Do you have your shit together today?
If you don’t want the added burden that comes with answering those questions, change positions. Play shooting guard. Be a tight end or a safety.
I know you have problems in your past. I know none of it is your fault. But we’re dealing with two unavoidable truths: we have a business to run and you have a career to start. Let’s say we combine those two and turn this into a happy marriage from Day One?
Dolphins general manager Jeff Ireland was viciously attacked in the media for asking Dez Bryant if his mother was a prostitute. It was a ridiculous question, but not in the way you might think. To me, it was a ridiculous question because Dez Bryant is a wide receiver. The question was irrelevant because Bryant doesn’t play a leadership position.
If Dez Bryant was a quarterback, I might have asked the same question.
I’m not a child-development expert but—to my knowledge, anyway—neither is any NFL or NBA general manager or personnel director. They need answers, though, and they need to ask the kinds of questions that get them as close as possible to the truth. The NFL and NBA have salary caps, so a GM can’t just buy his way out of a terrible mistake.
If I’m a general manager, I’m going to be extremely interested in your life from the time you were 4 till you were 16, or whenever you burst into the public consciousness. Those years could tell me which way you’re headed and how long it will take to get there. I need to ask questions. I need to make judgments.
If you don’t like it, or if you can’t handle it—hey, that probably tells me all I need to know.
There’s some urgency here. You’re an athlete, not a politician. You don’t have the kind of shelf life that will allow you to reinvent yourself in your early forties to atone for earlier stumbles. You’re not an academic who might seek therapy to unravel the meaning of all of your preteen obstacles.
Again: Are you ready to lead today?
Bobby Beathard, former GM of the Chargers, saw his legacy turn to scorched earth after drafting Ryan Leaf. In retrospect, don’t you think Beathard would have liked to know that Leaf was considered to be a bully by many in his small Montana hometown? Do you think it would have altered Beathard’s opinion had he known that Leaf had once been ejected from a Little League game?
Couldn’t a reasonable person see an early warning sign in Vince Young’s past, which included a mostly absentee father who had spent time in prison for burglary? Young, a chronic NFL underachiever like Leaf, had a career marked by several regrettable choices. As a pro, he quickly became friends with Pac Man Jones, whose own father was killed in a robbery.
The NFL has used the Wonderlic Cognitive Test for more than two decades to determine the learning and problem-solving capabilities of its draftees. What’s the one position that concerns team executives the most? Quarterback, by far. In fact, outside of that one position test scores are rarely revealed or discussed. Frankly, other positions don’t matter as much and don’t demand the same kind of scrutiny in terms of IQ, maturity, and quick decision making.
I met then-Duke point guard Kyrie Irving on my radio show, and within ninety seconds it was crystal clear to me that he would not only be an excellent player but the kind of person who could maintain a healthy image off the court. He was sharp, assertive, and confident. He looked me straight in the eye. When I said he looked frail—something I said both on and off the air—he responded with a clever verbal jab.
Irving had no posse and no need for one. He’s a leader and his own man, something you could feel in his presence. And sure enough, his background meshed nicely with his aura: he was born in Australia, his father played basketball internationally, and he grew up in a solid, suburban neighborhood in West Orange, New Jersey.
Solid family.
Solid kid.
It’s a universal equation.
I felt the same way meeting each of the three remarkable quarterbacks who played their rookie years in 2012: Andrew Luck of the Colts, Russell Wilson of the Seahawks, and Robert Griffin III of the Redskins. I knew they were each talented football players, but upon meeting them I was struck by the consistent qualities they exhibited. Each one made strong eye contact, had confident—but not arrogant—body language, and showed a sense I can only describe inarticulately as with-it-ness. Arm strength goes only so far; I was blown away by the poise and personality of each young man. These guys are going to be asked to lead groups of alpha males for the next decade, and Central Casting couldn’t have come up with better men for the job.
Not surprisingly, all three come from rock-solid families.
If you work in sports long enough, you can spot the success stories and bankruptcies years before they arrive. You don’t need to be a sociologist—just pay attention. I don’t need to be a marriage counselor to know a bad marriage when I see one.
Past performance absolutely can predict future results.
Right about now, I have a pretty good idea what you’re thinking:
Isn’t he going to mention John Wall?
I received massive amounts of criticism for calling out the Wizards’ then-rookie point guard one day on the air. I was charged with being everything from insensitive to racist. I think the context of my criticism got lost amid the noise.
After being introduced at his first NBA home game, Wall launched into a thirty-second dance known as “The Dougie.” This was outrageous to me, and I said so on the air. Maybe ten years into a career—with a few championships to your name—then maybe I could stomach an abbreviated version of what Wall did. But can you imagine anyone, in their first day of work, showboating into the office? It was such an incredible lapse of basic common sense and judgment that I slammed Wall for his immaturity and idiocy.
I don’t take any of it back. That one incident told me all I need to know about John Wall.
He just doesn’t get it.
He is a huge talent, but leadership and talent are two different things. Wall, to this point, lacks the fundamental leadership qualities, the overall with-it-ness that I see in RGIII and Luck and Irving.
Had I left my observations there, I probably wouldn’t have received much criticism. But I want to know why some guys possess these qualities and others don’t. I want to look into backgrounds and mentalities to find trends and truths.
Here’s what I found: Overwhelmingly, leadership starts at home. Sure enough, Wall grew up in a broken family. His father was incarcerated and released from prison around the time John turned eight. Through no fault of his own—let me repeat that, through no fault of his own—Wall is a kid who dealt with baggage and instability that I wouldn’t wish on anyone.
And even though it’s not his fault, it’s part of the package he brings to the NBA.
There’s no formula for success in professional sports. I’m not about to say that solid family + athletic talent = All Star. Still, it doesn’t hurt to play the percentages, and the percentages say a good family and a less chaotic background sets the stage for success in the rest of your life. This goes double for those in leadership positions. Make a list of great leaders in sports; most come from stable families with strong fathers.
John Elway. Derek Jeter. Magic Johnson. Tom Brady. Peyton and Eli Manning. Michael Jordan. Bill Belichick.
Now turn it around and make a list of some of the most troubled and disruptive athletes in sports: Dennis Rodman. Pac Man Jones. Milton Bradley. Chris “Bird Man” Andersen. Terrell Owens. Metta World Peace.
What do they have in common? Predictably unstable backgrounds.
Chaos doesn’t inhibit talent—in some cases, it ignites it—but it absolutely can become a roadblock to leadership, which is an essential quality for great quarterbacks and point guards.
The people who called me unfair or racist also criticized me for playing the role of radio sociologist. Look, this isn’t that hard. The evidence is out there, as close as a few keystrokes on the Internet.
There’s a bigger issue at play here: Are we supposed to refrain fro
m criticizing young athletes for fear of being labeled? Should we just close our eyes and pretend their actions are redeemable without any intervention or acknowledgment? Should we just let all the bankruptcy numbers rise and the string of broken lives continue? Or do we owe these talented young men guidance, even if it comes in the form of harsh words and occasional criticism?
In the International Review for the Sociology of Sport, Joshua Dubrow and Jimi Adams studied the backgrounds of NBA players for a ten-year period (1994–2004). Among their findings, they write, “The intersection of race, class and family structure presents unequal pathways into the league.” They discovered that a white athlete raised in a non–two-parent family was 33 percent less likely to make the pros, while the number among African-American families was 18 percent. Doesn’t it stand to reason that once in the NBA, the experience from those backgrounds would either assist or inhibit? Of course it does. We can’t leave our experiences behind just because we landed a good job or make a lot of money or suddenly have more friends than we can count.
Translation: dads matter—a lot; background matters—a lot.
And when it comes to point guards and quarterbacks, it’s crucial. It’s a topic that needs to be part of any honest discussion of sports.
I’ve made my judgment on Irving and Wall: Irving will rise to a higher level. It’s based largely on maturity, which is based largely on their backgrounds.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I’ve lived long enough and seen enough to believe wholeheartedly that I’m right. I’ve got the ligament pain and the tomato cravings to prove it.
But if it turns out that I am wrong, I guarantee one thing: there will be a long line of people ready to remind me.
Diamonds Aren’t Forever
You want a job with a litany of challenges? You want a job that’s filled with unpredictability and guesswork? You want a job where the decisions you make, many of them based on hunches and hope and the forces of an uncontrolled market, might end up costing your team as much as $100 million?
Perfect. Set your sights on becoming a Major League Baseball general manager.
There’s no job in sports that’s even remotely as difficult.
Name another sport where the performances of star players fluctuate as wildly. Name another sport where a team has to wait as many as five years just to see if a player it drafted in the first round is even good enough to play at all. Name another sport where the players are as fragile and the variables are so wild that even a player’s age—his age, for crying out loud—can’t always be taken at face value.
Let’s go right to one of the most ridiculous examples: in baseball, there’s an actual malady they call Dead Arm Syndrome. It’s a real thing. Has its own Wikipedia entry and everything. So if you’re the GM, there’s a chance the guy you just gave $85 million to $100 million to be your stud for the next five to seven years might walk up to the manager after his first start and say his arm is dead. It happened to the Red Sox and Daisuke Matsuzaka. (Not after his first start, but it happened.) When the Patriots sign Tom Brady to a big extension, they know at least one thing: he’s not going to tell Bill Belichick his arm’s dead. But you know what happens if he does? The Patriots pay him for the rest of that year and then cut him loose, at no further cost. Our friend the baseball GM doesn’t have that option; he’s stuck paying out the entire contract—down to the penny—for a dead arm.
When you break it down, it’s almost laughable.
It’s the closest thing to an impossible job.
Chone Figgins hit .298 and led the league in walks with 101 in 2009 with the Angels. He was good enough to get a few MVP votes. That off-season, he signed a big contract with the Mariners, and about an hour later his career was essentially over. He wasn’t particularly old when he signed with Seattle—thirty-two. There were no glaring red flags about his age or his fitness or his desire. He stole forty-two bases his last year with the Angels and forty-two his first year with the Mariners. (That was about the only thing he did well in three years in Seattle.)
What happened? Nobody really knows. He just stopped being a good major-league baseball player, and it cost the Mariners $35 million, including the $8 million they gave him before the 2013 season to simply go away.
In baseball, they shrug and move on.
Oh well. Happens all the time.
It is truly incredible how wildly the performances of baseball players fluctuate when compared with other sports. In basketball, unless there’s a serious injury, the decline is gradual. Guys slow down little by little and their playing time decreases along with it. When they announce their retirement, nobody’s surprised. Jason Kidd can play for two decades and still be productive providing he’s used correctly and he stays healthy.
You can’t say the same about a guy like Adrian Beltre. Not to pick on the Mariners again, but when they signed Adrian Beltre from the Dodgers in 2005 they thought they were buying instant contention. In his walk year with the Dodgers, Beltre was a beast: 48 homers, 121 RBIs, a .334 average, OPS of 1.017.
In five years in Seattle, he never even drove in 100 runs. That 1.017 OPS became .716 his first year as a Mariner. He went from Barry Bonds to David Freaking Eckstein over the course of one off-season. And he was twenty-six years old! How does that happen? Even factoring in the pitcher-friendly nature of Safeco Field, Beltre’s decline was outrageous. The Mariners should have been buying the best years of Beltre’s career; instead, about the only things he did consistently in Seattle were play defense and strike out.
Oh, and the Mariners ended up paying Beltre more than $60 million for his efforts. And the next three years of Beltre’s career? He drove in at least 100 runs in each of those years and finished third in the American League MVP balloting after a huge year with the Rangers in 2012.
How crazy is that?
You know who took the heat for Beltre’s collapse? Well, Beltre took a little of it, but he got to move on and make tons more money and continue an impressive career. The guy who got the bulk of the blame was the general manager, Bill Bavasi, who rode the signings of Figgins and Beltre off into the sunset after the 2008 season. Sure, he looked bad, but how could he have known? It’s not like he was the only guy willing to give those two players big, multiyear contracts. He’s just the one who got stuck.
It’s not just the guys shopping off the rack who get burned. The big-market boys do, too. In his first four years with the Yankees, Mark Teixeira went from being a possible Hall of Fame candidate—his 2009 year was phenomenal—to being an average hitter while playing in a tremendous hitters’ park. The deterioration was sudden and inexplicable, but it was real. By the time he was 32, he was just another guy.
The Mets have become a futile franchise. They have attendance problems and identity problems and they’ve lost the goodwill of most of the fan base. But in 2012, they had one transcendent player: R.A. Dickey.
He wrote a captivating and compelling best seller.
He had a phenomenal season on the mound and won the National League Cy Young Award.
He was a novelty, relying on the knuckleball, a nearly extinct but highly entertaining pitch.
He represented the team well by routinely giving interesting quotes from a generally sour locker room.
He had one bad outing, was a wonderful story, and became one of the few reasons to embrace the franchise.
What happened in the off-season? The Mets traded him to Toronto. They didn’t trust his success enough to count on it happening again, and so they took one of their two marketable players (David Wright being the other) and packaged him in a deal that brought a bunch of young prospects.
The trade didn’t bring a huge outcry from whatever is left of the Mets’ fan base. You know why? They could see the reasoning. Nobody can safely say that R.A. Dickey’s 2012 season wasn’t a fluke. Not even the Blue Jays. Again, there’s the difference between the baseball GM and the guys in the other sports: it’s rare—exceedingly rare—for a football or basketball player in his prime
to have one transcendent season and then utterly fail the next season without injury being a factor. In baseball, it happens.
In fact, you can make the case that 40 percent of the time major-league starting pitchers don’t have it on the day they start. And that’s exactly how they describe it: I didn’t have it today. And that’s acceptable in baseball, because it’s just the way things are. A guy making $15 million to make 35 starts sits at his locker and says, “Well, fellas—just didn’t have it today,” and everybody nods their heads and moves along. It’s nobody’s fault.
Imagine being the guy who has to make the case for spending all that money. Your livelihood is linked to so many random, non-scientific factors, and you have no control over any of them.
To cite another example: name the last time an NBA general manager was shocked to learn that his starting center was actually five years older than anybody thought. It happens in baseball often enough for general managers to include it in their research when they’re looking to sign a Dominican player.
Let’s compare drafts. The NBA draft is two rounds. Every game of every college team is on television or live-streamed over the Internet. The amount of research that is handed to an NBA general manager is astounding.
The baseball draft is a circus. Seriously, I don’t know how they can even keep it all straight. They’re tossing out names faster than a horse-racing announcer—do we really even know if all these guys really exist? They draft up to forty rounds—plus compensatory picks—and that’s an improvement. It used to be that teams could draft until they wanted to stop drafting. If you wanted to stay all night and into the next day picking every one of the owner’s nephews and a junior-college pitcher whose dad owns the local Mercedes dealership, knock yourself out. A team could sit all by itself, tossing out names until the GM fell asleep or the phone went dead. Now they say the draft is “up to” forty rounds. You want to pack up after thirty-five rounds because the owner doesn’t have any nephews this year, go right ahead. Still, the number of baseball players that must be scouted to fill all the minor-league teams in an organization is astounding.
You Herd Me!: I'll Say It If Nobody Else Will Page 10