The Captain Class: The Hidden Force That Creates the World’s Greatest Teams

280 Pages·2017·2.45 MB·English

by  Sam Walker

Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Prologue
Part I: Greatness and Its Origins: The Birth of a Freak Team
Chapter One: Alpha Lions: Identifying the World’s Greatest Teams
Chapter Two: Captain Theory: The Importance of “Glue Guys”
Chapter Three: Talent, Money, and Culture: Alternative Explanations
Chapter Four: Do Coaches Matter? The Vince Lombardi Effect
Part II: The Captains: The Seven Methods of Elite Leaders
Chapter Five: They Just Keep Coming: Doggedness and Its Ancillary Benefits
Chapter Six: Intelligent Fouls: Playing to the Edge of the Rules
Chapter Seven: Carrying Water: The Hidden Art of Leading from the Back
Chapter Eight: Boxing Ears and Wiping Noses: Practical Communication
Chapter Nine: Calculated Acts: The Power of Nonverbal Displays
Chapter Ten: Uncomfortable Truths: The Courage to Stand Apart
Chapter Eleven: The Kill Switch: Regulating Emotion
Part III: The Opposite Direction: Leadership Mistakes and
Misperceptions
Chapter Twelve: False Idols: Flawed Captains and Why We Love Them
Chapter Thirteen: The Captaincy in Winter: Leadership’s Decline, and How
to Revive It
Epilogue
Appendix
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
By Sam Walker
About the Author
My ego demands—for myself—the success of my team.
—BILL RUSSELL
PROLOGUE
The first time I stepped through the looking glass into the private sanctum of a
professional locker room, I had just turned twenty-five. I had a notebook jammed
into the back pocket of my college khakis and a press credential looped around
my neck. If I didn’t look like I knew what I was getting into, that’s because I
didn’t. This locker room belonged, as fate would have it, to Michael Jordan’s
Chicago Bulls.
Since that March evening in 1995, I have seen Tom Brady’s Patriots win their
first Super Bowl and mingled with an FC Barcelona team steaming toward a
European soccer title. I have watched cyclists storm up Mont Ventoux at the Tour
de France and been doused with forty-nine-dollar champagne by the New York
Yankees as they celebrated a third straight World Series victory.
For a reporter, all of this was exactly as charmed as it sounds. Every
championship brought with it the guarantee of good play and a generous word
count in the newspaper, not to mention the chance to tell everybody who’d listen
that yes, I was there.
Behind the glamour, however, there was one persistent problem with my career
choice. Every time I watched some group of euphoric athletes collecting its
trophy, I had an intense personal reaction that surprised me. I felt jealous.
Every summer, throughout grade school, I played second base for a
neighborhood baseball team called the Burns Park Bombers. For the most part,
there was nothing remarkable about this team. Our pitching was decent, our
hitting was serviceable, and our coach was a taciturn guy with oversize glasses
who conducted practices with a cigarette bobbing between his lips. We usually
won about 50 percent of our games and played just well enough to earn the
coveted postgame trip to Dairy Queen.
In the summer of 1981, however, something changed. The nose-pickers who
used to let balls roll between their legs started making competent plays. When hits
were needed, hits materialized, and our pitchers threw just enough strikes to hold
the lead. All of us seemed to have escaped the confines of our eleven-year-old
bodies: We floated above the diamond in awe as these children who looked
suspiciously like us transmogrified into a formidable team.
We finished the season 12–0.
What I realized about this glorious experience, years later, is that it had forever
modified my expectations. The Bombers gave me a taste of what it was like to
play on an excellent team, and this had rewired my brain to believe it was my
God-given right to experience the same sensation many times over. As the years
passed, however, it became painfully clear it was not. The 1981 Bombers were
the only championship team I ever played for.
As I started writing about a multitude of sports, and parachuting in to cover
some of the world’s best teams, the memories of that summer kept bubbling up.
Feelings of disappointment and longing took possession of a modest apartment
somewhere at the back of my brain. If it’s true that our lifelong obsessions stem
from seemingly mundane events in our childhoods, then I suppose this is mine. I
ache to be part of a great team.
—
Behind the scenes with these elite groups of athletes, I always paid rapt attention.
I studied how they spoke to one another, noted their mannerisms and body
language, and observed their pregame rituals. When they offered theories about
what made their collaborations successful, I jotted them down in my notebook.
No matter the sport, I always heard the same handful of explanations—we
practice hard, we play for each other, we never quit, we have a great coach, we
always come through in the clutch. More than anything, I was struck by the
businesslike sameness of these groups and by how nonchalantly their members
spoke about winning. It was as if they were part of a machine in which every cog
and sprocket was functioning precisely as intended. “You do your job so
everyone around you can do their job,” Tom Brady once said. “There’s no big
secret to it.”
In 2004, I took a leave from my job to write a book about competing in
America’s toughest fantasy-baseball expert competition. My strategy was to spend
many days and nights with real major-league teams collecting inside information.
The club I followed most closely was the Boston Red Sox.
The Red Sox franchise had a long and glorious history of failure and
heartbreak dating back to 1918, the last time it had won a World Series. The
moment I met them at spring training in February, I found little evidence that this
season would be any different. Despite a sprinkling of stars, the roster was largely
composed of misfits and castoffs—oddly shaped and sloppily bearded party
animals with unconventional skills that other teams didn’t value. Behind the
scenes I found them to be candid and funny, unpredictable and hopelessly
undisciplined—a profile that would earn them the nickname The Idiots.
When Boston fell nine and a half games behind their rivals, the dynastic New
York Yankees, I wasn’t the least bit surprised. I believed my first impression had
been spot-on. The Red Sox were nothing like the dominant teams I had known.
They weren’t championship contenders.
In early August, however, the Red Sox—like that youth baseball team of mine
—seemed to fall under the influence of a spell. The Idiots started playing with
confidence and ferocity, keeping cool under pressure and projecting a sense of
unity and purpose I hadn’t seen in the spring. After clambering back up the
standings and sneaking into the postseason, the Red Sox met the Yankees in the
American League Championship Series and promptly lost the first three games.
Before Game 4, the bookmakers put their odds of survival at 120 to 1. They
would come within three outs of being eliminated.
Yet the Red Sox didn’t fold. They not only battled back to win Game 4 in extra
innings, they defeated the Yankees three more times, capping the most dramatic
postseason comeback in baseball history. Next came the World Series, where
they swept the St. Louis Cardinals four games to none.
To Bostonians, who had endured one of the severest dry spells in sports history,
this championship felt like deliverance. Three million people jammed the streets
for a victory parade. There was even talk in the sports world that these Red Sox
deserved a place among the greatest ballclubs of all time.
Here was a team that had been left for dead in July—and yet somehow the
players had pulled together to form a brilliant, resilient whole. I wouldn’t call the
Red Sox a dynasty—it would take them another three years to win a second title
—but out of nowhere, they’d been gripped by a contagion that allowed them to
play like every other magnificent team I’d observed. What I wanted to know, but
couldn’t fathom, was why this happened. What provided the spark?
—
The following spring I started reporting an analysis piece for The Wall Street
Journal that I hoped to call “The Secret Lives of Elite Teams.” My plan was
simple: I’d come up with an objective formula for identifying the ten most
accomplished dynasties in sports history, then trace their performances back to
the moment they made the “turn” toward greatness to see if there were any
similarities. Maybe these teams had all hired an inspiring coach, or drafted a
standout player, or developed an innovative strategy.
The fact that this article never ran in the paper is not an indication of flagging
interest. In fact, I developed the opposite problem. The deeper I dug, the more
complex and engrossing the subject became. Just deciding how to define a “team”
turned out to be a major undertaking requiring several weeks of spadework.
As I type this sentence, I’ve been working on the same line of inquiry for
almost eleven years. I have reviewed and researched the accomplishments of
more than twelve hundred teams across the world in thirty-seven major categories
of sport since the 1880s. I have ripped through hundreds of books, articles,
documentaries, scientific papers, and statistical analyses. I have tracked down
interview subjects in Auckland, Barcelona, Boston, Chicago, Havana, London,
Los Angeles, Madrid, Melbourne, Montreal, Moscow, New York, Paris, Perth,
Rio de Janeiro, and dozens of sleepy hamlets in between.
When I started out, I never expected to reach one emphatic conclusion. I
assumed the fingerprints of these elite units would have many of the same whorls
and ridges yet no perfect matches. In the end, I was shocked to discover that the
world’s most extraordinary sports teams didn’t have many propulsive traits in
common, they had exactly one. And it was something I hadn’t anticipated.
The Captain Class is the culmination of a lifetime of watching sports, two
decades of spending time in the orbit of world-class teams, and my own lengthy
investigation into what drives the dynamics behind a surpassing collective effort.
It’s not the story of one team’s triumph, although there are many triumphs
recounted here. It’s not a biography of one transcendent star or coach, although
many legendary figures will be discussed. Though it uses sports as its source
material, it’s ultimately a book about a single idea—one that is simple, powerful,
and can be applied to teams in many other fields, from business and politics to
science and the arts.
It’s the notion that the most crucial ingredient in a team that achieves and
sustains historic greatness is the character of the player who leads it.
PART I
GREATNESS AND ITS ORIGINS
The Birth of a Freak Team