football through the goalposts from the fifty yard lines from his knees). So I’m going to hold out hope for my scenario.