The Weight Of The Moment

A couple of years ago I worked with former NFL Coach Herm Edwards. He wears many hats in his post-coaching life, including motivational speaker. I asked him to give me a sample, and he launched into some fiery verse on the difference between anxiety vs pressure. 

It's not completely removed from one of my favorite Malcolm Gladwell chapters about choking vs panic. And it all applies to the NCAA Basketball Tournament.

Under this intense one-and-done spotlight, anxiety, pressure, panic, and choking all come together in a cruel witch's brew. What was Georgetown's Freddie Brown thinking when he passed the ball to North Carolina's James Worthy? Why did Chris Webber call timeout when Michigan had none remaining? How did Derrick Rose miss those free throws against Kansas?

Edwards says that anxiety is good, it's how you know the game is big. The butterflies make you feel alive. But pressure makes you so afraid of failure, that you stop doing the things that instinctually put you in this lofty position in the first place.

And in this 2013 edition of March Madness, we've seen some maddening examples of players and teams buckling under the pressure. If Davidson had completed a simple outlet pass, they would have upset Marquette. If Ole Miss had gotten a timeout after La Salle's go-ahead shot, Marshall Henderson may have been able to make his own NCAA history - but not from the bench. And then there was Kansas, who felt the pressure and fell in one of the all-time March Mishaps.

It's true that Michigan's Trey Burke made one unbelievable play after another to lift Michigan to the historic win, but it never should've been up to him. Unlike what Syracuse University has done to their opponents in this tournament, Kansas allowed Michigan to get close enough to create a miraculous circumstance. And there were a number of reasons it didn't have to be that way.

Kansas was led by top-notch head coach Bill Self and senior point guard Elijah Johnson. They had gotten to this point largely because of these guys but as events unfolded, everything unraveled.

With 2:34 remaining, Kansas led 72-62. Michigan had just missed back-to-back shots, and Johnson had come down with the rebound. As a fan watching at home (and as a TV producer), I would have expected Johnson to walk it up the court while the huge Kansas fan presence gave a standing ovation for a victory that was imminent.

Inexplicably, Johnson forced his dribble into traffic and turned it over resulting in a dunk at the other end. So now the Jayhwaks were only up 8 with 2:22 left. Kansas not only failed to score, but failed to use clock, and Michigan chipped away until it was within a single prayer of a shot.

From that point on, Johnson had lost his mind. There was the key turnover, the missed free throws, the seemingly open layup he missed at the end of the OT session. But his coach wasn't much better. They actually came out of a late timeout in overtime with 6 guys on the floor.

So how do you explain all this? One and done makes you crazy, and when the game's on the line any play could be your last.

Trey Burke was a hero because there was nothing to lose. He had the anxiety, the desperation to save his team. Elijah Johnson crumbled because there was everything to lose. He only had the pressure not to blow it - which of course became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

A Sunday Away From The Fray: Kentucky

Even with a whole day to myself, I couldn't bring myself to visit the infamous Harlan County. Despite what you gather from the TV show Justified, it isn't right next door to Lexington, it's a good 2+ hours away.

But I did my homework anyway on the central player of my favorite current TV drama. Harlan County is only home to just over 29,000 souls (96% white), and it has at least that many firearms. I met a Harlan native now based in Lexington, and he was actually wearing a cowboy hat just like Raylan's.

ME:   So what is there to do in Harlan on a day off?

HARLAN:   They do ATV tours that are pretty cool.

ME:   What about stockpiling guns and explosives? Is there like a Boyd Crowder fantasy camp?

HARLAN:   There's still moonshine.

ME:   So ATVs, explosives, and moonshine? Or as they call it in Kentucky...Sunday?

HARLAN:   Sounds about right.

ME:   What about Ellie Mae's trailer out in some Holler?

He laughed and said the show makes life look far more interesting than it really is. But some of the stuff is too real. Like last episode, there are plenty of families that'll blow your head off if you try to take away their government "draw."

The "draw" is the government disability/workers comp check for almost every human that has ever worked in the mines. It's ironic that people so dependent on the government are so against it.

Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers has a chapter called "Bloody Harlan" which examines the Culture of Honor that takes place in the American South. The quote that prefaces the chapter is "Die like a man, like your brother did." Generations have killed off each other in Harlan because of an insult directed at one's family.

If I spent the day in Harlan, chances are I would have insulted someone before the day was through. Which would have meant my chances of getting killed would be greater than zero. Especially if I was on the moonshine, setting of explosives while I was ATVing.

So I decided to stay in my Lexington hotel suite and catch up on expense reports. That never killed anyone.

Paper Backtime: Gladwell's Greatest Hits

In the early part of the 21st century, Malcom Gladwell has been a pioneer in teaching us how to get beneath the surface and re-examine what we think about a lot of things, but mostly about expertise and what makes someone or something great.

The Tipping Point examined the exhaustive connectivity and machinations that goes into explosive change. Blink showed how we all rely on our instincts, that have been built on a foundation of life experience. And Outliers deconstructs individual achievement and brilliance, and breaks it all down to the root cause: extremely hard work amid favorable circumstances.

I refer to Gladwell's Outliers and "10,000 hours" rule often. I can claim it as a TV producer and a parent, though situations continue to come up in both areas that I'm completely unprepared for. And despite certain levels of achievement in martial arts and Mario Kart, I am still in a Gladwellian sense, a novice.

What The Dog Saw is a compilation of Gladwell's essays over the years for The New Yorker, a follow up to his three other books, and no doubt re-released in book form to capitalize upon his previous literary successes.

Inside are a number of extrapolated deep thoughts. Here are some of the chapter titles:

The Ketchup Conundrum: Mustard Now Comes in Dozens of Varieties. Why has Ketchup Stayed the Same?

John Rock's Error: What the Inventor of the Birth Control Pill Didn't Know About Women's Health.

Blowup: Who Can Be Blamed for a Disaster like The Challenger Explosion? No One, and We'd Better Get Used to It.

Late Bloomers: Why Do We Equate Genius with Precocity?

The Talent Myth: Are Smart People Overrated?

The last two are the best examples of Gladwell's premise as a whole. Being smart or being precocious are not necessarily indicators of anything. It is the hard work, perseverance, and most importantly the ability to tinker with your approach that makes all the difference.

I don't know too much about Gladwell's resume, but I do know he became a staff writer for The New Yorker at 32 years old and published his first book, The Tipping Point, at 36. So he wasn't exactly an overnight sensation. He had to work on and fine-tune his craft for years, and then he needed the vehicle for the audience to receive his message.

He was able to look at things a different way and pull in his audience, often drawing parallels between two completely different subjects and find a common link. Like mammography and military infrared weapon location. Or plagiarism and music sampling. Or spotting terrorists and faking mental illness. Or pit bulls and the New York City crime rate. He's got a million of them.

My favorite chapter is The Art Of Failure: Why Some People Choke and Others Panic. This essay (no chapter is more than 29 pages) breaks down the difference between Jana Novotna's infamous Wimbledon meltdown to JFK Jr's piloting crash in the Atlantic.

"Choking" is the pressure of the moment causing you to seize up and forget your years of learned experience, while "panicking" is a result of poor judgment based on inexperience. Jana Novotna knew how to serve, yet double-faulted three times when the Wimbledon title was on her racket. Conversely, JFK Jr had no idea what to do on a foggy night when he lost his horizon in his small plane.

It's a perfect example of why we can't paint everything, even failure, with such a broad brush. All you have to do is dig a little deeper.