George
Beinhorn
WriteRemedy
240 Monroe Drive #514
Mountain View, CA 94040
(650) 248-9878
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article)
The Simple Joys of Sport
During a vacation in Hawaii last summer, I picked up a hitchhiker—he was a fit-looking lad of about 20 who spoke with a French accent. He told me he'd grown up in Tahiti, but that he lived in France, and that he made his living as a professional body-boarder. I asked if he rode big waves, and he said, "Yeah, that's my thing. It takes lots of wave energy to perform well."
He said he’d grown tired of the endless travel that his sport required, and that he was thinking of taking a break, because he was no longer happy being a professional athlete. His voice thickening with regret, he described how, as a child in Tahiti, riding the waves had been pure joy, whereas competition had sapped that pristine happiness. He said, "Competing, you have to play tricks on your friends--you can't even talk to them the same way anymore."
I marveled. Here was this young man who’d accomplished so much, and already he was career-weary--and, some moxie, too, to drop off a three story wall of water while performing tricks along the way. His voice was firm with the determination that had made his achievements possible.
We talked in a general way about sports, and I mentioned that I'd worked at Runner's World in the early 1970s. I told him about a conversation I'd had with Joe Henderson, the magazine's founding editor, while we’d run ten miles together during a recent marathon. Joe had talked about the changes in running over the last thirty years. In the 1970s, when the American runners were still competing well at the highest international levels, many of them were friends who trained together and shared their methods, even as the world-dominating Kenyans do today. Joe said that, with big money riding on every race, the Americans no longer feel comfortable hanging out together and sharing their secrets.
I told the body surfer that I'd spent most of my vacation snorkeling at Tunnels Lagoon. His voice rose with enthusiasm as he described the "amazing numbers of seashells" I would find if I swam straight out from the singer Charo's house to a gap in the reef where the inflowing currents drop mounds of debris. "You'll find many wonderful things!" he said, his pleasure in sharing contrasting with the weary tones with which he'd described his career impasse.
I told him how, while I was at Runner's World, I would occasionally photograph indoor track meets. I described how the meets would always begin with races for elementary school kids, and how the crowd would go wild, screaming and whistling as the tiny kids flailed around the track. I told him that the applause for the professionals was always much more subdued. The body boarder appeared to resent my saying this, as if I had intended to cast a slur on his sport. "I like competition," he said sullenly as he stepped out of the car.
I regretted that I hadn't been able to explain myself more clearly. Putting down his sport was the last thing on my mind. I’d simply wanted to share a feeling that people respond more readily to sports performances that are tinged with a certain naive joy, than to events surrounded with too much adult hype and seriousness.
Reflecting on our conversation, I wondered if the young bodyboarder’s simple happiness, riding the waves as a boy, had helped him to rise to the top of his sport. If he could recover some of that un-self-conscious joy, might he be able to forget his competitors and perform better than ever? It might take courage, because he'd have to become engrossed in pure play once again, and less focused on external rewards. Going his own way, he might even find himself further distanced from his competitors. But his purity would surely win their respect, and his joy might even inspire them.
An idealistic scenario? A Pollyannaish ending to a Hollywood movie? Possibly.
When Michael Jordan joined the Chicago Bulls, he insisted on a clause in his contract that spelled out his freedom to play basketball whenever and wherever he liked, including joining neighborhood pickup games. And when a reporter asked Chicago Bulls coach Phil Jackson to characterize Jordan's co-star Scottie Pippen in a single phrase, Jackson thought for a moment then replied: "The joy of basketball."
In sports nowadays, joy can be pretty hard to find. Turning on the TV, the odds are excellent that we’ll be treated to the sight of professional athletes whining, brawling, and preening. Numbed by the parade of boorishness, we tend to gloss over behaviors that would have brought a blush of shame to the cheeks of the great philosopher-coaches: people like Vince Lombardi, Jim Counsilman, John Wooden, Bill Walsh, Dean Smith, and George Halas.
As fans, we may have to accept what's dished out to us, but as participants, we can craft our own experiences. Like Jordan and Pippen, we can make the conscious decision to turn sports, at our own level, into an artistic performance, a celebration, and a spiritual quest.
How can we still find pure joy in sports? We can learn a lot from famous athletes who show exceptional qualities as people.
Granted, this is personal, but I'm very inspired when I see Ann Trason, the greatest female ultramarathon runner of all time, handing out cups of Gatorade at an obscure trail race in the hills north of San Francisco, motivated by the simple pleasure of serving old geezers like me.
I'm inspired by Mark Plaatjes, winner of the 1993 World Championships marathon. At the New York City marathon the next year, Plaatjes was running in the lead pack when an injury forced him to drop out of the race. Instead of retiring to his hotel room to sulk, Plaatjes hobbled to the nearest aid station, where he applied his skills as a trained physical therapist to massage the slower runners.
Aside from their amazing physical gifts, what are some of the personal traits that inspire us in great athletes? Gymnast Kerri Strug's courageous performance at the 1996 Olympics comes to mind. With a severely injured ankle, Strug performed a vault that ensured a gold medal for the US team. Surely, an inspiring quality in athletes is a heart that's big enough to include others in its sympathies.
Loving, expansive feelings aren't exclusive to great athletes, of course--but can an athlete be considered truly great without them?
Consider Ty Cobb. I first learned of the professional baseball Hall of Famer’s phenomenal career when I was seven or eight years old. I happened to mention his amazing lifetime batting average to my father one day, and to my surprise, Dad fell silent. I knew from this that there was something vaguely wrong about Cobb, but it would be 45 years before I learned of his darker side, when I watched Ken Burns’s Baseball documentary on PBS. It dawned on me then that my father had been unwilling to discuss Cobb's faults, however reprehensible, and that it was a reflection of Dad's goodness that he'd been loathe to do so.
But hey, let's be realistic. Sure, everybody loves an athlete with a heart of gold, but can jocks truly afford to harbor big, floppy feelings? Can an NFL linebacker afford to love his competitors? If he treats them with kindness, won't they cheerfully murder him where he stands? (Certainly.) On third down and goal, there’s not a lot of room for politeness: "After you." "No no, after you!" Whether winning requires beating the crap out of someone depends a lot on the sport, of course, but there's solid scientific evidence that expansive attitudes contribute to athletic success, and not only by distracting us from energy-draining negativity. As 1972 Olympic marathon gold medalist Frank Shorter put it, "The marathon is too hard a race to waste energy hating your competitors."
A review of 101 studies of several thousand men and women revealed that negative emotions can have severe health consequences:
People who experienced chronic anxiety, long periods of sadness and pessimism, unremitting tension or incessant hostility, relentless cynicism or suspiciousness, were found to have double the risk of disease--including asthma, arthritis, headaches, peptic ulcers, and heart disease (each representative of major, broad categories of disease).
At a business meeting recently, I was introduced to a former college All-American football player for whom the consequences of negative attitudes had taken a particularly brutal turn. He’d been a linebacker at a nationally ranked Division I school. During his playing days, he’d weighed 245 pounds, and he’d had a 20-inch neck, but when we met, he looked like a tennis player—slim, athletic and well-proportioned, but far from his former hulking self.
He told me about a game that he’d played in, where a 300-pound offensive tackle had been giving him lots of trouble. Angry and frustrated, he chose his moment and deliberately hit the offensive tackle in the knees, disabling him and sending him off the field. “He didn’t give me any more trouble after that,” he said. “I saw him several years later after I transferred to his school -- he was hobbling across the campus using a cane.”
He then told me how, after leaving school, he’d been in a car accident that had left him paralyzed, to the extent that in order to move around he had to press buttons that activated servo-motors in a complex bionic frame. His body had wasted away; when I met him, he’d spent years painfully working to rebuild his fitness to the point where he could walk and ride a bicycle.
We didn’t discuss the possible subtle karmic “payback” mechanism that might have led to his severe impairment. Yet it was apparent from the way he described his experiences that he believed he’d incurred a serious moral debt in ending that 300-pound lineman’s career, and that the bill had come due. The American nineteenth-century philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson was probably right, when he talked of a “law of compensation” that rewards us according to our deeds.
In his wonderful book, Running With the Legends, journalist Michael Sandrock compares the ever-cheerful Frank Shorter, whose phenomenal career spanned 10 years of racing at the world-class level, and Derek Clayton, the Australian former marathon world record holder (2:08:33) whose career was plagued by injuries, thanks to his ruthless approach to training.
Just as with [British Olympic marathoner Ron] Hill, there is something in Shorter's makeup that set him apart from Clayton. A story that gives an idea of Clayton's personality is one he tells when speaking at prerace clinics. Clayton relates how during a race, he missed his drink at an aid station. A Japanese competitor running alongside graciously offered Clayton his own bottle. After taking some of the drink, Clayton began to hand it back to the Japanese runner. Suddenly, he changed his mind. Instead of giving it back to the Japanese runner, Clayton turned and threw the bottle off to the side of the road. Clayton was proud of that, and of the fact that he trained so hard that he would sometimes be "pissing blood."
Sandrock observes, "Lots of runners train hard, but only the select few are able to put it together when it counts." Meaning, presumably, that a ruthless attitude doesn't always win the race. In the 1972 Olympic marathon where Shorter won Gold, Clayton finished a disappointing 13th.
Our everyday experiences tell us that contractive feelings sap our energy. Shorter was right: life is too hard to waste energy hating people. Moreover, the notion that expansive feelings such as love and kindness promote health and improve performance is no longer an airy sentiment. It's been verified by the discovery of the electrical and chemical pathways by which the effects of our positive and negative thoughts and feelings are carried to the remotest corners of our bodies, including the immune system, which is vitally involved in sports performance and recovery.
Bruce Ogilvy, Ph.D., a pioneering sports psychologist, once studied the psychological factors that had prevented a group of world-class badminton players from making the final breakthrough to the top of their sport. Ogilvy discovered that the second-tier athletes tended to beat themselves up mentally for their mistakes, while the champions simply noted their errors and moved on, wasting no energy on angry self-blame. They inwardly reviewed their mistakes and quickly turned to the next task. Negative self-thoughts sap our energy. They are self-defeating.
Is it surprising that so many great players, including Michael Jordan, relished the game throughout their careers? David Halberstam, in his wonderful biography, Playing for Keeps Michael Jordan & the World He Made, ties Jordan's happy spirit to his phenomenal success.
Jordan seemed almost innately joyous. His pleasure seemed to come from playing basketball, and he generated the most natural kind of self-confidence."....
He was going to be a great player, Loughery [Jordan's college roommate] thought, not just because of the talent and the uncommon physical assets but because he loved the game. That love could not be coached or faked, and it was something he always had. He was joyous about practices, joyous about games, as if he could not wait for either. Not many players had that kind of love. All too many modern players, Loughery believed, loved the money instead of the game. But Jordan's love of what he did was real, and it was a huge advantage.
A cornerstone principle of spirituality holds that each time we make our awareness a little bit larger, our soul—the internal conduit for God's infinite bliss within us—rewards us with a corresponding little extra shot of joy. The world's spiritual teachings tell us that cultivating expansive, positive thoughts and feelings promotes health and well being, while negative thoughts and emotions poison the body and make it vulnerable to disease.
If joyful, expansive attitudes can spread good vibrations throughout our bodies, they surely won’t stand in the way of sports achievement; and they may, in fact, give us a powerful advantage. In every area of our lives, positive, life affirming attitudes are important for success: in relationships, business, child-raising, and sports. Even if our goal is just to lose ten pounds, we can be sure that our joy in the achievement will be amplified if we can devise ways to shed the pounds "expansively"--perhaps with the goal of gaining health and energy in order to better serve our family and friends.
It’s not hard to understand how expansion works. Consider the experience of people who begin an exercise program. After the first painful weeks, they find that they can climb stairs, take out the garbage, and play with the kids with greater zest and freedom. As fresh energy spreads throughout their being, they become happier, more alert, and more in tune with the life flowing around them. Where they were formerly dragged down and confined by the torporous mass of their own flesh, they now have visions of surfing on waves of energy. Their awareness—the force and range of their bodies, hearts and minds—has expanded.
The world's spiritual teachings tell us that these welcome increases of happiness are hints of an even greater inner expansion and joy that await us, as we extend our awareness sufficiently to loosen the ego's grip and open our hearts to God’s boundless bliss and love.
I'm certainly not going to claim that every successful athlete is a quivering mass of joy. I read a newspaper story recently about a 270 pound college football player who, enraged because his fast-food order didn’t include chalupas, tried to attack the attendant and became stuck in the service window, from which he had to be extricated by the police. (There's a website dedicated to athletes' less-than-enlightened behavior: www.badjocks.com.)
To expect every athlete to be a model of compassion and humility is -- well, stupid. Basketball player Charles Barkley nailed it, in the famous Nike commercial where he deadpans: "I am not your role model." Still, there are excellent grounds for suspecting that athletes who are expansive get more out of their personal experience of sports, at least in the dimensions of their being where they're expansive. Whether they also perform better is up to science to decide. It might not take loving feelings to win the Super Bowl, but if you can get through the bloody battle with at least some part of your essential humanity intact, who’s to doubt that it will add a positive dimension to the experience.
Consider the great philosopher-coaches mentioned earlier. Take Jim Counsilman, the swimming coach who built a dynasty of NCAA champion teams at the University of Indiana. Counsilman worked tirelessly to combat selfishness and narrow heartedness among his swimmers. He devoted a great deal of ingenuity to making their workouts fun, because he believed that a relaxed atmosphere, colored with positive, expansive feelings enhances athletic performance.
Or take John Wooden, the legendary coach whose UCLA basketball teams dominated the NCAA, winning 10 national championships during the 1960s and ‘70s. Wooden’s UCLA players were required to study his famous "Pyramid of Success," which included such expansive values as "cooperation," "enthusiasm," "loyalty," "friendship," and "team spirit." Wooden's autobiography, My Personal Best: Life Lessons from an All-American Journey, published in 2004 when he was 94, is one of the most inspiring sports books of all time. There's also a wonderful video, Values, Victory and Peace of Mind, in which the "Wizard of Westwood," still clear-eyed at age 90, presents the Pyramid, with respectful appearances by former UCLA players Bill Walton and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and NBA coach Phil Jackson.
Even Vince Lombardi, the notoriously tough-minded coach who led the Green Bay Packers to victory in the first Super Bowl, practiced expansive values when it counted. Lombardi wasn't hard on his players merely to get the best out of them on the field. Bart Starr, the Packers' Hall of Fame quarterback, recalls: "He never treated football as an end result, but rather a means to an end. He was concerned with the full, total life.... Tough, demanding, abrasive, he was also compassionate and understanding. For though he recognized that absolute perfection is never attainable, he believed the quest for it can be one of the most challenging races an individual can run."
Jerry Kramer, the Packers' All Pro guard, put it more succinctly: "I had hated him at times during training camp and I had hated him at times during the season, but I knew how much he had done for us, and I knew how much he cared about us. He is a beautiful man."
Joe Ehrmann, a former Baltimore Colts All-Pro defensive tackle, now coaches high school football at the Gilman School in Baltimore. Ehrmann believes that young athletes today are encouraged to grow up believing in three wrong values: athletic ability, sexual conquest, and economic success. He calls these “false masculinity.”
“Masculinity, first and foremost, ought to be defined in terms of relationships," Joe said. "It ought to be taught in terms of the capacity to love and to be loved.... And I think the second criterion--the only other criterion for masculinity--is that all of us ought to have some kind of cause, some kind of purpose in our lives that's bigger than our own individual hopes, dreams, wants, and desires."
Ehrmann teaches his players a code of conduct that’s starkly different from the values most young athletes learn today. It includes accepting responsibility, leading courageously, and “enacting justice on behalf of others.” Ehrmann's "Building Men for Others" program is based on empathy: "Not feeling for someone, but with someone."
Biff Poggi, Ehrman's fellow coach at Gilman, happened to read a newspaper article that quoted the football coach of a nearby school: "You have to push them [high school football players] to the brink and either they are going to break or they are going to stand up and be a man." Poggi took the story to a team meeting, where he read it aloud and then chortled:
"We ought to get a lifetime contract to play against this guy. We'd beat them every time we'd play, because he has no idea what he's talking about. You understand? Fifty boys together, fifty boys that love each other and that are well affirmed and well loved by their coaches, will smack those guys anytime, in anything. Being a father. Being a son. Being a football player. Being a doctor. Being an astronaut. Being a human being. Being anything.
"That's not how you become a man. Do you understand me? Because that means to be a man, you gotta somehow be some big, strong, physical person. And that's got nothing to do with it. Trust me."
When Season of Life was written, Gilman School had been state champions two years running, winning all of their games and being ranked among the nation's top ten high school football teams.
Dean Ottati is a personal friend and the author of a wonderful book, The Runner and the Path. A high school football team in Dean’s home town of Concord, California, the De La Salle Spartans, set the record for the longest unbeaten streak in high school history, winning 151 straight games in 13 years (1991-2004), while holding the nation’s number-one ranking for much of that time. Dean was in the barber shop one day, talking about the team with the barber. Dean said, "There's no way they don't recruit players from other schools." A woman who happened to be sitting in the shop overheard Dean’s remark and said, "Let me tell you something. My son played for De La Salle, and I would be willing to die for Coach Lad [De La Salle head football coach Bob Ladouceur]. I would do anything for that man, for what he did for my son."
Like Joe Ehrmann, Coach Ladouceur teaches values of brotherhood, sportsmanship, and integrity. The simple fact is, De La Salle doesn't need to recruit; parents are dying to get their sons into the school, not for football but for the values they’ll learn. The Spartans were the subject of an inspiring book: When the Game Stands Tall: The Story of the De La Salle Spartans and Football's Longest Winning Streak, by Neil Hayes.
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My best performances as a runner are not impressive. Thirty-one years ago, at age 32, I ran a 5K in 18 minutes -- a mediocre time, and it like to killed me. I've never run 400 meters faster than 80 seconds, and at age 53, after training very hard for seven months, I managed to eke out a 10-mile race in 70 minutes, thereby earning no bragging rights. I’m built like an African runner, all right—I have the biomechanics of a rhino and the VO2Max of a hippo. Yet I find that I can experience joy fairly reliably when I run if I can manage to cultivate expansive attitudes of the heart.
In fact, it's a particular feature of the law of expansion that you don't have to be fast, young, talented or famous to make it work. You don't even have to be physically fit, because you can taste the joys of expanded awareness by "nudging the edges" of your own awareness, becoming larger than you were in any single dimension of your being: body, heart, will, mind, or soul. You’ve surely met people like that--overweight, unhealthy folks who were genuinely happy in those parts of their lives where they expressed expansive qualities such as kindness or courage.
Several weeks ago, I was running at Rancho San Antonio, a beautiful 1200-acre park in the foothills of the Coastal Range on the San Francisco Peninsula, when I had an unusual experience.
I was feeling mildly conflicted about what to do next with my running career. I had been running ultramarathons for seven years, and I was beginning to feel a need for a change. I was praying about this as I ran, and I said, "What's next? What should I do now?" And I was very surprised to hear an intuitive voice that said, clearly and emphatically: "Retire!!!"
The message struck a chord. The seven-hour training runs required by the ultra sport had been taking a toll on my life, negatively affecting my relationships, work, and spiritual life. Yet, at the same time, it was a bit discouraging. I had logged so many years of hard work, run so many thousands of miles in training—and for what? "Retire!" sounded ominously like quitting. But what could I look forward to?
I was thinking about this a week later during a 10-mile run in the hills behind the campus of Stanford University, and once again feeling a bit discouraged. I certainly didn't want to quit -- if that’s what “retire” meant, it certainly wasn't a pill I could eagerly swallow.
Emerging from the hills onto a nearby street, I felt a freshness enter my legs and I picked up the pace, feeling strangely joyful. Soon I was cruising at a fast clip, lightly and smoothly, my spirits rising. Turning my attention inward, I asked what it meant, and once again I heard the intuitive voice. This time, it said, "Do you think you'd be feeling this good if I meant that you should retire completely from running?"
Near the end of the run, I was warming down, jogging along and feeling a little bit sandbagged, when I passed a grassy field where three Stanford soccer players, two men and a woman, were practicing a ball-control drill. The players were gold-rimmed against the green grass by the late-afternoon sun, and for some reason the scene caught my attention, and I slowed to watch.
One player would run toward an orange pylon, then cut back sharply while a second player tossed him the ball and the first player kicked the ball into the arms of the third player. They repeated the drill over and over without pausing, with relentless skill and completely absorbed attention, and for reasons that I can’t begin to explain, my heart was flooded with joy. The scene seemed to embody the Zen concept of "suchness" -- it was timeless, a thing complete in itself, a small miracle of beauty and economy, and I nearly wept with happiness. My fatigue vanished, and I sailed through a nearby eucalyptus grove on legs as light as air.
A moment of simple magic had released an energy and joy that washed my fatigue away. What if I could run like that again and yet again? Could I banish fatigue by expanding my heart to the point of self forgetfulness? What lessons must I learn in order to repeat the experience at will?
Looking back over my three decades as a runner, I realized that I could recall other times when I had in fact experienced a similar joy: an inner warmth of heart, perhaps a fusion of energy and silence. And those moments had always come when I succeeded in opening doors through which my awareness could escape from the confines of the narrow ego into a wider reality.
In the next chapter, we’ll look at what the world’s spiritual traditions tell us about the search for happiness, and why the key to finding joy, in running as in life, is expansion.