– Louis Pasteur
There are two lines of commentary in sports which piss me off. The first is the whole excuse of “we have to work harder.” This is usually bullshit. Everyone in sports works hard. The worst offenders along this front are in the game of hockey, but every sport goes has similar declarations of the need to work harder. There are occasionally exceptions, but for the most part, talent prevails. You don’t need to “work harder.” You usually need to play better, which often also means that you need to play smarter.
Now, I understand that there is some politics involved when you’re a coach and you’re answering questions from the media, particularly after a bad loss. You don’t want to just come out and say your team is dumb.
That didn't end so well for Coach Callahan, who was fired from the Raiders after a 4-12 season.
Winners tend to use lame explanations like "we worked harder than them" to explain their success, but particularly frequent winners start using the most annoying cliché in sports, which is talking about how they are a "team of destiny." The idea being that somehow fate or chance is on your side, and that you're being somehow spirited by Fortuna or Divine Providence or (pick any deistic system of choice) towards the promised land that is a championship. What utter rubbish. The outcome is not scripted ahead of time. Attempting to do so is, in fact, considered the biggest sin in sports.
That being said, winners do tend to get the breaks. In part, this is due to the fact that they are in position to capitalize when opportunities present themselves. Consider what happened last Sunday in Houston, for example. The Seahawks are one of the favourites to be in the Super Bowl this year. They look like one of the 2-3 best teams in the NFL. They had a tough road game against a good Texans team and were struggling on the road, trailing 20-13 late in the game. Now consider the quote at the top of this entry from Pasteur – "chance favours the prepared mind." Through film study, the Seahawks had come to suspect that a particular formation would result in a favourite play of the Texans – faking a run to their left, the QB keeping the ball on the fake and then throwing back to their right. When they saw that particular formation with 2:51 left in the game, the Seahawks defense knew exactly what to do – a safety sneaks up and blitzes from the left edge, with the left CB expecting the short pass and jumping the route. When you are prepared, good things can happen.
If you notice, Seahawks CB Richard Sherman runs 50 yards with only one shoe:
This is because Richard Sherman jumped out of his shoes when he saw this terrible pass from Texans QB Matt Schaub.
There is a difference between being lucky and your opponents being stupid. It was a terrible choice of plays to begin with – why would you call this play with a 7-point lead and 2:51 left in the game at all, but particularly against a team whose best players are their ball-hawking defensive backs who are looking to force turnovers? There hasn't been an interception returned to tie the score this late in a game in the history of the modern NFL, and with good reason – teams that are winning don't do stupid stuff like put the ball up for grabs!
The play call is horrible, but the execution is even worse. It's 3rd down for the Texans at this point. OK, so the play doesn't work. Take a sack or throw the ball into the stands, then punt the ball and let your defense finish off the game. You do basically anything other than what Schaub did. So no, that doesn't count as luck.
Now this, on the other hand, could probably be construed as luck:
WTF? I was at this game, up in Section 330 of Phone Co. Park. Game 7 of the NLCS between the Giants and the Cardinals. Giants RF/resident weirdo Hunter Pence's thrice hit ball had the weirdest spin I have ever seen and promptly did this:
That play made no sense, yet it scored 3 runs and the Giants went on to win 9-0 and go to the World Series.
Fast forward :45 in this video, which is probably the greatest case of luck in sports history. (For some reason I can't get the video to sit on this page right.) Boris Becker won the US Open that year, but he was dead to rights in this 2nd round match with Derek Rostagno. His shot isn't very good at all, but then it skips off the tape – probably the only way he could win the point. This was Match Point, mind you, and Becker then rallied from there.
But it's stuff like what I just showed above which gives rise to the whole 'team of destiny' idea. Weird stuff starts to happen. Unlikely heros step up. All the breaks and the bounces seem to go their way. And on the road to a championship, there is almost always a moment in time where the victors nearly fell from grace. If the Seahawks go on to win the Super Bowl this year, they will no doubt look back to the day when Matt Schaub lost his mind as a pivotal moment in their season: a moment when victory just sort of fell their way, and they won in spite of themselves.
The big European football leagues often seem like fait accompli from very early on, an inevitable procession to a coronation, but then something nuts like this will happen from time to time. You sometimes see a team in college football that is completely dominant and seems unstoppable, but the team I will begrudgingly admit is the best I have ever seen still almost lost at Cal. There is, almost always, a great escape along the way to a championship – a moment where luck seemed to go the winners' way.
And this is how we want it. What's the point of a good story without conflict? All endings have to be earned in literature and cinema – there is no happy ending without potential for sadness. (And, conversely, the most tragic endings in the arts are those in which hope and salvation are possible.) The winners always get the breaks. We're talking about minute differences here between winning and losing here. Some of the greatest teams in history didn't win championships (the 116-win Mariners and undefeated UNLV basketball team immediately come to mind). And since the winners are the one who end up writing history, they often like to gloss over the fact that they very nearly got beat. This is true in sports, in war, in just about everything. If you didn't nearly lose, you wouldn't appreciate winning quite as much.
Like I say, the key is to be in position to take advantage of luck when it happens – and there is no guarantee that it will, mind you. But it has nothing to do with destiny when luck goes your way. It just happens sometimes. God doesn't care if you cover the spread. God doesn't have a bet on the game.
