Winning and heroes

Even from a young age, boys typically tend to start focusing on sports. There's your favorite football (soccer for you Americans out there) team, favorite hockey team (ice, not field), etc. I guess in a way its funny that when listing sports, such as above, the one of the common things with them is the team aspect in them. And in a way I think this is healthy, emphasizing the meaning of the team and how the individual is nothing without the team. This thought can be seen present in economics as well. Adam Smith noticed a trend that when people were made to specialize in certain tasks, the outcome was far greater than what each individual could've achieved on their own. Positive synergy. I'm not that knowledgable on the Eastern cultures, but I understand that the concept of belonging to a group, be it a family or the society at large, is very strong there when compared to the west. And that this also exhibits certain very good aspects.

How the West differs from the East then is through the elevation of the individual. Even though ice hockey is a team sport, there are still the people like Mario Lemieux, Wayne Gretzky, Bobby Orr, and Gordie Howe, just to list a few. Those are the people that are really remembered. Not the teams they played for. And in these cases the person dominates the team in the sense that when the megastar leaves for another team, so does a portion of the fans. This can also be witnessed in tailoring; when a tailor leaves one company, his clients usually follow him.

There are of course the sports, then, that are obviously for individuals. And here it is of course very understandable that the individual is the one who is worshipped. Formula 1 and Ayrton Senna, golf and Payne Stewart--and yes, I know, both sports have "bigger" names, but I prefer the two listed here. But even these blokes have a team behind them. But I guess it's fair to say that if you take Tiger Woods and his team and switch me to be in Tiger's place, the results would be, well, not as great. So apparently there is something unique about certain individuals, after all.

But where does that certain something come from, and what exactly is it? Why was Senna so successful? How did Lemieux manage to score 1+1 the same day he returned back to ice from his long battle with Hodgkin's and while having had his last radiation treatment the same day? What makes us mere mortals so different? Or I guess that's a fairly trivial question, but what made Mario so much better than the average NHL player? Was it just that he had genes that happened to be so much better for ice skating, or that he started when he was very young, or maybe it was the mindset.

Tennis is a sport where it is sometimes said that the world's best players aren't the ones dominating the ranking lists, but instead their coaches. Tennis, like golf, is a game that is very subtle and many of the issues can be found from between your ears. From a technical standpoint the coaches may undoubtedly be very good, but the thing that separates the tennis coach from the tennis superstar is the ability to win. To score the points when the going gets tough and keep the whole package together even after a long battle. And maybe also the fact that the top tennis players are quite possibly younger and move a lot better than their coaches. But maybe most of the thing comes from within our heads. If you have the right mindset, you'll succeed, at least to some extent.

On a given day, a given circumstance, you think you have a limit and you go for this limit and you touch this limit and you think, ok, this is the limit. As soon as you touch this limit, something happens and you realise that you can suddenly go a little bit further. With your mind power, your determination, your instinct, and your experience as well, you can fly very high. --Ayrton Senna