Bounce, by Matthew Syed; Open, by Andre Agassi
By Simon Redfern
Sunday, 21 November 2010
Four of the six books on the shortlist for this year’s William Hill Sports Book of the Year award, to be announced on 30 November, have already been reviewed here – Blood Knots, Beware of the Dog, Trautmann’s Journey and A Last English Summer.
Of the two which complete the set, Bounce (Fourth Estate, £12.99) is an ambitious attempt to try to discover what factors need to coincide to produce a sporting world-beater. Syed, a former Olympic competitor himself, has done his homework, drawing together research in sports science, neuroscience, psychology and economics in a book that fizzes and bubbles with ideas.
Some conclusions seem obvious – the harder you work, the better you get – while others are startling, such as the crucial importance of the time of year you were born.
Syed also looks at the reasons behind choking, explains how three (Polgar) sisters became the best female chess players in the world, and answers the question as to whether black athletes have genetic advantages that make them superior in some sports. Fascinating stuff.
Source: http://www.independent.co.uk
Editorial Reviews
Syed, sportswriter and columnist for the London Times, takes a hard look at performance psychology, heavily influenced by his own ego-damaging but fruitful epiphany. At the age of 24, Syed became the #1 British table tennis player, an achievement he initially attributed to his superior speed and agility. But in retrospect, he realizes that a combination of advantages—a mentor, good facilities nearby, and lots of time to hone his skills—set him up perfectly to become a star performer. He admits his argument owes a debt to Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, but he aims to move one step beyond it, drawing on cognitive neuroscience research to explain how the body and mind are transformed by specialized practice. He takes on the myth of the child prodigy, emphasizing that Mozart, the Williams sisters, Tiger Woods, and Susan Polgar, the first female grandmaster, all had live-in coaches in the form of supportive parents who put them through a ton of early practice. Cogent discussions of the neuroscience of competition, including the placebo effect of irrational optimism, self-doubt, and superstitions, all lend credence to a compelling narrative; readers who gobbled up Freakonomics and Predictably Irrational will flock to this one.
Child prodigies are not a myth. Syed is committing a common logical error. (See “survivorship bias.”)
Yes, for every one exceptional success there are huge numbers of kids whose parents fail to create an exceptional achiever, because the kid simply doesn’t have the native ability.