I think before we plan practice for skills or system it is important to define exactly what the game is. Here are some hockey facts.

In a game between 2 equal teams with good skills you are on;
offense 35% of the time
defense 35% of the time
the puck is loose 30% of the time (not on someones stick) For low skilled teams the loose puck situation is much higher.

The average for someone to carry the puck is about 2.5".
The average for the team to have the puck is about 4.5".
Each team has possession and loses possession of the puck about 200 times during a game.

So a hockey game is a constant transition between the 4 Game Playing Roles. Every player is always in one of these roles. There is never a time when a player has nothing to do.

Role One: player has the puck.
Role Two: players supports the puck carrier, close player creating a 2-1 and farther away width and depth.
Role Three: player checks the puck carrier with either a pressure or contain decision..
Role Four: player gives either close or farther support to the first checker depending on whether the first checker pressured or contained.

If you look at the game in this manner then you realize that good habits like facing the puck, always having your stick on the ice, angling, moving to open ice quickly with the puck and again to open ice once you pass it are essential. It takes a team about 2" to get into good defending position after losing the puck, so quick transition to the attack is essential if you want to attack an unorganized defense as compared to an orgainized defense. Good technique at game speed are the tools you need.

The coach has to organize practices that not only work on one game playing role at a time but also on the constant transition between roles. One game playing role drills are fine for perfecting a technique but if you only do 1 on 1's in drills where the defender and attacker knows it is a 1 on 1 and after the shot they go back to the lineup then you are not practicing the reality of hockey which is a. both players read the situation. b. attack and defend with good technique. c. after the shot the attacker follow the shot for the rebound and defender deny a second shot. d. make a second play on offense or the defender start the breakout.

A coach who doesn't practice transition is missing the essence of the game.

Some other numbers to consider are:

1. A turnover in the offensive end followed by an attack the other way results in a scoring chance about 2% of the time. (why do teams play so cautiously on the forecheck)
2. Neutral zone turnovers give up scoring chances 7-10% of the time.
3. Defensive zone turnovers give up scoring chances about 25% of the time. In other words the farther the puck is from your net the more time you have to get back and defend. (so what is the point of the neutral zone trap being a teams only forecheck)

Also teams that play systems that are purely contain or totally aggressive also don't understand the game. The plan should be to pressure when possible (you are within a half stick and have a good angle) and contain when there is no chance for the closest player to get a stick on the puck and body on body.

So hockey is more like a tennis game than like basketball (pplays are similar to bball). i.e. hit the ball-offense, ball in the air - loose puck -get in defensive position to hit - defense. Constant changing of roles.

Our practices and our team play philosophy should reflect this.

It seems to be really interesting book (ordered it today). It allso has really interesting website.
http://thetalentcode.com/

Kai

I am also awaiting my copy of Talent Code. I'll offer up another book for those still looking for more on a similar subject. Bounce by Matthew Syed is a good glimpse into the Science of Success. Unlike others, it is directed at athletes and quotes The Talent Code, Outliers(Gladwell) and (Blink) Gladwell, along with others. It goes into the psyche of athletes as well. A worthwhile read.

Tom wrote "A coach who doesn't practice transition is missing the essence of the game" In my humble opinion, the key to coaching is to get players to think in terms of the 4 Roles... until they get so comfortable with it that they don't even have to think about them anymore. When I get my team to that point I will consider the season to be a success. There is nothing in hockey but transition, that's why traditional drills do not work. I thank God for this website.

Tom,

Hope you had a good trip to Europe! I will call you to hook up this week so we can get caught up.

Glad to hear you read one of the books I was telling you about! I knew it would strike a chord with you! Some Hockey Canada people had some good one-on-one time with Daniel Coyle while over there. He made a positive impact in helping cement their beliefs that we need to continue our work on our LTAD model (which the Americans have rolled out nationally this past year as the ADM.)

I have heard rumours of some very interesting (and most likely controversial) programs that will start getting implemented in minor hockey... perhaps as early as this fall; after the Hockey Canada AGM wraps up this weekend in Montreal! They are to designed to further enhance player development... stay tuned!

Another book that may be of interest to you and your readers is "Spark - the revolutionary new science of exercise and the brain" by John J. Ratey. He just presented at MRU and at Red Deer College. This has created further interest (national / provincial / local) in how this can be applied to the Canadian LTAD model. I am in conversations with many people about this as I believe we should look to try to implement these findings into the school systems. (For all that are interested in books, please go to my previous post about books I have read / am reading for other titles / recommendations.)

Cheers,

Eric, it was posted Dec 7 2009. Here is the link for those interested:

http://hockeycoachingabcs.com/forum/viewtopic.php?showtopic=307

Yup. Not written in scientific prose. Don't even need to drink a BIG beer to make sense of it. Check out my reading list for some other titles (above) as there are some good'ers on it! Try your local library first as it will save you a few scheckles...

More from Daniel Coyle... an article written for the NY Times - they used to produce a segment called "Play Magazine" which unfortunately is discontinued...

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/sports/playmagazine/04play-talent.html?_r=1&ex=1173758400&en=ff5fcfa9ff62bb41&ei=5070

This is a long read, but IMHO, a very good one for those of you who want to know "the secret!"




How to Grow a Super-Athlete

The future of tennis? Spartak's Little Group, ready to impress.

By DANIEL COYLE
Published: March 4, 2007

This story could begin in many places — it's about beginnings, after all — but I'd like to start with the recent evening when my 4-year-old daughter, Zoe, appeared before me wielding a yellow baseball bat and an important announcement: batting tees were for babies. From now on, she would hit real pitches, like the big kids.

By way of biography, I should mention that Zoe, the youngest of four, is considered one of the finest all-around mini-athletes in the history of our house. She's widely celebrated for her ability to throw balls really far, to hop on one foot across the whole front porch, and to run faster than a superfast airplane can fly. So as I walked (and she raced) down to the basement and located an inflatable purple ball, I fully expected Zoe to take to hitting like she'd taken to everything else.

But Zoe, it turned out, pretty much stunk.

Toss after toss, she missed. Five tosses. Then 10. I tried throwing the ball softer, harder, lower, higher. I got a different bat, offered advice and abundant encouragement, tried covertly to pitch the ball so it hit the bat. Nothing worked. Zoe whiffed with virtuosity and enthusiasm. Against my nobler instincts, I found myself, like the purple ball, getting a bit deflated. I felt as if I were receiving a grimly polite report suggesting that Zoe, despite her athletic promise, had regrettably tested negative for hand-eye coordination.

A few days later, we did it again. This time Zoe started off missing, then hit a foul ball. Then two fair balls in a row. Then three. She was watching the ball now, timing it. As the saying goes, something had clicked. Zoe hit the last toss squarely, and the purple ball zipped past my ear and smacked the window with a resounding gong. We froze at the unexpected sound, enjoying the moment and the question echoing beneath.

What, exactly, just happened?

What is talent? It's a big question, and one way to approach it is to look at the places where talent seems to be located — in other words, to sketch a map. In this case, the map would show the birthplaces of the 50 top men and women in a handful of professional sports, each sport marked by its own color. (Tennis and golf handily rank performance; for team sports, salaries will do.) The resulting image — what could be called a talent map — emerges looking like abstract art: vast empty regions interspersed with well-defined bursts of intense color, sort of like a Matisse painting.

Canada, for instance, is predictably cluttered with hockey players, but significant concentrations also pop up in Sweden, Russia and the Czech Republic. The United States accounts for many of the top players in women's golf, but South Korea has just as many. Baseball stars are generously sprinkled across the southern United States but the postage-stamp-size Dominican Republic isn't far behind. In women's tennis, we see a dispersal around Europe and the United States, then a dazzling, concentrated burst in Moscow.

The pattern keeps repeating: general scatterings accompanied by a number of dense, unexpected crowdings. The pattern is obviously not random, nor can it be fully explained by gene pools or climate or geopolitics or Nike's global marketing budget. Rather, the pattern looks like algae starting to grow on an aquarium wall, telltale clumps that show something is quietly alive, communicating, blooming. It's as though microscopic spores have floated around the atmosphere in the jet stream and taken root in a handful of fertile places.

A quick analysis of this talent map reveals some splashy numbers: for instance, the average woman in South Korea is more than six times as likely to be a professional golfer as an American woman. But the interesting question is, what underlying dynamic makes these people so spectacularly unaverage in the first place? What force is causing those from certain far-off places to become, competitively speaking, superior?

In early December, I traveled to the heart of one of those breeding grounds, the Spartak Tennis Club in Moscow. Russia is the birthplace of a group of athletes who have affected the World Tennis Association rankings in the same way that zebra mussels have affected the Great Lakes — which is to say, pretty much clogged them. The invasion happened swiftly: at the end of 2001, Russia had one woman (Elena Dementieva) in the W.T.A. Tour's top 30. By the start of 2007, Russian women accounted for fully half of the top 10 (Dementieva, Maria Sharapova, Svetlana Kuznetzova, Nadia Petrova and Dinara Safina) and 12 of the top 50. Not to mention 15-year-old Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, who was the International Tennis Federation's No. 1-ranked junior and who was joined in the top 500 by five countrywomen also named Anastasia.

Spartak, usually preceded in the tennis press by the word "famous" or "legendary," had produced three of the top six Russians (Dementieva, Safina and Anastasia Myskina), along with Anna Kournikova, now retired. Tournament pairings regularly became all-Spartak affairs, most memorably the 2004 French Open final, Myskina over Dementieva, the continuation of a rivalry the two began at age 7. To put Spartak's success in talent-map terms: this club, which has one indoor court, has achieved eight year-end top-20 women's rankings over the last three years. During that same period, the entire United States has achieved seven.

"They're like the Russian Army," says Nick Bollettieri, the founder of the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy in Bradenton, Fla., and the former coach to Sharapova, Andre Agassi and other top-ranked players. "They just keep on coming."

Getting to Spartak, however, takes more than a talent map; it's not located on any real maps. Fortunately, help arrived in the form of Elena Rybina, a chain-smoking, speed-talking translator who worked part-time for the Russian Tennis Federation and who possessed a fast-alternating combination of film noir toughness and childlike giddiness that I took as the quintessence of modern Russia.

"I learned my English listening to music, like Elton John," she said. " 'Crocodile Rocks'! I love it!"

We rode the subway half an hour northeast to Sokolniki Park and started walking. And walking. Sokolniki is almost twice the size of Central Park, considerably less central and only vaguely parklike. It's basically a huge forest of birch and elm trees filled with a disconcertingly energetic population of stray dogs. We walked past an abandoned chess club, an abandoned amusement park, an abandoned factory and the smashed onion dome of what appeared to be an abandoned church.

"It is very beautiful in summer," Rybina assured me as we passed a pond frosted with green scum. "But Spartak, I must warn you, is not so nice."

"What do you mean?"

Rybina lighted a Davidoff cigarette and raised her eyebrow into a Gothic arch. "Spartak is not exactly like a palace."

We turned a corner, followed a road for a few hundred yards and saw a loose assortment of peaked buildings and shotgun shacks that resembled a dilapidated ski village. Windows were dim cataracts of warped plastic, paint was scabbed and peeling and the buildings were frescoed in a rich coat of grime. A glaze of ice coated the club's 15 outdoor clay courts, as it did for six months of the year. A beat-up 18-wheeler lent the scene a postnuclear, "Mad Max" vibe. The only bright color came from the rainbow sheen of diesel fuel in the puddles.

Rybina shrugged indifferently and lighted another Davidoff. We walked past the inexplicably manned guard post, past an A-frame that appeared to be a storehouse for scrap metal and toward a larger structure that resembled a greenhouse. We ducked through a low door and onto the court. The surface was worn down in frequently trodden spots, like cathedral steps. Two wooden sticks nudged the sagging net futilely toward regulation height. The fluorescent lights buzzed. "We are lucky," Rybina whispered. "The heat is working." When it doesn't, the kids play in their coats. 1

The class, called the Little Group, had already arrived. They wore heavy coats and toted their tennis rackets in backpacks, sports duffels and plastic grocery bags. At first glance, they looked like a standard-issue assortment of 5- to 7-year-olds: there was Denis, the handsome blond in the blue turtleneck; Alexandra, the lanky towhead in the green T-shirt; Gunda, the smiley ponytailed girl in the silver shoes; and Vova, the revved-up boy with the Asiatic eyes who was the class's only 4-year-old. There were 12 students in all. They had been coming to Spartak three times a week since September; by now they'd been on the court perhaps 40 times. As the lesson began, a few of them made their final preparations, reaching into their bags for what appeared to be their good luck charms: a tidy gallery of stuffed dinosaurs, bunnies and pandas formed on the wall behind the base line.

The coach, 77-year-old Larisa Preobrazhenskaya (pronounced pray-oh-brah-ZHEN-skya), stood at the sideline, watching. She wore a red-and-white tracksuit and a knowing, amused expression. Preobrazhenskaya was Spartak's most renowned youth coach, but she wore her authority lightly, radiating a grandmotherly twinkle behind hooded eyes. She'd been quite a player in her day, the 1955 Soviet singles champion. She still looked athletic, sauntering around the court with a John Wayne limp caused by a sore hip. The parents huddled by the door, watchful and silent.

The students formed a circle on one side of the net and started to stretch. I watched, scoping for telltale signs of überkinder superiority, but saw nothing of the sort. The Little Group proceeded to hustle energetically through a 15-minute set of calisthenics worthy of Jack LaLanne: jumping jacks, hops, crab walking, bear walking, skipping, sidestepping, zigzagging through a line of orange cones. I was half expecting them to pull out medicine balls, when they actually did pull out medicine balls, passing them back and forth earnestly like so many extras in a Rocky movie.

"All the motions," Preobrazhenskaya would tell me. "It is important to do everything, every practice."

The Little Group paired off with rackets and began imitatsiya — rallying with an imaginary ball. They bounced lightly from foot to foot, they turned, they swung, the invisible balls flew. Preobrazhenskaya roamed the court like a garage mechanic tuning an oversize engine: realigning a piston here, tightening a flywheel there. Several times, she grasped their small arms and piloted their bodies through the stroke. Thus the lesson began, and with it the unspoken implication: the great, rusty Spartak machine was coming to life, carrying its cargo of mini-geniuses another step closer toward inevitable glory.

As I pictured the scale of the David and Goliath phenomenon this unlikely scene embodied, the question arose: how does Spartak do it?

Explanations were not in short supply. I'd heard plenty from American tennis coaches, a nicely bulleted list that included a Slavic gene pool that produces a seemingly inexhaustible supply of tall, fast, strong kids; the economic and cultural gateway that opened with the 1991 collapse of the Communist government; the former Russian president Boris Yeltsin's enthusiastic (if at times klutzy) love for the sport; and the potent catnip effect of Kournikova, the former top 10 player who, though she never won a singles tournament, provided an escape-hungry generation of girls (and, more important, their parents) with vivid proof that tennis success equaled glamour, fortune, fame.

The Russians, when I asked them, chimed in with explanations of their own, including the lifelong commitment of coaches like Preobrazhenskaya; the superior biomechanical techniques taught at the Moscow Institute of Physical Culture, where many of Russia's top coaches train; and (in a nostalgic burst of cold war trash talking) the intrinsic softness of the West.

Watching the Little Group play, I, too, felt a strong urge to bellow my share of theories: it must be the medicine balls! The discipline! The lack of Game Boys! I was particularly struck by the kids' obvious enjoyment of the lesson. One of the mothers told Preobrazhenskaya that her daughter, Gunda, had awakened early that day, unable to sleep. "Today is my day with Larisa Dmitrievna!" Gunda had said. "It is today!"

In sum, there are a lot of explanations, some better than others. For instance, is the Russian gene pool really that innately superior to that of Ukraine or Slovenia or Southern California? If Kournikova inspired so many Russians, then where were the German stars inspired by Steffi Graf? But ultimately the theories fall short because they don't explain the principles underpinning Spartak's success. Indeed, seeing the place up close made me wonder if there were any principles. Spartak radiates the glow of happenstance, the diamond in the trash heap. (This impression is apparently shared by the Russian Tennis Federation, which has been content to allow Spartak to remain with its single indoor court.)

So even here, at the core of one of the globe's brightest talent blooms, the question of that talent's source remains enigmatically tangled, perhaps as much of a mystery to those who nurture these athletes as it is to the rest of us. It's enough to make you wish for a set of X-ray glasses that could reveal how these invisible forces of culture, history, genes, practice, coaching and belief work together to form that elemental material we call talent — to wish that science could come up with a way to see talent as a substance as tangible as muscle and bone, and whose inner workings we could someday attempt to understand.

As it turns out, that's exactly what's happening.

I was peering inside an incubator at the Laboratory of Developmental Neurobiology at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. The incubator, about the size of a small refrigerator, held shiny wire racks on which sat several rows of petri dishes containing clear pink liquid. Inside the liquid were threadlike clumps of mouse neurons, which were wired to platinum electrodes and covered with a white, pearlescent substance called myelin. Within that myelin, according to new research, lies the seed of talent.

"In neurology, myelin is being seen as an epiphany," Douglas Fields, the lab's director, had told me earlier. "This is a new dimension that may help us understand a great deal about how the brain works, especially about how we gain skills."

The myelin in question didn't look particularly epiphanic, which is understandable since it would normally be employed by mice for sniffing out food or navigating a maze. Neurologists theorize, however, that this humble-looking material is the common link between the Spartak kids, the Dominican baseball players and all the other blooms on the talent map — a link all the more interesting for the fact that few outside this branch of neurology currently know much about myelin. In fact, as Fields pointed out, if indirectly, the talent map wasn't technically the most accurate name for my hypothetical landscape. It should be called the myelin map.

"I would predict that South Korean women golfers have more myelin, on average, than players from other countries," Fields said. "They've got more in the right parts of the brain and for the right muscle groups, and that's what allows them to optimize their circuitry. The same would be true for any group like that."

"Tiger Woods?" I asked.

"Definitely Tiger Woods," he said. "That guy's got a lot of myelin."

Fields, 53, is a sinewy man with a broad smile and a jaunty gait. A former biological oceanographer who studied shark nervous systems, he now runs a six-person, seven-room lab outfitted with hissing canisters, buzzing electrical boxes and tight bundles of wires and hoses. The place has the feel of a tidy, efficient ship. In addition, Fields has the sea captain's habit of making dramatic moments sound matter-of-fact. The more exciting something is, the more mundane he makes it sound. As he was telling me about the six-day climb of Yosemite's 3,000-foot El Capitan he made two summers back, I asked what it felt like to sleep while hanging from a rope thousands of feet above the ground. "It's actually not that different," he said, his expression so unchanging that he might have been discussing a trip to the grocery store. "You adapt."

Fields reached into the incubator, extracted one of the pink petri dishes and slid it beneath a microscope. "Have a peek," he said quietly.

I leaned in and saw a tangled bunch of spaghetti-like threads, which Fields informed me were nerve fibers. The myelin was harder to see, a faintly undulating fringe on the edge of the neurons. I blinked, refocused, struggled to imagine how this stuff might help my golf game.

Fields proceeded to explain that myelin is a sausage-shaped layer of dense fat that wraps around the nerve fibers — and that its seeming dullness is, in fact, exactly the point. Myelin works the same way that rubber insulation works on a wire, keeping the signal strong by preventing electrical impulses from leaking out. This myelin sheath is, basically, electrical tape, which is one reason that myelin, along with its associated cells, was classified as glia (Greek for "glue"). Its very inertness is why the first brain researchers named their new science after the neuron instead of its insulation. They were correct to do so: neurons can indeed explain almost every class of mental phenomenon—memory, emotion, muscle control, sensory perception and so on. But there's one question neurons can't explain: why does it take so long to learn complex skills?

"Everything neurons do, they do pretty quickly; it happens with the flick of a switch," Fields said. "But flicking switches is not how we learn a lot of things. Getting good at piano or chess or baseball takes a lot of time, and that's what myelin is good at."

To the surprise of many neurologists, it turns out this electrical tape is quietly interacting with the neurons. Through a mechanism that Fields and his research team described in a 2006 paper in the journal Neuron, the little sausages of myelin get thicker when the nerve is repeatedly stimulated. The thicker the myelin gets, the better it insulates and the faster and more accurately the signals travel. As Fields puts it, "The signals have to travel at the right speed, arrive at the right time, and myelination is the brain's way of controlling that speed." 2

It adds up to a two-part dynamic that is elegant enough to please Darwin himself: myelin controls the impulse speed, and impulse speed is crucial. The better we can control it, the better we can control the timing of our thoughts and movements, whether we're running, reading, singing or, perhaps more to the point, hitting a wicked topspin backhand.

Back at Spartak, the Little Group lined up outside the service box, rackets at the ready. Preobrazhenskaya stood at the net, a shopping cart of balls at her hip. She waited for silence, then started: forehand, backhand, back to the end of the line. One by one, the kids took their swings — to my eye, pretty nice-looking swings. But not to hers. Preobrazhenskaya frequently stopped them, had them do it over. More follow-through. More turn. Watch. Feel.

Pravil'no, she said. Correct.

Molodets. Good job.

If Preobrazhenskaya's approach were boiled down to one word (and it frequently was), that word would be tekhnika — technique. This is enforced by iron decree: none of her students are permitted to play in a tournament for the first three years of study. It's a notion that I don't imagine would fly with American parents, but none of the Russian parents questioned it for a second. "Technique is everything," Preobrazhenskaya told me later, smacking a table with Khrushchev-like emphasis, causing me to jump and reconsider my twinkly-grandma impression of her. "If you begin playing without technique, it is big mistake. Big, big mistake!"

I thought of something Dr. Fields had said: "You have to understand that every skill exists as a circuit, and that circuit has to be formed and optimized." To put it in Spartak terms, myelin is a slave to tekhnika — and so, in turn, was the Little Group. Preobrazhenskaya didn't instruct them on tactics or positioning or offer any psychological tips; rather, every gesture and word was funneled to teaching the elemental task of hitting the ball clean and hard. Which they did, one by one. A few of the kids had located that magical-seeming burst of leverage that makes the ball explode off the strings with a distinctive thwock.

"What do good athletes do when they train?" George Bartzokis, a professor of neurology at U.C.L.A., had told me. "They send precise impulses along wires that give the signal to myelinate that wire. They end up, after all the training, with a super-duper wire — lots of bandwidth, high-speed T-1 line. That's what makes them different from the rest of us." 3

As the Little Group continued its lesson, I found myself picturing myelin. I'd seen a highly magnified image on one of Fields's computer screens, and it looked like a deep-sea photograph: bright colors against a field of black. The oligodendrocytes — oligos, in lab lingo, are the cells that form the myelin — resembled glowing green squids, their tentacles reaching toward a set of slender nerve fibers. Once they seize hold, each tentacle begins to curl and extend, as the oligo squeezes the cytoplasm out of itself until only a cellophane-like sheet of membrane remains. That membrane proceeds to wrap over the nerve fiber with machinelike precision, spiraling down to create the distinctive sausage shape, tightening itself over the fiber like a threaded nut.

"It's one of the most intricate and exquisite cell-cell interactions there is," Fields said. "And it's slow. Each one of these wraps can go around a nerve fiber 40 or 50 times, and that can take days or weeks. Imagine doing that to an entire neuron, then an entire circuit with thousands of nerves."

So each time Alexandra or Denis or Gunda swings the racket properly — or, for that matter, each time we practice a chip shot or a guitar chord or a chess opening — those tiny green tentacles sense it and reach toward the thousands of related nerve fibers. They grasp, they squish, they make another wrap, thickening the sheath. They build a little more insulation along the wire, which adds a bit more bandwidth and precision to the circuit, which translates into an infinitesimal bit more skill and speed. Myelin is both practice and mastery, cause and effect. As Bartzokis had said: "Myelin is our Achilles strength, and it's our Achilles' heel. It's what makes us human." 4

All this myelin talk, combined with jet lag, left me feeling slightly changed. I wandered Moscow as if I were seeing the world through myelin-colored glasses. Emerald-green squids and snowy white sausages were everywhere I looked. A TV highlight of a Ronaldinho goal? Pure myelin! That violinist playing Mozart in the subway? What incredible oligodendrocytes that guy must have! A poster for the 2008 Olympics? An international myelin cultivation contest! My repeated ability to get lost within a few blocks of my hotel? Myelin again! (Rather, my lack of it.)

It also left me thinking about the clusters on the talent map. Specifically, wondering whether these places quietly possess myelin-accelerating factors: i.e., forces and conditions that promote what Fields would call "circuit optimization." Might those factors help explain the success of these superior athletes?

The rise of the South Korean golfers, who won almost one-third of the events last year on the Ladies Professional Golf Association Tour, has usually been explained by citing two factors: the country's formidably driven parents, and the rock-star status of Se Ri Pak, who has won 23 tournaments and is one of the nation's biggest sports celebrities. Yet the logic of this formula has always been confounded by a puzzling fact: South Korea happens to be a nation where it is singularly difficult for a young person to play golf. There are only 200 golf courses in the entire country, compared with 17,000 in the United States.

Viewed through the prism of myelin, however, the situation makes more sense. The lack of public courses sends golf-hungry parents and kids to South Korea's abundant driving ranges, which are Elysian fields of myelination compared to the relative randomness of course play. Were South Korea to increase access to courses, it could be argued, the country might wind up producing fewer top golfers.

Then there's the Dominican Republic, which has historically produced more Major League Baseball players than any other country outside the United States. Conventional wisdom holds that this remarkable record arises from the fruitful collision of a baseball-mad culture and grinding poverty. The equation is undeniably true, but it's also true of several nearby countries that don't achieve a fraction of the Dominican Republic's success.

There is one way, however, in which the Dominican Republic is historically unique. It's the first place where Major League Baseball teams built training academies — two dozen of them, starting in the mid-1970s. While academies provide players with obvious advantages like good nutrition and housing, not to mention regular exposure to scouts, they also provide a daily structure of drills and practices that, like the South Korean driving ranges, would presumably be a ripe environment for building myelin. 5

The most impressive myelin collection I encountered during my Moscow trip belonged to a woman encased in a sheepskin coat, fur-trimmed boots and a fuzzy white hat. Elena Dementieva, 25, represented the acme of the Spartak product. She stood 5-foot-11, weighed 141 pounds and emanated a vibration of such unearthly physical perfection that crowds parted as she moved down the sidewalk. Seeing Dementieva walk into the Russian Army sports club, where she trains between tournaments, I flashed to an image of the Spartak kids and felt a brief parental pang of disbelief. Such a transformation seemed impossible.6

Sitting down on a set of courtside bleachers (level gaze, warm laugh, no hint of divahood), Dementieva told her story. Surprisingly, she had been rejected by several other clubs as too slow before landing at Spartak. She spoke fondly, if a little vaguely, of her days at the club: dodging stray dogs, washing dirty tennis balls in the sink, doing homework on the long subway ride. Her first instructor was the renowned Rausa Islanova (the mother of Dinara Safina and of the men's 2000 United States Open winner, Marat Safin), who was known for her strictness and her elimination system in which students competed for a constantly shrinking number of slots. Dementieva's group started with 25 students; within a year it was down to 7. Of those 7 kids, 4 became world-class players (Myskina, Kournikova and Safin were the other 3).

"Spartak was good for me, I think," Dementieva said, squinting as if she were peering into her hazy past. "I always had a feeling that I was going forward, getting better technique."

When Dementieva took the court to practice, she began with a set of those Jack LaLanne-style warm-ups — sidesteps, jumping jacks, high steps. She looked as if she were still a member of the Little Group, so much so that, watching from the bleachers, I was momentarily unsure whether it was her or some beginner. Dementieva did imitatsiya; she practiced each stroke in slow motion. Then, when her male sparring partner showed up, she proceeded to hit the ball so hard, accurately and consistently that it seemed she was playing a sport I'd never seen before. Again and again, her body rose to the ball in a twist of ballistic force, the power betrayed only by the snakelike rise of her thick blond braid. The ball hissed.

Trying to wrap my head around the metamorphic process through which a too-slow kid could become . . . her, well, it left me utterly at a loss, able only to fumble for such useful scientific terms as "magic" and "miracle."

Fortunately, there are more rational people to consult, and perhaps the most rational is K. Anders Ericsson, who has devoted much of his life to studying phenomena like Dementieva and Spartak. Ericsson, a native of Sweden and a professor of psychology at Florida State University, is co-editor of "The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance," published in 2006. If talented people can be thought of as a singular species, then Ericsson is its John J. Audubon, and the handbook is his painstakingly annotated field guide.

The handbook runs to 901 pages, so, in the interest of time, allow me to sum up. Every talent, according to Ericsson, is the result of a single process: deliberate practice, which he defines as "individuals engaging in a practice activity (typically designed by teachers) with full concentration on improving some aspect of their performance." In a moment of towering simplification, "The Handbook" distills its lesson to a formula known as the Power Law of Learning: T = a P-b . (Don't ask.) A slightly more useful translation: Deliberate practice means working on technique, seeking constant critical feedback and focusing ruthlessly on improving weaknesses.

"It feels like you're constantly stretching yourself into an uncomfortable area beyond what you can quite do," Ericsson told me. It's hard to sustain deliberate practice for long periods of time, which may help explain why players like Jimmy Connors succeeded with seemingly paltry amounts of practice while their competitors were hitting thousands of balls each day. As the tennis commentator Mary Carillo told me, "He barely practiced an hour a day, but it was the most intense hour of your life."

Ericsson also discusses the Ten-Year Rule, an intriguing finding dating to 1899, which shows that even the most talented individual requires a decade of committed practice before reaching world-class level. (Even a prodigy like the chess player Bobby Fischer put in nine hard years before achieving his grandmaster status at age 16.) While this rule is often used to backdate the ideal start of training (in tennis, girls peak physically at around 17, so they ought to start by 7; boys peak later, so 9 is O.K.), the Ten-Year Rule has more universal implications. Namely, it implies that all skills are built using the same fundamental mechanism, and that the mechanism makes physiological demands from which no one is exempt.

This is not to suggest that the only difference between an average Joe and Michael Jordan is a few thousand hours of deliberate practice. Almost all of the scientists I spoke with agreed that inheritance is a huge factor in potential, if perhaps not in quite the way we've commonly assumed. (Perhaps, as George Bartzokis suggests, Jordan's greatest natural gift was his powerful oligodendrocytes.)

All in all, Ericsson's theory sounds logical and appealing, but part of me rises up in rebellion. What about geniuses? What about young Mozart's famous ability to transcribe entire scores on a single hearing? What about Shakespeare or Leonardo or those 14-year-old Ph.D. candidates? What about savants, who walk up to the piano or a Rubik's cube and are magically brilliant?

T = a P-b would be the reply.

In his 1999 book, "Genius Explained," Michael Howe of the University of Exeter speculates that Mozart studied some 3,500 hours of music with his instructor father by his sixth birthday, a number that places his musical memory into the realm of impressive but obtainable party tricks. Savants, it is pointed out, excel within narrow domains that feature clear, logical rules (classical piano, math, occasionally art — as opposed to, say, jazz clarinet). Furthermore, savants typically possess prior exposure to those domains, such as listening to music around the home. Savants' true expertise, the research suggests, is in their ability to practice obsessively, even when it doesn't look as if they're practicing. As Ericsson succinctly put it, "There's no cell type that geniuses have that the rest of us don't."

So let's return to the initial question: how does Spartak do it? If the new science is right and myelination is to talent as photosynthesis is to plant growth, then Spartak makes it abundantly clear that photosynthesis alone is never enough; you also need soil, water, air, sunlight, luck. The question becomes, which variables are helping Spartak's myelin grow to such riotous abundance? Four factors stand above the rest:

1. Driven Parents. The hunger and ambition of Russian parents is uniquely strong, particularly when one considers how hard life is in Russia right now and also that the patron saint of Russian tennis parents is the ex-Siberian oil-field worker Yuri Sharapov, who came to America with less than $1,000 and his 7-year-old daughter, Maria, who now earns an estimated $30 million a year in endorsements. On the other hand, while they are intense, Russian parents aren't all that different a group from the parents in Serbia, the Czech Republic or Mission Viejo, Calif.

2. Early Starts. The kids here start young and specialize early. They are tennis players, and not much else competes for their attention (only a handful owned video games, according to my informal poll), and they also benefit from a Russian culture that's built to select athletes and shield them from academic pressures. Incidentally, there were indeed elite athletic genes floating around at Spartak: Alexandra's parents were famous figure skaters, and another kid was Myskina's cousin. So good genes probably play a role, or (just as likely, to my mind) there's a beneficial effect to growing up in an environment of working athletes.

3. Powerful, Consistent Coaches. Most tennis coaches I saw were treated with a respect reserved for university professors. The tennis clubs I visited were patrolled by a squad of Brezhnev lookalikes who offered advice that seemed hewed from stone. Their institutional specialty is biomechanics, but the point is perhaps not so much in the details of that coaching, but rather in the passion, rigor and uniformity with which that coaching is delivered. This, incidentally, is the opposite of the entrepreneurial system in which many American tennis coaches operate, as they often compete with one another, relying on their ability to sell their services to sometimes anxious parents. American coaches have to be unique to survive; Russian coaches are mostly the same.

4. Cultural Toughness. As poets have pointed out, the intrinsic hardiness of the Russian woman is legendary. Historically, this might have something to do with the hardships of life under Communism and the loss of 11 million soldiers in World War II. Whatever the cause, the immediate effect is a tangible mental toughness and a work ethic second to none. After all, at Spartak, they don't speak of "playing" tennis. The verb they like to use is borot'sya — to struggle.

If I gave in to the uncontrollable Ericssonian urge to put Spartak's success into a formula, it would read something like:

Intense Parents + Young Kids + Rigorous Technique + Toughness = Talent

Alongside it, we could write another equation:

Deliberate Practice + Time = Myelin = Talent

But in the end, as I look around the court, it can't come down to a formula because formulas are rational, and whatever Spartak is, it isn't entirely rational. It's a bunch of kids in a dumpy club who are burning to be here, for whom every swing is meaningful, who wake up in the morning and say, "Today is my day with Larisa Dmitrievna!" It's deeply and purposefully irrational, because it's built on a love of sport and country that can't be explained but holds everything together anyway. Spartak is not science; what happens here is not analogous to what happens in a factory or a laboratory. It's closer to what happens in a garden, a forgotten, rundown garden that somehow produces marvelous tomatoes, summer after summer. 7

Thwock . . . thwock . . . thwock . . . thwock.

The Little Group was smacking it now, the balls zipping over the net and ricocheting off the far wall. Preobrazhenskaya, the gardener, watched with a smile, occasionally correcting a backswing or a grip, nudging the kids on with a murmur of praise and instruction: "Clever boy." "Good girl." "No." "Correct." "Not there." "That's it."

On my last day at Spartak, I met one more player. Her name was Kseniya; she was 5, and she'd come for a tryout. Her parents, an upscale pair, ducked through the low door and asked Larisa Dmitrievna if she might have a moment. Kseniya had black pigtails held in place with pink ribbons. She wore new silver tennis shoes. She walked solemnly, one step behind her parents, carrying a tiny pink racket. Something in the precision of her walk, in her air of self-possession, reminded me of my daughter Zoe.
Preobrazhenskaya put her arm on Kseniya's shoulder and walked her to the corner of the court, out of the parents' earshot. The girl looked up into the coach's face. "She has good eyes," Preobrazhenskaya said later.

Preobrazhenskaya rotated Kseniya's arms in a wide circle, feeling for looseness in her muscles, which she regarded as a good sign. Preobrazhenskaya then showed Kseniya a new tennis ball, and told her what was about to happen. Kseniya listened closely, and nodded. Then the coach tossed the ball lightly, and Kseniya, her small body coming alive at once, ran to catch it.

• • •

FOOTNOTES

1 In September, as part of an ongoing effort to revive American tennis, the United States Tennis Association plans to centralize its player development program at the Evert Tennis Academy in Boca Raton, Fla., a new complex that will feature 23 courts (14 lighted), dormitories, a state-of-the-art video lounge and a staff of 30, including a mental-conditioning coach. Tuition with room and board will cost as much as $42,000 a year. By comparison, the Russian Tennis Federation's total youth-development budget is estimated to be between $300,000 and $400,000.

2 Timing is vital because neurons are binary: either they fire or they don't — no gray areas. Their firing depends solely on whether the incoming impulse is strong enough to exceed the neuron's threshold of activation. To explain the implications of this effect, Fields had me imagine a skill circuit in which two neurons need to combine their impulses to make a third, high-threshold neuron fire — for, say, a golf swing. In order to combine properly, those two incoming impulses must arrive at nearly exactly the same time — sort of like two people running at a heavy door to push it open. The time window turns out to be about four milliseconds, or roughly the time it takes a bee to flap its wings once. If the first two signals arrive more than four milliseconds apart, the door stays shut, the crucial third neuron doesn't fire and the golf ball soars into the rough (or, as I was reflexively picturing, Zoe swings and misses the purple ball). "Your brain has so many connections and possibilities that your genes can't code the neurons to time things so precisely," Fields said. "But you can build myelin to do it."

3 These studies shine a new light on the neuro-anatomist Marian C. Diamond's 1985 finding that the left, inferior parietal lobe of Albert Einstein's brain, though it had a typical number of neurons, had significantly more glial cells than her other samples, a study that neurologists at the time considered so meaningless as to be nearly comical but that now seems to make sense, bandwidth-wise.

4 The list of myelin-related pathologies is long and, Bartzokis believes, includes multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer's as well as a wider range of conditions, like schizophrenia, dyslexia, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and autism, all of which can be understood as disorders of impulse timing.

5 Venezuela is a more recent example of this phenomenon. In 1989, the Houston Astros opened the first of what are now nine major-league academies there, and a few years later, the number of Venezuelans in the big leagues started to rise. Since 1995, 125 Venezuelans have broken into Major League Baseball, 51 more than had appeared in all the years up to that point.

6 In children, myelin arrives in a series of waves, some of them determined by biological code, some of them dependent on activity. These waves last into young adulthood. Until this time, the brain is extraordinarily receptive to learning new skills. Though adults retain the ability to myelinate throughout life (thankfully, 5 percent of our oligos remain immature, ready to answer the call), anyone who has tried to learn a language or musical instrument late in life can testify that it costs a lot more time and sweat to build the requisite circuitry. The effortlessness is the first thing to go.

7 Replicating the Spartak system in the United States (or, for that matter, installing Dominican-style baseball academies or forcing young golfers to practice only at driving ranges) would likely not create a sudden wellspring of stars. The reasons that the United States is losing ground on the talent map have less to do with training mechanisms and more to do with bigger factors: a highly distractive youth culture, a focus on the glamour of winning rather than on the brickwork of building technique and a sporting environment that is gentler than those found in many of the world's harder corners.

"You can't keep breast-feeding them all the time," Robert Lansdorp, a tennis coach in Los Angeles, told me. "You've got to make them an independent thinker." Lansdorp, who is in his 60s, has coached Sharapova, along with the former No. 1-ranked players Pete Sampras, Tracy Austin and Lindsay Davenport, all three of whom grew up in the same area and played at the same run-of-the-mill tennis clubs near Los Angeles. "You don't need a fancy academy," he said. "You need fundamentals and discipline, and in this country nobody gives a damn about fundamentals and discipline." Lansdorp also mentioned that he'd visited Spartak last year to teach a clinic. "It was a pretty different place," he said. "But that Larisa, she sure knows her stuff."

Daniel Coyle wrote about the endurance cyclist Jure Robic in the February 2006 issue of Play.

I have spoken to two people I have recently mentored and they asked me to tell them my reason(s) as to why I thought I have been "successful" in coaching. Kind of a coincidence in the timing, as I re-read this article... so some relevance to my story!

The first thing I told them was "you need to find what you like - your passion in life - and pursue it. But be true to yourself (your values and morals) in the process." Opportunities, ongoing education and experiences. You will never know it all. Keep your ego in check and commit to being a like-long learner! You aren't better than anyone else. Share your wisdom with others as this is a form of professional development. Stay true to your ethics and morals. If the situation doesn't match them, don't pursue the situation any further - on this you should not compromise. The mental conflicts are not worth it. (Been there, done that... this is the voice of experience talking!) A great quote I just read last month - can't remember where or who it is from: "Silence in the presence of wrongdoing is complicity." Or as Brad Hamilton in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) said to Jeff Spicoli, "Learn it. Know it. Live it!" <...meaning - Know Yourself!>

The second thing I said was self-awareness. Know your strengths and weaknesses. Highlight the strengths and mask the weaknesses (while you work to make them better!) For example, whether you are winning, developing players for the next level, or teaching kids important life skills; try to reflect and ask yourself, how did I achieve these things? Conversely, losing or getting fired can be traumatic, but you need to look at the situation after some time has passed, and examine what really happened and why. How can you become better? Act like yourself - not someone else. Your coaching style is uniquely you! Chose good mentors and learn from them (everyone has good and bad parts... sift through all of it to get what is best for you!)

The third thing I said was "perseverance." If you like what you do, odds are you will continue, so kind of inter-connected to "find your passion." You need to define success and failure for yourself and your own situation. Not every experience will turn out grand! Lots of times, others, and maybe yourself, will think you have failed. You need to have the ability to reload and bounce back after experiencing a setback. How many times did it take Edison to 'invent' the light bulb? He 'failed' so often, telling himself he 'discovered' another way NOT to make a light bulb... so how he approached it, wasn't failure at all.

("Born on February 11, 1847 in Milan, Ohio; the seventh and last child of Samuel and Nancy Edison. When he was seven his family moved to Port Huron, Michigan and Edison lived there until he struck out on his own at the age of sixteen. He had very little formal education as a child, attending school only for a few months. He was taught reading, writing, and arithmetic by his mother, but was always a very curious child and taught himself much by reading on his own. This belief in self-improvement remained throughout his life.")

Then...

The last thing I said was "have a plan." I created a plan in High School (it was pretty rough!) but I gave myself 10 years to achieve it. At the forefront of my plan was to play for Canada's National Hockey Team. I didn't quite get there, but I played in Canada, the USA, Finland and Sweden. By the 10th year, I was on the bench running the defence - coaching my first international game as a member of Team Canada! (It was my 28th birthday, several kids who I had coached at the junior level in BC came to town to surprise me - they came to see me coach and take me out for dinner and drinks afterward; plus one of my cousin's got married earlier in the day... at a church one block from the rink! What a coincidence!)

Now I do 5-year plans. More detailed and more categories than my first attempt! And I evaluate it every 3-6 months and make adjustments. I have achieved a bunch by doing this, so in my own definition, "I have been successful!" I still have lots more I want to do though...

Now, on to the article!

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For the Best of the Best, Determination Outweighs Nature and Nurture

By ALINA TUGEND
Published: April 9, 2010 NY TIMES

I’VE always been considered a good writer and a terrible singer. I pick up sports quickly but draw like a 2-year-old. My talents, such as they are, seemed pretty set by the time I was in my late teens.

Most of us think of talent as an ability we’re born with and have fairly little control over. But increasingly, experts are questioning the notion that genes limit how far we can go.

“We’re at a very interesting moment in this discussion, where new science is giving us an X-ray of what lies beneath speed and fluency of great performances,” said Daniel Coyle, author of “The Talent Code” (Bantam Books, 2009). “A lot has to do with genes, but more doesn’t.”

This sounds like the familiar nature-versus-nurture arguments — how much of us is what we are born with and how much is due to our environment. But scientific research shows that the interplay between environment and genes is far more intricate than that.

“I’d like to blow up the words nature and nurture as two distinct things,” said David Shenk, author of “The Genius in All of Us” (Doubleday, 2010). “They are completely intertwined.”

Talent, Mr. Shenk said, needs to be seen as a process rather than as a thing that we either have or we don’t. “I see this as the beginning of a more nuanced conversation,” he said.

Why does this matter? Because if we think of talent as more or less immutable, then we’re selling ourselves and our children short.

K. Anders Ericsson, professor of psychology at Florida State University, is one of the leading researchers in the field of expertise. He has spent years studying what makes people great at what they do, be they violinists or chess players or athletes.

In his research, he said, there appears to be very little evidence that talent is linked to individual genetic differences. One exception he sees is height. It’s difficult, for example, to be a professional basketball player if you’re too short or an Olympic gymnast if you’re too tall.

But it does not follow, Professor Ericsson said, that everyone can become great, or even really good, in a given arena. First of all, you need to have parents willing to put in an intensive amount of resources and time in helping you excel.

In fact, research has shown that most people who are really outstanding in their fields don’t come out of nowhere. Top-notch musicians are usually born into families where music plays a dominant role. The same is true with sports or any other endeavor.

In addition, by studying those who have excelled, Professor Ericsson has found that they engage in something he calls “deliberate practice.” It involves spending hours a day in highly structured activities to improve performance and overcome weaknesses.

The practice is not necessarily enjoyable and requires someone willing to put in the grueling hours over at least 10 years. From his observations, it takes a minimum of a decade of deliberate practice to excel in any field.

But he is not talking about practicing every day, all day. Four hours a day is usually the maximum that anyone can do to really get the most out of the effort, he said. After that, exhaustion sets in.

“Most people wouldn’t be able to engage in deliberate practice for even a few weeks,” Professor Ericsson said. And that’s one of the biggest reasons why more of us don’t get to — or even near — the top levels in a given field.

Not everyone agrees with Professor Ericsson that genes play such a minimal role in talent. Dean Simonton, professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, who has also studied this area for many years, argues that “genetics influence how quickly and how well a person can master the expertise necessary to perform at world-class levels.”

Moreover, the very process of acquiring that expertise requires tremendous drive and determination. But where does that exceptional motivation and energy come from? Is it learned or inherited — or another combination of nature and nurture?

While, for example, we may not inherit a music or a writing gene, Professor Simonton said, our openness to experience is partly attributed to genetic influence, and “that trait is correlated with achievement in all domains that require exceptional creativity.”

So what’s the point of this? That it’s awfully hard to become great at something? We probably all know that. And the reality is that most of us are not going to be Picassos or Shakespeares.

But these concepts are still important. Because even if we give lip service to the idea that hard work will make us better, it’s awfully hard to overcome the belief that we’re born a certain way and there’s not much we can do about it.

“Most of us are far from our potential,” said Angela Duckworth, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. “The prevailing wisdom, for much of the last century, has been that talent is the most important determinant of achievement. Our focus in the next millennium is turning to all those things that unlock talent, including grit, self-discipline and confidence.”

Grit is what Professor Duckworth calls perseverance or, as she defines it, “the capacity to sustain effort toward a very long-term and challenging goal.” Her studies have shown that grittier individuals thrive in extremely challenging situations, and that grit is quite distinct from talent.

But it’s dangerous for parents to think that if talent is much more malleable than we used to believe, we can somehow make our children into great ballplayers or artists. Those of us who have tried — trumpet lessons, anyone? — know you can’t force your children to become interested in something.

Or you could probably push your children to excel in an area by parenting in a way few would advocate — “withhold love and affection and trade it for achievement,” Mr. Shenk said. As the recent memoir by the tennis star Andre Agassi shows, that recipe can produce a highly accomplished yet very unhappy adult.

“I want my kids to aspire to greatness,” Mr. Shenk said. “I want them to work hard and to have the deep satisfaction of striving. But I don’t want them to have a two-dimensional life.”

What we can do is teach ourselves and our children that we have far more ability to develop our skills than we think we do, but that it doesn’t come easily, said Daniel H. Pink, author of “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us” (Riverhead, 2009).

“A lot of parents are obsessed with cognitive skills,” like reading or mathematics, Mr. Pink said. “But we’re not good at teaching noncognitive skills,” like sticking with it when the work gets tough and understanding that failure and disappointment are part of success.

“Are we establishing a generation literate in perseverance?” he asked. “After all, what’s more satisfying than getting something and mastering it?”

With all this talk about talent, it’s easy to forget one thing. While I love watching someone who is terrific at what they do and I also know the great feeling of accomplishing something difficult, it’s too easy to let admiration of such skills overshadow less visible attributes — like kindness and generosity. While I may marvel at great achievers, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to live in a world full of them.

Another Crosby article - this time saluted by his peers. Hmmm... maybe deliberate practice + passion = Crosby?

Crosby now in league on his own

December 7, 2010

By ROB LONGLEY, QMI Agency


PITTSBURGH — It could have happened when he won his first Stanley Cup.

Or when he led Canada to a gold medal at the 2010 Olympics.

Or last April when he reached 50 goals for the first time in his career.

At any one of those times, Sidney Crosby we could have ditched the Sid the Kid handle with the recognition that perhaps the superstar had arrived in the prime of his career.

The only problem is there appears to be no end in sight to the upward curve for the Pittsburgh Penguins captain, who over his past 16 games may be playing the best in his young but remarkably accomplished life in hockey.

Leading the Penguins to a 10-game win streak and starting to distance himself in the scoring race from the other young NHL stars, Crosby is making plays that are even surprising his teammates.

“When you’ve got guys on our bench looking at each other and shaking their heads and saying: ‘Did you see that?’ ... it’s a pretty special play,” Penguins coach Dan Bylsma said following a Penguins practice on Tuesday in advance of a Wednesday date with the Maple Leafs.

“We’ve seen him do special things a lot — the highlight reel is long. But the consistency level is there now. There’s no cheat (to his play). What we’re seeing right now is pretty unique night in and night out.”

Former teammate Bill Guerin, in town to announce his retirement this week, put it even more succinctly.

“What Sidney’s doing right now, it’s like an assault on the game,” Guerin said.

And, as the numbers emphatically support, the bullets are coming from everywhere.

With 24 goals and 24 assists in 29 games, Crosby is starting to dominate like he never has before. On pace for a 135-point season, if he keeps this up, the Nova Scotia native will have the most productive season since his boss, Penguins owner Mario Lemieux, piled up 161 points in 1995-96.

“It’s capitalizing on your chances,” Crosby said when asked why he’s playing the best statistically in his career. “I don’t feel like I’m getting that many more chances than I have in the past.

“I think at this point I’m just making the most of my opportunities. I don’t feel any different.”

Humble as always, Crosby is no authority on his own performance.

Once pegged as more of a playmaker, in each of his five previous seasons Crosby has had more assists than goals, often dramatically so. Complementing those skills were the occasional timely goal and defensive responsibility not always embraced by the game’s most skilled players.

But every year, Crosby looks to improve. This year, it would seem, the great leap forward is in a scoring touch and shot that weren’t always his main artillery.

“It’s as good as I’ve seen any hockey player play,” Penguins forward Pascal Dupuis said. “He’s on the top of his game, not only putting points on the board but blocking shots, winning faceoffs and playing in his own zone.

“He’s at another level right now. Now one can even compare.”

Throughout his career, Crosby’s motivation has always come from within. Not one for bold and brash, he has been content to let his play carry the commentary.

But timely enough, isn’t it, that Crosby’s latest surge is coming at a time when a couple other notable younger players are making noise. Washington Capitals’ Alex Ovechkin, who has linked with Crosby for a couple of seasons now is one, for no other reason than the HBO documentary crews that are tailing bout the Caps and Pens.

The other is young Tampa star Steven Stamkos, who appeared on a recent cover of the Hockey News with the declaration of “The NHL’s New Best Player.”

As you would expect, Penguins players scoff at that provocative headline. When asked about it, Crosby is polite as usual, suggesting the topic could make for a lively discussion.

“It’s a pretty common argument or debate and that’s for other people to decide,” Crosby said Tuesday in the comfort of the Penguins dressing room. “I’m sure (Stamkos) wants to be his best and I want to be mine.”

As for reaching the prime of his career, Crosby doesn’t sound like a guy who believes his will arrive any time soon.

“Your prime what is that?,” Crosby said. “You have one good year at 24 and that’s your prime?

“I think it’s different for everybody. I think it depends on a lot of things. When you come in, everybody develops differently and adjusts and depending on your situation and role with the team.”

Bylsma believes that as long as Crosby is in the game, he’ll never play like he’s reached the zenith. The shot can always be harder and more precise, the next pass more crisp.

“Sidney Crosby is always going to be trying to get better no matter what age he’s at,” Bylsma said.

“If he gets to the point he’s playing at an older age, he’s still going to be getting better. He’s in that process right now and I think he will be in it right to the end.”

On Monday, Crosby played the 400th game of his career and at age 23, that marks a significant body of work. But even those who have been around him for a while are noticing a new level of excellence.

“He doesn’t seem like a young captain any more,” forward Tyler Kennedy said. “He carries himself so well. He’s a great role model for young guys and even older guys.

“It’s hard to tell with a guy like that but if he get’s any better ... I don’t know.”

rob.longley@sunmedia.ca

twitter.com/longleysunsport

Sport: Masters of Their Own Game

TIME Magazine Monday, Mar. 18, 1985


Anyone even casually aware of professional hockey and basketball knows Wayne Gretzky and Larry Bird as shades of no one else, except maybe each other: two unexpectedly alike and amazingly unlikely straw-haired farm boys who are not only reigning at the top of their games but raising the ceilings of their sports. Confounding normal description, confusing standard measurement, Gretzky is not the slickest skater or hardest shooter, just as Bird is not the swiftest runner or highest jumper. One is frankly too frail for the business, the other simply too agile for his size.

Though neither is highly educated, in the study of their games they were prodigies as children, and are intellectuals now. By some similar force of instinct and understanding--maybe Chess Grand Master Bobby Fischer would know about this--they see and play the game several moves ahead of the moment, comprehending not only where everything is but also where everything will be. Shown a photograph of a nondescript instant on the ice, Gretzky can replace the unpictured performers here and there about the periphery and usually recall what became of them the next second. Glancing at the basketball photo in the morning paper, Bird's automatic thought, essentially a reflex, is to note approximately what time the photographer had to snap his picture to make the deadline.

Their eminence in current terms is obvious, since they are the incumbent Most Valuable Players of the National Hockey League and the National Basketball Association, and their teams, the Edmonton Oilers and the Boston Celtics, are each the sport's defending champion. But increasingly Gretzky and Bird are referred to as the best hockey and basketball players of all time. Both resist the idea. "It's silly to argue that," Gretzky says. "In my mind Gordie Howe is the best player who ever played hockey and the best man who ever played sports. Then others say Bobby Orr was better than Howe. There'll never be another Howe. There'll never be another Orr. But there'll be another kid to compare them to."

Gretzky was a six-year-old on a team for ten-year-olds, and at eleven made Howe's acquaintance. The great man inquired gently, "Do you practice your shots, son?" "Yes, sir, I do," he replied. "Your backhand too?" "Yes, sir." "Good. Make sure you keep practicing that backhand." Of all the remarkable entries in Gretzky's log--most goals by far in a season (92), most assists by far (125), most points (212), most records (35 in the N.H.L. alone)--the least told is the most telling. The first goal he ever scored in Junior B league play, the first he scored in Junior A, the first in the World Hockey Association and the first in the N.H.L.--all were on backhand shots.

Growing up, Bird was not much aware of the N.B.A., either at seven or 17. He never thought to watch Elgin Baylor perform his legerdemain for the Los Angeles Lakers. When Bird joined the Celtics at 22, six years ago, he knew nothing of Boston Coach Bill Fitch, who had toiled in the league for nine seasons. So no sentimental memory inhibits Bird's self-assessment, just a typically restrained presumption that "people probably tend to forget how good players really were. I'm definitely one of the top ones today, but calling anyone the best ever is too harsh a statement. I put myself in the same category with John Havlicek, someone who works for everything he gets." Not that either MVP denies his ability. "This game is all confidence," Bird says, "and, you know, sometimes it's scary. When I'm at my best, I can do just about anything I want, and no one can stop me. I feel like I'm in total control of everything." The signal for this is when, after shooting, he loops fully around and recoils down the court in triumph before the ball has even reached the basket. "I already know it's all net." His joy is regenerating. "I'll be tired, worn down from travel, or just sad and moody--I consider myself a moody person. But then the ball will go up, and all of a sudden I'm up too. It's wild." Gretzky, reaching that bracing elevation, can actually feel a shift in temperature. "When the play isn't so great, my hands are cold and my feet are freezing. But when it's really good, I can't get enough cold, it's so hot. And then I don't hear anything except the sound of the puck and the stick."

Bird accepts this, his richest statistical season, as the introduction to his prime, "because 28 just sounds about right." That suits Gretzky, who at 24 would fervently like four more years of incline, but he wonders. "When Guy Lafleur retired this season, and I saw he had played only 14 years, I thought, 'Hey, I've played seven already.' Maybe I am halfway through." The first time he and Lafleur ever faced off, it seemed the puck would never drop, and under the tension of the wait, below the clamor of the crowd, he heard Lafleur murmur, "How's it going, Gretz?" Without planning to, Gretzky found himself saying the same thing this year to Star Rookie Mario Lemieux. "How's it going, Mario?"

They never seem to stop going long enough to think about it. From autumn to spring, they crisscross the ice and the court, and the country.

The Celtics are on the road. Of all the caravans in sports, basketball's is the most intimate. Because of their numbers, baseball and football teams are obliged to travel on chartered planes, and customarily fill out the cabins with supernumeraries. But a basketball troupe consists of ten or twelve players, a coach or two, a writer or three, a radio broadcaster and a combination trainer-traveling secretary. They wait with everyone else for undependable commercial departures. Every team's traditional safeguard against a severe fine for missing a game is always to take the first flight out in the morning. So the players are up at 7 each day, bleary vaudevillians pursuing one-night stands.

To Bird, "this part here is all baloney," and he actually counts down the stops. "Just five more games in Dallas." He smacks his lips, calculating one visit a year for the balance of his contract. Dallas' charms have been especially elusive, but few of the league cities warm him. "The same towns over and over. You know where you're going, but you forget where you're coming from. I've seen a lot of places, but I've still never been any place as good as Indiana."

Like globe trotting, grammar has no firm hold on Bird. His manner is countrified enough to give people a comfortable misimpression of his intelligence and sophistication. Either guilelessly or gleefully he contributes to his image. "I read a couple of books this summer, shows you how bored I was," he twangs self-consciously in response to the stares of teammates who have observed him reading Arthur Schlesinger's Robert Kennedy and His Times, and could not be more stunned if he were wearing a necktie. Particularly by N.B.A. standards, it is a paperback of Tolstoyan heft. "This will probably take me three years," Bird moans. Not one for justifying himself much, he explains the selection by mentioning a couple of movies and leaves out the truth that a basic grounding in the Kennedys is a prerequisite for conversation in Boston.

In moderation, he does not mind the public inconvenience attending his celebrity, at least not as much as he used to. It would be nice, however, if he could be left in peace to watch a baseball game at Fenway Park. "Everybody wants to be a part of something. I understand that now," he says. "In college I didn't, but I'm getting better. Some days I want to be around people, but other days I just don't." Seeking privacy, he folds himself up like a lawn chair--haunches, levers and various other right angles--into a tiny airport telephone nook, and picks up Schlesinger on page 85.

Any topic attracting Bird's research inevitably prompts a fascination aboard the hotel jitneys that deliver the Celtics players to airport or gym. As the Kennedy round table inexorably revolves to sex lives, Bird muses, "Who was that blond actress Kennedy supposedly dated?" This brings smiles. How could anyone know of Marilyn Monroe and not know her name? Another time, when the subject is popular music, Bird puzzles, "Who's Bruce Springsteen?" Dan Shaughnessy, the thoughtful young basketball writer for the Boston Globe, answers softly, "Larry, he's the you of rock 'n' roll." Bird laughs wearily. "Where have I been?"

Playing basketball. "I know I missed a lot, but I'm making $2 million a year, and I'm seeing and learning a lot of things, and I wouldn't be doing none of it without basketball. I know a person has to expand, but I'm sort of in college here, and I'm getting smarter." Consequently, he checked out a Springsteen concert and came away an unusual fan. "I'm still not into loud music, but you should see how hard that guy works for four hours. By the time it's about through, you're sick of him, but he still wants to go more. Whew, it wore me out. He's great." Leave it to Bird to admire a man for his perspiration.

In contrast, Boston's other usual starting forward, Cedric Maxwell, is a connoisseur of leisure. At the moment he is caring for a bad knee. During the off-season Maxwell finds it restful to steer his long car to a construction site and watch other men sweat. While he has an undeniable flair for grand occasions on the court, and was the play-off MVP of 1981, now and then in the ordinary going he throttles down for an evening as if idling at a building project. This mildly annoys most of the other players, but it galls Bird, whose farm-bred ethic makes no allowance for sidewalk superintendents.

"My goal in life when I was younger: get out of school, work construction --be a construction guy--pour concrete. I never worried about what I would do, because I always knew I could do something. I put up hay all my life. In school the only thing I thought about was basketball, but I went to class and did my homework. I felt sorry for the players who didn't, and I tried to talk to them, because I knew they were going to have a tough life. And sooner or later it's the same thing on the basketball court. The guy who won't do his schoolwork misses the free throw at the end. In high school we used to shoot fouls at 6:30 in the morning before class, but one of my best friends never showed up. In the regional finals our senior year, he missed three one-and- ones in a row, and we lost in overtime. I never said nothing to him. I just looked at him, and he knew."

The season before last, after the royal Celtics suffered the first four- game sweep in their play-off history, against the Milwaukee Bucks, distinguished First Substitute Kevin McHale puffed out his ostrich breast in the locker room and declared for the average player, "I can walk out of here with my head held high." But Bird spoke for himself, bitterly: "I'm gonna go back home this summer and work harder on basketball than I ever did before." Last year Boston achieved its 15th world championship, and Bird was the MVP of the tournament as well as the season. In the final seven-game play- off, the Lakers won the first in Boston and appeared to have taken the second --with 15 sec. left, Los Angeles held both the lead and the ball--only to blink and lose in overtime. Following a 33-point Laker romp in game 3, Bird referred to the Celtics as sissies, and in the singular episode of the fourth game, McHale ran over Los Angeles Forward Kurt Rambis. The series changed.

That familiar Bill Russell sampler, "He improves every man on the court," has been restitched on Bird, who positions himself so nimbly and is such an innovative passer it scarcely registers that at nearly 6 ft. 10 in., he may be slightly taller than Russell. Neither fame nor finances have compromised Bird's relationship with teammates, because the others not only profit from but are infatuated with his game, especially its essential principle that the most deserving party gets the pass. A 14-ft. jump shooter stationed 17 ft. from the hoop might as well be standing in Oshkosh. Other players on the frantic run may glimpse jersey colors, but Bird always sees people in profile, frailties included. "From a certain spot Kevin will score every time, but from another point right around there he's sure to walk or foul. If I'm pressured into giving him the ball in the wrong place, I'm thinking to myself, 'Don't shoot, Kevin, pass it out.' " As McHale scored a Celtic-record 56 points last week, Bird personally arranged the final nine, with deft assists that included a court-long pass for the lay-up that broke the old regular season mark of 53--Bird's.

He plays a forward position but is closer than either the Lakers' Magic Johnson or Detroit's Isiah Thomas to the ancient point guards, who were considerably less gifted than the moderns but infinitely more mindful of quirks and clocks and subtler vagaries. In the simplest expression for his game, Bird always seems to do the right thing. "I've had good coaching everywhere," he says gratefully--two coaches at each high school, college and professional stop. The first in each case was a stiff fundamentalist, the second "always like K.C. Jones, who tells me, 'You know how to do this, you know how to do that. Go do it.' " Bird values both types, but his special affection for Celtics Coach Jones is evident. "He's a competitor, that's the thing. K.C. takes it personal."

If an impression exists that Bird wins every game on a final-buzzer shot, it traces to two consecutive episodes in January, primarily one basket against Portland to complete a 48-point performance. Range is of no concern to Bird --from beyond the three-point distance of 23 ft. 9 in., he makes nearly half of his shots--so his system for clearing air space at any time is just to step back one yard, ample compensation for even the springiest defenders. His right hand--the one he shoots with, not the one he writes with--is gnarled from a 1979 softball accident that required him to alter his release. Crooking his elbow, he launches the basketball suddenly yet daintily on a lofty arc from off his shoulder. Against Portland, the ball rose out of an odd corner angle and fell after time was exhausted in what seemed to be frozen frames. + "Everyone was quiet in the arena," Jones recalls the hush. "You could see the ball spinning in the air." So far, that seems the only really distinct point in the interminable season.

The Oilers are at home. Temporarily down to a solitary goaltender, awaiting a replacement from the minor leagues, they have recruited an Edmonton policeman, Floyd Whitney, for a practice session. "You're the target today, eh?" one of the stubbly giants greets Whitney reassuringly, as the Stanley Cup champions slide sleepily onto their indoor pond. Despite a proliferation of Europeans, hockey players still tend to be white, toothless Canadians from small, picturesque places, who skated to grammar school on iced-over footpaths until diverted during high school to the big city, where they enjoy drinking beer and occasionally throwing each other through plate glass windows.

Once slicing along at practice, the Oilers are awakened in every way. Though the lively pace of the scrimmage seems only slightly less dangerous than a regular game, helmets have been discarded, and the blush of exhilaration shows on all of their faces but glows on Gretzky's. Inoffensively, he laughs aloud at the successful plays, and drops his long jaw and howls at the blunders, drawing happy curses all around. Wimp does not fairly describe his 5-ft. 11- in., 170-lb. appearance in this bulky company, but it comes to mind. Almost every shot Gretzky takes, Officer Whitney snares in his first-baseman's mitt, an astonishment that the goalie explains later with a chagrined smile: "I didn't even see some of them. He was aiming for my glove."

Near the end of the session, Gretzky slips into a corner and vanishes. Concentrating on Finnish-born Right-Winger Jari Kurri, the Oilers' and the league's second leading scorer, Whitney half-steps out of the mouth of the goal to minimize Kurri's angle, and just then a puck plunks off his back into the net. Whitney says, "If you take your eye off Gretzky, he'll bank it off your skate, your back, your helmet, your wife. I could hang a nickel in the net, and he'd hit it every time." As majestic as the sight of Orr full bore used to be, at least he appeared out of somewhere.

Exactly in the manner of the Celtics, the Oilers came through a humiliating four-game sweeping two seasons ago by the four-time champion New York Islanders. Gretzky, who, Coach Glen Sather says, "scores goals nobody else even dreams about," scored none in the series, and his dreams were disturbed - for a summer. The first goal he finally got in the five-game rematch last year was a backhander. "I enjoy hockey even more now that I can say I'm a champion," he says. "To be champion changes everything, just the way you feel about coming to the rink. Many a time I've stared and stared at the Stanley Cup."

He expresses more than just respect, a fondness for Mike Bossy, Bryan Trottier and especially Denis Potvin of the crumbling Islander dynasty. Mimicking strikeout Pitchers Steve Carlton and Nolan Ryan, Bossy and Gretzky pass the three-goal hat-trick record to and fro. But Gretzky is most conscious of the defenseman Potvin, and not only because Potvin is one of those formidable superstructures whose presence on any side of the ice sends the pacifists to the other. Two years ago, in a slip that irritated New York fans, Gretzky referred to the Montreal Canadiens as hockey's greatest team when he meant its most storied organization. No Canadian misunderstood, as Potvin was gracious enough to explain on television, winning Gretzky's gratitude.

Gretzky is glad for the home stand, not because he objects to the road --"It's one of the most fun parts of the game"--but because he is the sports world's most overwrought flyer since Broadcaster John Madden. "What may stop him is that flying," says his father Walter, from whom he inherited the queasy sensation. On Canadian airlines, Gretzky is brought to the cockpit for soothing by the pilots. It is hard to express what a towering figure he is north of the 49th parallel. His $21 million hockey contract extending to the end of the millennium constitutes about a third of his earnings after adding cereals, pillowcases and Barbie-size Wayne dolls. All the same, he tolerates the attention without strain and enjoys pointing out that Saskatoon and Flin Flon are not exactly New York and Chicago. At times the arenas he visits will supply him a private exit ("I get nervous. I don't like crowds"), but generally he courts inconvenience. "If I walk into a room and don't hear anyone say, 'There's Gretzky,' it just doesn't feel right." After practice, shuttling teammates require his signature on posters and sticks for causes of their own. "But there's already a signature printed on it," he complains. "Yeah, but that's a phony, just like you. Sign it, you little jerk." They laugh brightly.

Only the newest players behold him with open awe. "The first time I stood on the ice beside Marcel Dionne, I was 18. I can remember exactly how excited I was. I've seen that same look in younger eyes." For perspective, he has several devices, but his most effective helper is the small, bespectacled clubhouse boy, Joey Moss, who has Down's syndrome. "I grew up around it," Gretzky says. "My dad's sister is mentally retarded. I love Joey, I love to shake his hand."

Books, he dislikes. But soap operas are his passion, particularly The Young and the Restless, on which he played a small role two summers ago. During an annual trip, Gretzky also enjoys low-rolling in Las Vegas. The casino swallows him for days. Otherwise, hockey has been absorbing. "I don't have a whole lot of time for anything else. I play the game." He likens the N.H.L. to a university, and calls hockey the study of geometry. "People talk about skating, puck handling and shooting, but the whole sport is angles and caroms, forgetting the straight direction the puck is going, calculating where it will be diverted, factoring in all the interruptions. Basically my whole game is angles."

The clubhouse feels like his den. "It's great to be the captain of a great team," he says, another distinction he shares with Bird, although the Celtics' captain dislikes the pregame socializing and the community arguments only captains are permitted to wage with the referees. "It's true," Gretzky agrees, "the fans think you're arguing for yourself all the time, but it's great. Here, Kevin Lowe, Mark Messier and Paul Coffey take charge too. It's fun to be champions."

Sawing the ends off his long sticks, fashioning a collage of tape and talcum, Gretzky remains after the others to tinker and think. "If anyone wants Neil Diamond tickets," someone advises the room with a shout, "call Dorothy." Gretzky looks up in puzzlement. "Who's Neil Diamond?"

"Hick from French Lick" is an easy description of Bird and his hometown, but unfair on a couple of counts. If the spa waters have calmed since the days when Franklin Roosevelt and Al Capone journeyed to southern Indiana for a sulfurous cure, French Lick continues to be a resort community of considerable grace. The leading citizen is identified on a circular standard, larger than a Gulf sign, marking LARRY BIRD BLVD. Every street's a boulevard in old French Lick. The location of the Bird residence is given away by a full blacktopped court, complete with two glass backboards, reclining in a grassy glen just a good stretch of the leg from a sunny country house.

Georgia Bird, a calico woman, has managed to raise five sons and a daughter, as her famous boy explains, "cooking in restaurants and such," having been something of a kitchen legend herself. Her husband Joe had a tragic thirst and killed himself in 1975 about a year after their divorce. From a dwarf named Shorty, the late proprietor of Shorty's pool hall, the boys first learned that their father had been a terrific basketball player and might have gone places had he not left school around the eighth grade to begin a life of work. Relating this memory, Larry's brother Mark, 31, conveys an understanding affection for the man who was at times the best finisher at the Kimball Piano & Organ Co. A shorter and fleshier version of Larry, Mark shares the features right down to the yellow mustache.

The youngest brother Eddie, the current flash of Springs Valley High, resembles him too. "The same mannerisms, the same temper--no, temperament," says Coach Gary Holland, whose first year at Springs Valley was Larry's last. "I was getting on Eddie the other day, and he was so upset he decided to put one in left-handed from the right side of the basket. We all just shook our heads." Last month, when the N.B.A. All-Stars were weekending in Indianapolis, Bird returned to the Springs Valley gymnasium, where his mural looks down like a chapel Madonna. He recollects, "I hadn't seen Eddie play since sixth grade," and they were both moved. "He had his best game of the year. When people are saying your brother is the greatest ever, how does an 18-year-old stand up to that?"

Larry was just 17 when he went off to Indiana University, 50 miles away. He lasted 24 days. A common and logical assumption is that he was terrorized by the undisciplined disciplinarian Bobby Knight, a coach who orders haircuts while throwing furniture. In fact, it was a roommate's brimming closet wardrobe that daunted Bird, an embarrassment of clothing. "I was a homesick kid who was lost and broke," he says. "If I knew then what I know now, I'd have run right back. Coach Knight and me wouldn't have had no trouble. He'd have loved my game."

A year with the city cutting grass, coating benches, striping streets and riding the famed garbage truck gave him confidence to start over at Indiana State, where the Celtics' crafty president Red Auerbach drafted him as an eligible junior. "Red's kind of like the daddy who was never there for Larry," his mother says. "He thinks that Red is just it." Auerbach sounds like a father: "If Larry ever did something bad, I wouldn't fine him. I'd just not let him play for a couple a games. That would be the worst thing you could do to him."

Georgia Bird is tingling over a surprise telephone call from the Detroit Pistons' Kelly Tripucka, an old Notre Damer who happened to hear he was her second favorite player. "My sister was for Purdue, I was for Kelly," she says, a delightful illustration of basketball's hold on Hoosiers. It is not unlike the spell hockey has over Canadians. "Here he called me. I couldn't hardly get over it. That's my hero. You meet so many nice people through Larry, and then when you go to see them it's almost like they're one of your own. Who's that nice-looking boy from Boston? He plays quarterback." (How could she know of Doug Flutie and not know his name?)

"All my kids have been good, but to have a superstar, really. Well, I usually don't brag on him." Though she once said, "He always played as though he had to be perfect. A lot of people say that's how it turned out."

From the age of ten in the frozen village of Brantford, Ont., an hour's drive out of Toronto, Gretzky was given no choice in the matter of perfection. The facts of life were revealed to him in the family car returning from an unexpected loss at nearby Brampton, where the arena was so swollen it could not have accommodated three more curious onlookers if a star had risen in the East. The object of this attention stood 4 ft. 4 in. and weighed 70 lbs. Wayne's father addressed him good-humoredly, which is still Walter Gretzky's style, but there was an ingredient of sorrow that has not left his voice completely yet. "You can't be like everybody else any more," he told the great little Gretzky. "You can't be normal. For you there can never, ever be a bad game again. Every game now, everyone will expect a miracle."

Their home is the cheery one with the apple-red goals on the backyard rink, which Walter first installed by the spray of a garden hose when Wayne was four --two years into his hockey career. A telephone technician, Walter played five seasons of amateur hockey, and Phyllis came to the games. "My mother and father are tremendous family people," Gretzky says. "They dedicated their whole lives to their kids: moral support, financial support, whether for hockey, baseball or piano." There are five children, one girl, and it tells something of the father that he steps over a bundle of Wayne's milestone sticks to begin the paneled-basement tour by showing off Daughter Kim's high school track medals.

At 14, Wayne left home to compete against young men in Toronto. "I didn't leave to play hockey really. I wasn't enjoying the atmosphere in Brantford, the peer pressure. It was so difficult for me just to go to school, such a big thing to knock off Gretzky. I had been a lot of places by the time I was 14, everywhere basically. Lying in bed the first night in Toronto, I thought it was the greatest thing in the world. Three days later it came to me, 'Oh, no, what am I doing here?' I was homesick for a year." His most vivid snapshot of childhood longing is a mental picture of five fishing poles tied to the car. "If I had it to do over, I wouldn't go."

Gretzky's formal education ended short of twelve full grades in, of all places, Indiana, where he was a 17-year-old Carmel High School student and, for eight games, a professional hockey player for the fading Indianapolis Racers. They ended up selling him to Edmonton. "I can tell you that high school basketball is a lot bigger than pro hockey in Indiana." Two of his brothers--Keith, 18, and Brent, 13--appear to be following him. "They say Keith will be drafted in the first round this year. He handles the comparisons pretty well, better than I would. Brent's quite good, and he loves the attention. He's the first to tell people he is my brother."

Of course, new wunderkinds with different last names have been toddling out steadily for years, and Gretzky is sadly conscious of them. "It's too bad they get compared. Thankfully, my family always played that down. The funny thing is, it's most often the mother and father who are disappointed if he doesn't make it. The kid is usually relieved." Brent, the world-champion kid, pledges unobnoxiously, "Wayne doesn't know it, but I'm going to be better than he is." Phyllis Gretzky will be pleased if Brent just keeps his mouthpiece in. The only four teeth Wayne has lost were chopped off when he was ten, "in the last minute of the game," she well recalls, "after all that orthodontia, all those nights wearing the retainer." Braces on a young hockey player must be the definition of positive thinking.

Literally an unflappable woman, Phyllis is cooking dinner while a yellow canary swoops freely overhead, a balm for Brent in the wake of a recently deceased cat named Morris. Gazing at the window, she sighs, "It's going to be awfully quiet when all of a sudden there's no hockey in the backyard."

The Edmonton Oilers and the Boston Celtics have each won 45 to 50 games and lost around 15. In addition, the Oilers have tied seven. This puts Edmonton in utter charge of its division, though goalie injuries have intruded recently. While the Celtics are also in first place, as usual they are resigned to teeter-tottering into April with the Philadelphia 76ers, their Eastern archrivals. A startling November fistfight between the 76ers' Julius ("Dr. J") Erving and Bird, who sometimes taunts his victims, mortified both men thoroughly but summarized the rivalry rather well. "People who have to fight tooth and nail can't go out and eat together," Bird explains. "Take Magic Johnson. They say I don't like him and he doesn't like me, but I just don't believe that. We're all so competitive. Dr. J and I will miss each other some day, probably look over our shoulder and wonder where we've gone." Erving simply says, "Bird is the consummate player, the best in the game today."

Fresh from a nine-game tear of 30-point games, Bird is averaging 28 points and 6.5 assists, but he is unmoved by numbers. In one game, when statisticians realize he is a stolen ball from double figures in points, rebounds, assists and steals, Bird declines the invitation to re-enter a lopsided victory. Winning the 1984 foul-shooting title (88.8%) purely delighted him, since Springs Valley's dawn shooter still regards free throws as a measure of honesty. But maybe rebounds gratify him most of all. "Rebounding," he says, "is an art, a talent, a hustle play."

Gretzky understands that breaking his own scoring record, securing his fifth consecutive point title and assuring his sixth straight MVP distinction have lost some shock value. But this never means any less to him. "Every time I break a record I'm excited, even if it's my own. I want to crack the 212 this year (he is on a 214 pace), and some season before long somebody's going to get 100 goals. I'd like it to be me." Phil Esposito's 76 goals with the Boston Bruins served as the standard for eleven years, until Gretzky beat that by 16. "It takes guts," says Esposito, now retired, "to recognize you have that much talent and to dedicate yourself to it."

At the same time, the prosperity of the Oilers' Jari Kurri on the Gretzky line is significant. Sixty points (combined goals and assists) behind Gretzky but trying to shade him in goals, the right-winger has become the first European to score over 60 in an N.H.L. season. "We're instinctive," says Kurri of their partnership. Gretzky grins, "If someone else has a better opportunity, give it to him." Every angle of this geometry makes him rejoice.

Gretzky fairly boasts that he "never touches a stick" in the off-season, but does not account for the solid summer he spent rounding up the children of Brantford to practice breakaways on lone goalies in an indoor ice rink, using tennis balls. "I'm still not that good on breakaways, but I'm four times better than I used to be." The truth is, shinny games tempt him. Meanwhile Bird is embarrassed to admit, "Last summer I caught myself shooting around for five hours. I thought, 'What's wrong with me?' It's like I get this guilty feeling that I'm not playing enough, that someone is playing more." Dr. J? Magic? "Some kid in the sixth grade."

Bird and Gretzky are each involved in a long-standing relationship with one woman. Gretzky's sweetheart Vickie Moss is a cabaret singer. Joey, the Oilers' clubhouse boy, is her younger brother. From a momentary marriage to a cheerleader, Bird has a seven-year-old daughter he sees in the summertime. His companion is a Kelly Girl secretary named Dinah Mattingly. Neither man is extravagant, though Gretzky likes to dress. No longer fazed by clothes, Bird plucked his MVP trophy in shirtsleeves from a crowd of tuxedoes. Both are adept at trading in the Ferraris and Trans Ams they are frequently awarded, or handing them down to brothers.

As long as men beat sticks against the ice, not to mention each other, Gretzky will be remembered. Bird's legacy should also be durable, though he attaches little importance to history: "As far as that goes, it's enough for me that the flags are flying in Boston Garden." Neither expected to possess his sport for long or forever. "When I finish," says Gretzky, "I'll walk away from it totally, be my own person, my own businessman." This plan amuses Gretzky's friend Howe, who lingered 32 pro seasons and is a Hartford Whalers' executive now. The way Bird looks at it, "When it's all over with, I'll just go off and be glad. At the end of every season, when you get up the next morning, you think: 'Hey, no bus to take today, no plane to catch tomorrow.' It's the greatest feeling next to the championship." One gentle concern: he wonders if French Lick or even Terre Haute will ever suit him again as a place to live, now that he's seen Paree.

They do not know each other, but they do. Hockey has become a small study to Bird, like the Kennedys, and for a similar reason. "The Bruins own our building," he says, and Gretzky has been his focus. "He's got to be the greatest athlete who just about ever lived." For his part, Gretzky says, "I don't know a whole lot about basketball, but Bird is the one I watch." One skating without the puck, the other running without the ball, they are a diverting sight even away from the play, practically a game of their own. Maybe they are playing the same game.

Stare to Win

Daniel Coyle "The Talent Code" March 9th, 2011

If you were to visit a dozen talent hotbeds tomorrow, you would be struck by how much time they spend staring.

I’m not talking about merely looking. I’m talking about active staring — the kind of raw, unblinking, intensely absorbed gazes you see in hungry cats or newborn babies.

What’s more, the physical spaces seem frequently designed for staring: practice areas are shared among different groups, so that older and younger can mix (and stare). Walls feature photos and posters of local heroes (the better for staring). Training sessions often seems to be augmented by injections of high-octane staring.

This pattern of behavior strikes most of us as strange and surprising, because to all appearances, staring seems kind of dumb. More important, most of us instinctively view staring as passive — and when it comes to teaching/parenting/coaching, there is no greater perceived sin than tolerating passivity. We strive to create environments of constant, purposeful action that makes our classrooms and playing fields resemble a never-ending episode of Iron Chef. Just staring? It seems like a waste of time.

But is it? Or is there something powerful going on beneath the surface?

I recently visited a group of Special Forces soldiers who had recently taken an expedition to an exotic, far-off place: the corner offices of General Electric. The soldiers spent a few weeks in the boardrooms, watching top executives at work. The soldiers didn’t have any responsibilities other than watching the GE execs make decisions, communicate, and work together. Basically, they stared. And when they returned to their unit, the Special Forces commanders (who’d set up this experiment) noticed an immediate and pronounced boost in performance. They made better decisions, they communicated more clearly.

Another example: classical music teachers around the world have been stunned in the past few years by the quality of learning going by watching great performances on YouTube. There aren’t any real classes, per se, but rather a space where people stare at Heifetz, Perlman, Lang Lang et. al., copy them, and get better.

And another: In a famous episode of 60 Minutes, tennis teacher and author Timothy Galwey taught a person who’d never played tennis before to hit a decent forehand in 20 minutes — without uttering a word. It was all via the stare.

So what’s happening in these cases?

Three things, I’d say:

* First, mimicry. Staring is the fastest, most efficient way to imprint a skill on our brains — far more efficient than trying to learn through the keyhole of words. (First the teacher has to come up with the right word, then the learner has to absorb/understand it, then the learner has to convert that word into an action — it’s a multi-step conversion process, with the possibility for error at each step.)
* Second, high-quality feedback. Active staring gives us a way to measure our performance against those who are better than us. Once their performance is imprinted, we can see how we compare, and make adjustments accordingly. We can feel where we fall short, and fix it.
* Third, igniting motivation. Staring is the royal road to passion, because it’s the main way we link our identities with other people. Those photos of heroes around the talent hotbeds are not a coincidence, because they send a signal that creates a response from the starer: those dudes did it. Why can’t I?

To evolutionary-psychology types, the hidden benefits of active staring come as no surprise. For millions of years, long before language existed to motivate and inform us, our brains learned by staring — and we’re still good at it. Staring is a neural combination platter — fuel for both learning and motivation.

So the question becomes one of design — specifically, how do we mimic the talent hotbeds and get more staring into our lives? I’d suggest four ways:

1. Pick quality targets. Start collecting a video catalogue of brilliant, stare-worthy performances (YouTube is handy for this). All the better if there are slow-motion versions.
2. Treat staring as a daily fuel stop. Set aside five minutes per day for watching brilliance.
3. Design stare-friendly spaces. Isolation kills motivation — make sure age groups get a chance to closely observe each other, to see what they might become.
4. Respect the stare. If you catch someone staring at something or someone (presuming here that it’s something vaguely worthwhile), realize what’s going on and give them some room. There’s some important stuff happening beneath the surface.

WHL Draft Statistics by Month

Small Thoughts At Large - musings on the WHL, hockey, and the sports world in general.
Alan Caldwell Friday, May 6, 2011


One more stat category I missed in that review of the draft picks (below): what month were the most players born in? I think we already know the answer to this, but here's the math:

232 players picked. Of those, the numbers by birth month:

January: 41 (17.7%)
February: 36 (15.5%)
March: 32 (13.8%)
April: 34 (14.7%)
May: 25 (10.8%)
June: 13 (5.6%)
July: 13 (5.6%)
August: 14 (6.0%)
September: 5 (2.2%)
October: 10 (4.3%)
November: 4 (1.7%)
December: 5 (2.2%)

Overall, 62% of draft picks were born in the first four months (33%) of the year 1996. Assuming that births of baby boys were evenly spread over the 12 months of the year, you can see what a disadvantage the boys born in the last third of the year (10.3% of picks) had against the bigger, older boys from the early months.

This happens every year.
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Draft pick breakdowns

Thursday, May 5, 2011

A statistical breakdown of today's draft - showing the number of picks by each team and the average height (in inches) and weight (in pounds) of their draftees, as well as breakdown by positions (forwards-defensemen-goaltenders), and where the players hailed from (B.C.-Alberta-Saskatchewan-Manitoba-USA).


Nbr Ht Wt F D G BC AB SK MB US
Brandon 12 70.5 157.8 8 3 1 0 8 0 4 0
Calgary 10 70.8 161.4 6 3 1 4 2 2 2 0
Edmonton 10 71.6 159.3 4 5 1 4 5 0 1 0
Everett 11 71.2 159.4 8 2 1 5 3 2 1 0
Kamloops 11 71.3 164.2 6 4 1 2 4 2 2 1
Kelowna 10 71.5 157.6 6 3 1 3 1 4 1 1
Kootenay 14 70.8 161.1 7 6 1 3 7 3 1 0
Lethbridge 11 70.1 161.1 6 4 1 1 6 4 0 0
Medicine Hat 11 69.3 151.5 6 4 1 2 4 0 3 2
Moose Jaw 9 70.2 161.6 7 2 0 2 3 3 1 0
Portland 10 69.9 153.6 6 4 0 4 1 0 1 4
Prince Albert 10 70.9 168.9 6 3 1 1 2 4 3 0
Prince George 10 69.9 151.3 5 4 1 2 2 3 2 1
Red Deer 9 71.7 163.3 4 3 2 1 3 4 0 1
Regina 10 71.5 163.3 4 4 2 1 5 0 2 2
Saskatoon 12 71.1 170.3 7 4 1 2 3 6 1 0
Seattle 9 73.2 167.8 4 4 1 2 1 3 2 1
Spokane 11 70.3 149.9 6 4 1 2 6 2 0 1
Swift Current 12 70.8 161.4 7 4 1 3 5 2 1 1
Tri-City 11 70.3 156.2 7 4 0 0 4 0 0 7
Vancouver 9 72.3 166.3 3 5 1 4 3 0 0 2
Victoria 10 70.8 171.1 5 4 1 4 2 2 1 1

For reference, the average player picked today is 70.5 inches tall and weighs 160.1 pounds.

The team picking the biggest players is Seattle, at an average height of 73.2. Vancouver is second but almost a full inch shorter at 72.3 inches. Obviously Seattle put a priority on size.

Shortest team is Medicine Hat at 69.3, followed by Portland and Prince George at 69.9. (Side note here - one of Portland's players, Ryan Collins, has no ht/wt to be found and so I did not average him in. He is the only drafted player excluded from the ht/wt numbers)

When it comes to position, there were 129 forwards, 82 defensemen, and 21 goaltenders picked. Most teams took some kind of roughly proportional mix of those. A few exceptions:

- Brandon took 8F-3D-1G
- Everett took 8F-2D-1G
- Moose Jaw took 7F-2D-0G

Guess those teams were targeting forwards over defensemen. Vancouver took 3F-5D-1G, so they may have been targeting defenders.

For where the players came from, there were 52 from British Columbia, 80 from Alberta, 46 from Saskatchewan, 29 from Manitoba, and 25 from south of the 49th.

Something to think about - Alberta and B.C. typically team up to form Team Pacific at the U-17 Challenge, while Saskatchewan and Manitoba are Team Western. If this draft is any indication of the overall strength of the 1996 born players, how's that U-17 Challenge going to look in 2 years? Alberta alone had more players drafted than Saskatchewan and Manitoba put together. In theory, Pacific should be crushing Western in 2 years.

Manitoba almost got beaten out by the American players. Not a great year for the Manitoba hockey programs?

Interesting to see how some teams draft more heavily from their own region, and some draft from wherever. A few notes there:

- Tri-City picked 4 kids from Alberta and the rest of their draft was American kids. Trying to put the "Americans" in "Tri-City Americans", I guess.

- Regina, the provincial capital, did not pick a single kid from Saskatchewan.

- Lethbridge's 6 Alberta kids included 4 from Calgary. What do they say about keeping your enemies closer?

- Calgary minor hockey produced 24 draftees altogether. That's almost as many as the entire province of Manitoba.