Malcolm Gladwell says I was right

Yesterday, I compared the quality of Gladwell's prose in The New Yorker to the stuff he posts on his own www.Gladwell.com and I suggested he benefited from the New Yorker support staff system. Today, a reader sends me a new interview that Bill Simmons of ESPN conducted with Gladwell, where he admits it:

"I write for the New Yorker, so I have an entire army of high-IQ fact checkers, and editors and copy editors working with me. To stretch the quarterback analogy here, I'm Jake Plummer [a normally mediocre quarterback who had a fine season this year due to his brilliant coaching staff]: I work in an offensive system designed to make me look way better than I actually am."

Then, to prove it, we get this exchange:

Simmons: "Can you explain the Contract Year phenomenon for me? What is it about the mentality of professional athletes where they sign huge contracts, then they either mail in the rest of their careers, or it takes them the requisite, "All right, I just made a crapload of money, maybe I don't have to try as hard" year before they bounce back in the second year? ... And why does this happen mostly in the NBA, and almost always with tall centers?" ...

Gladwell: This is one of my favorite topics. Let's do Erick Dampier. In his contract year at Golden State, he essentially doubles his rebounds and increases his scoring by 50 percent. Then, after he signs with Dallas, he goes back to the player he was before. What can we conclude from this? The obvious answer is that effort plays a much larger role in athletic performance than we care to admit. When he tries, Dampier is one of the top centers in the league. When he doesn't try, he's mediocre. So a big part of talent is effort. The second obvious answer is that performance (at least in centers) is incredibly variable. The same person can be a mediocre center one year and a top 10 center the next just based on how motivated he is. So is Dampier a top 10 player or a mediocre player? There is no way to answer that. It depends. He's not inherently good or bad. He's both. The third obvious answer is that coaching matters. If you are a coach who can get Dampier to try, you can turn a mediocre center into a top 10 center. And you, the coach, will be enormously valuable. (This is why Phil Jackson is worth millions of dollars a year.) If you are a coach who can't get Dampier to try, then you're not that useful. (You may want to insert the name Doc Rivers at this point.)

In the context of sports, none of us have any problem with any of these conclusions. But now let's think about it in the context of education. An inner city high school student fails his classes and does abysmally on his SATs. No college will take him, and he's basically locked out of the best part of the job market. Why? Because we think that grades and SATs tell us something fundamental about that kid's talent and ability -- or, in this case, lack of it.

But wait: what are the lessons of the contract year? A big part of talent is effort. Maybe this kid is plenty smart enough, and he's just not trying. More to the point, how can we say he isn't smart. If talent doesn't really mean that much in the case of Dampier -- if basketball ability is incredibly variable -- why don't we think of ability in the case of this kid as being incredibly variable? And finally, what does the kid need? In the NBA, we'd say he needed Phil Jackson or Hubie Brown or maybe just a short-term contract. We'd think that we could play a really important role in getting Dampier to play harder. So why don't we think that in the case of the kid? I realize I'm being a bit of a sloppy liberal here. But one of the fascinating things about sports, it seems to me, is that when it comes the way we think about professional athletes, we're all liberals (without meaning to be, of course). We give people lots of chances. (Think Jeff George). We go to extraordinary lengths to help players reach their potential. We're forgiving of mistakes. When the big man needs help with his footwork, we ship him off to Pete Newell for the summer. We hold players accountable for their actions. But we also believe, as a matter of principle, that players need supportive environments in order to flourish. It would be nice if we were as generous and as patient with the rest of society's underachievers.

Oh boy ...Where to begin?

Okay, so why do basketball teams often believe that seven foot centers have basketball potential if only they would stop dogging it, whereas society tends to assume that typical high school students with bad grades and bad test scores don't have any more academic potential than they've displayed? Let me think ... wait a minute ... I've almost got it ... Oh, yeah:

Because the seven foot centers are seven feet tall.

Now, if the high school student with the bad grades and bad test scores was reading Rawls' A Theory of Justice and Dennett's Consciousness Explained for his own amusement, we'd probably reassess our evaluations, too.

Obviously, the real reason seven footers in the NBA have worse work ethics than six footers in the NBA is because to make it in the NBA at six feet tall, you have to have everything other than height, including a great work ethic. But if you are seven feet tall, you don't need the whole package, because there are so few seven footers for NBA teams to select among. You're way out at the far right edge of the Height Bell Curve where there's not much competition. So, you can be lazy and get by, whereas a lazy six-footer in the NBA is history.

When I was at UCLA in 1980-82, out of 35,000 students, there were only two seven footers on campus: the basketball team's starting center Stuart Gray and the backup center Mark Eaton. Eaton was a campus joke, an awkward 25-year-old former auto mechanic who moved like he was better suited to a career of loading suitcases onto airplanes rather than being a high level athlete.

But he was 7'-3" and 275 pounds of solid muscle, a genuine giant. One day in 1981, I was standing in front of UCLA's Royce Hall, when I noticed two young men walking toward me across the huge open grassy quad. "Hey!" I said to myself. "There's something you don't see very often at UCLA. That tiny fellow talking to the normal-sized guy is a genuine midget." Then, another young man walked up to the pair. "Wow! Now there's two midgets with that regular guy," I thought. "What are the odds of that?"

Highly unlikely, I suddenly realized, as I underwent one of those gestalt snaps, like where the vase in the picture suddenly becomes two faces in profile. Now that there were three people, it became clear to me that the two "midgets" were six-footers and the "normal-sized guy" was Eaton.

So the Denver Nuggets took a chance on him as a "project" and Eaton evolved into a two-time NBA Defensive Player of the Year (although he was always a terrible scorer and only an above average rebounder).

Let's think about Gladwell's statement:

"But one of the fascinating things about sports, it seems to me, is that when it comes the way we think about professional athletes, we're all liberals (without meaning to be, of course). We give people lots of chances. (Think Jeff George). We go to extraordinary lengths to help players reach their potential. We're forgiving of mistakes. When the big man needs help with his footwork, we ship him off to Pete Newell for the summer."

I'll grant Gladwell that almost all sportswriters are liberals and claim to be true believers in nurture over nature, but surely the most spectacularly obvious fact about the NBA is that nature, especially height, matters hugely more than nurture. Eaton is one of the all time strongest examples of the power of nurture to improve a basketball player, but the overwhelming fact about him is still that he was 7'-3"!

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer