There was a time when obscene events in the sporting world would see brief mention in a local paper, and disappear from memory soon thereafter – but that is now in the distant past. The 80’s was the start of the movement towards the increased importance of sports media in pop culture. Legendary players like Larry Bird and Magic Johnson were defining what it meant to be a superstar and were gracing covers of magazines from Sports Illustrated to Time Magazine. The 90’s were all about Michal Jordan, and he single-handedly transformed the industry from being a sport to a form of entertainment. During this time, ESPN became a brand deeply imbedded within the DNA of sports with its highlights and opinions often becoming the apparent judge of success. The new millennium brought with it wide use of the internet, and thousands of Blogs were born everyday dissecting every small little topic humanly thinkable.

This rapid development of the sporting world and the way it has been covered has spiraled out of control – with plenty of reasons to explain how we have come where we are. Take the state of the media today: unprecedented competition with everyone having relatively equal access to finding and sharing information, the slow death of traditional media and its gasping effort to survive, and a fast drop in ethical standards. This landscape has resulted in everyone in the business blowing stories out of proportion and resorting to anything from lies to sensationalism, non factual rumors to biased opinions – in hopes of securing a piece of the pie.

If you’ve read this far down and are not sure what is wrong with the media today, perhaps a short recount of some recent stories might shed better light on the issue.

For example, Michael Vick went to jail and had his whole life destroyed because…he engaged in dog fighting. This isn’t exactly the right place to discuss the degree of severity of dog fighting – but I would personally place fighting (physically) with your wife on a higher level of evil. If you put together the suspensions of all these players with assault and battery histories (and believe me, there’s plenty), it wouldn’t come close to adding up to the losses both financially and emotionally that Vick has had to endure for his distasteful hobby.

Then you have Tiger Woods – his story probably received more media coverage than anything since 9/11. At the end of the day he was cheating on his wife – but last time I checked, the USA is not part of Saudi Arabia where such an act can be considered a crime worthy of being stoned. The amount of destruction the sheer amount of press coverage brought onto this previously angel of a human being resulted in an insurmountable and irrecoverable situation with his wife and family. The lost sponsorships were deserved, but complete loss of privacy and sensitivity in these private matters at times of crisis was a casualty of today’s media.

And this bring us to Gilbert Arenas – everything that could potentially have been written about him has been written. All his words have been published, his tweets followed, his list of pranks revealed, his interviews broadcasted, his thoughts and dreams shared, and everything you could ever want to know has been shoved down our throat by the media up to this point like it’s humanity’s shared child and we all need to know more about him than we know about our own family members. The same people who laughed at his jokes and wrote about how great he was now are using his pranks against him in explaining how he was a psycho megalomaniac bully.It wasn’t too long ago, the NBA even employed this guy themselves on their official website to write about all the crazy things going on in his mind – but following the gun incident Agent Zero, much like a spy who has gone offstray, got terminated.

What bothers me most is the breaking point came not as a result of his breaking the law but during a pre game huddle: the few seconds before a game where the leader of a team makes a final attempt to bond with his comrades before they go off to battle, like Spartacus in ancient times, like a King before his disciples, like a coach during a huddle. These speeches can be offensive, vulgar, downright offensive at times… but at the end of the day it’s none of our business what a core of individuals need to do to bond with each other. If you’re really looking for a punishment to teach a a lesson, you need to do it at the right time, right place, and right manner – and David Stern along with the Wizards organization dropped the ball on this one. If you’re going to completely break ties with someone, throw him off to the media wolves, do it correctly (that means doing something about Javaris Crittenton too).

Don’t get me wrong, what Gilbert Arenas did was wrong of course, and he needs to be punished. But his punishment should not be graver than the likes of Stephen Jackson, Laterell Sprewell, Delonte Jones, and Ron Artest. At the end of the day, guns don’t kill people, people kill people, and Gilbert Arenas is not a killer. The United States’ recent gun problem, and the mentality of its people towards highly paid celebrities and investment bankers following the financial crisis made this an easy home run for the media to escalate the situation to its current heights. Now Arenas is facing 5 years in prison, a loss of 80 million dollars, completely abandonment from his long time sponsors and NBA team, and a life where tags like ‘thug’, ‘bully, ‘criminal’, ‘maniac’ will follow him and haunt him for the rest of his life. Does he really deserve this?

Arenas as a kid had a rough upbringing, being raised by his father in one of the most dangerous communities in the United States. He had to battle adversity, failure, being a complete nobody. He made himself a somebody, and there are countless stories of Arenas having a generous and kind soul and helping others. A few years ago, people in Washington would scoff at the idea of trading Gilbert Arenas for Kobe Bryant but today, the word on the street (hint: the media tells us) is that the Wizards have the worst contract in the league.

In fact there is some truth to that, but it is Arenas who has the worst contract in the league. You bring revolution to an age old industry by popularizing the idea of celebrity blogging, you take a battered team to their first playoff series win in years, you donate your time and money to the community, you give your heart and soul and spend 2 years trying to get back to form to help your team and in the snap of a second, a slip-up in judgment, you find yourself the biggest enemy in the nation after Osama bin Laden, and you’re threatened to have your livelihood taken away from you forever.

I urge those in the media to reconsider their approach and demeanor in this story. At times I have also been mad and frustrated with the behavior of Gilbert Arenas – but it is time for the media to step in and do the opposite of what it is normally trained and shaped to do:  it must make as little of this story as possible. The media, even if it is against all its interests, needs to kill this story, focus on the positives, and welcome him back to his rightful place in the NBA once he has served the punishment sentenced to him by the law.

Related posts:

1. Gilbert Arenas’ Gun
2. Gilbert Arenas: Prison or Jail Next?
3. How to Increase Athlete Performance

You know what’s a really stupid and really overused sports cliché? Well, all clichés are pretty idiotic but one that particularly annoys me is the saying: “We gave it a hundred and ten percent..”. First of all, there is no such thing as over 100% in real life, it’s impossible by definition. 100% is the most that you can get from something if every possible things works without a flaw. Machines are able to operate at near 100%, but humans? Not even close. Thats what I want to talk about today, the limits of a person, but more specifically the limits of an athlete.

I’m gonna go ahead and forgive that little cliché we use about working in overdrive, but something more concrete to ponder over is whether athletes really play up to anywhere near their capacity, and my belief is an astounding no. Don’t believe me? Then read on.

The regular season of most sports league is one area where we see players constantly playing way below their potential. Any single tough and physical game where players really seem to care about is referred to as a ‘playoff intensity’ game. Now why would players intentionally play at below their levels and perhaps more importantly how can teams who pay them millions of dollars just stand by and do nothing about this unacceptable behavior. Especially teams that probably won’t make the playoffs should be playing games like it’s the last game of their life right? I’m not even going to talk about the huge discrepancy between players’ performance in contract years as opposed to other years, its a subject that makes my stomach ache.

Let’s assume for a second that athletes play a notch below their ‘hardest’ during the regular season so they avoid injuries and keep energy for more important games that will come in the post season. Ok.

The thing is, I also don’t think the level of competition being played in playoff games, or even finals games is anywhere near what the athletes are capable of either. I absolutely don’t believe it when players say ‘we played our hardest’ or ‘we gave it everything we had’. Nonsense. If you had kidnapped the families of the players in question and told them if they didn’t win, they would kill their families…don’t you think they would have hustled a tiny bit more out on the floor? Don’t you think they would be chasing loose balls like their life depended on it? Do you think any player would show a hint of selfishness at the cost of the greater goal? They might not win, but I’m willing to bet that they would do better than if they weren’t motivated in such a way.

It’s a scientific fact that people produce adrenaline in times of extreme danger or excitement. Imagine a woman lifting a very heavy object to save their kids’ life. You know what I’m talking about.

There will be some that argue that people can’t perform well under such extreme pressures because they will be too scared to do something wrong. If that’s the case then the right sort of ‘punshiment’ needs to be found in order to motivate these players to really play closer to the 100% level they are capable of. I remember my days playing basketball in high school and university, when our coach threatened to make us run suicides if we made mistakes. Immediately, the amount of mistakes would go down, people would focus more, and we played better. Did it take out some of the fun, and made us more uncomfortable? Sure, but people perform at their highest level not when they have fun, but when they are intimidated.

The theory is that this kind of extrinsic motivation has some serious negative aspects which I’ll quote below:

1. It’s not sustainable – As soon as you withdraw the punishment or reward, the motivation disappears.
2. You get diminishing returns – If the punishment or rewards stay at the same levels, motivation slowly drops off. To get the same motivation next time requires a bigger reward.
3. It hurts intrinsic motivation – Punishing or rewarding people for doing something removes their own innate desire to do it on their own. From now on you must punish/reward every time to get them to do it.”

Sure, its not a nice thing to constantly pressure your athletes and punish them. It will quickly kill of the team chemistry and motivation of ever playing on the team. But at the same time, sports is a billion dollar industry where teams are constantly looking for the slightest of advantages they can find over their opposition and this often times is enough to translate to victory and success.

Look back at some of the successful basketball teams of the last decade. Besides the overly talented Lakers and Boston squads, you only have the Miami Heat, Detroit Pistons, and the San Antonio Spurs who have won the championship. The three coaches in question: Larry Brown, Greg Popovich, and Pat Riley are widely known around the league as the some of the most serious and strict coaches in the NBA. It seems like discipline, and a sense of intimidation does result in higher levels of play. Contrast this with ‘loose’ teams that have a care free attitude like the Warriors, and you will see immediately that focus decreases and players hustle less, commit more turnovers, and overall play at a lower level than they are capable of.

The lesson of all of this is not that every team should go out and adopt a draconian system where players are treated like lab rats and tortured until they can produce at their optimal level. The more constructive idea to take out of all of this is that there is definite room in sports for better management of athletes’ performance levels. Whether it is flexible and custom motivational schemes, player specific psychiatrists, and more correlation and trends analysis of what makes different players ‘take nights off’ or have ‘career nights’. Teams that do so have better chances of making the most of the players they have, and in an industry where games and championships are decided by a single point, isn’t it all worth it?

Related posts:

1. Michael Jordan: “I Could Have Scored 100 Points”
2. Michael Jordan’s Last Shot
3. Sports Media’s Latest Victim: Gilbert Arenas

It’s been over a decade since we last saw the true MJ. There are days when I watch the current crop of elite NBA players and I get faint memories of Michael Jordan and wish somehow he was still out there, somehow still actively taking part in this sport that he carried for so long. I know it’s never going to happen, and as MJ said and countless others have repeated over the last 15 years…there will never be another Michael Jordan. Not because there won’t be someone more talented, not because there won’t be someone more marketable, not because there won’t be someone who wins as much. It’s because no matter what happens, there will only be one person that made you fall in love with the sport.. and that person will always have a place in history. For MJ, it just so happens that he came at the right time, was in the right place, and did exactly the right things.

Several days prior to Jordan’s Hall of Fame induction speech, I decided to load up some old DVD’s of Michael Jordan to remind myself of the man that has been the hero of the basketball world for the past 20 years. I had to remember exactly all that was great about him.

Frankly, there wasn’t much that I had forgotten..because there wasn’t much to forget. It was all very simple and formulaic of a basketball god: the game winners, the amazing highlights, the usual heroic ‘against all odds’ moments, the revolutionary advertisements, and then there’s the motive behind MJ – being ‘cut’ from his varsity team.

For years we’ve been led to believe that MJ’s inspiration came from this one single event. As textbook as it sounded, it never convinced me or made me understand the person behind the player that was Michael Jordan. A lot of people get cut or don’t make it in their high school varsity team, why would this single event turn a player from average to the best of all time? It just didn’t add up, and I swept the issue under a rug and from that point on and just simply started looking at him not like a fellow human, but as a unique and talented once-in-a-century kind of special being along with Da Vinci, Einstein, Newton and the like.

That is, until I heard Michael Jordan’s induction speech into the Basketball Hall of Fame.

Michael Jordan gave a shocking speech that no one really expected – it probably didn’t help that he went after John Stockton, David Robinson, and Jerry Sloan – three of the most low key stars to have ever played the game.

Gone was the Nike scripts, gone was the Phil Jackson plays, gone was the Air Jordan’s and the 23 Jersey. What we got was Michael Jeffrey Jordan, raw, unedited, real, uncut for the first time ever. His speech started with tears – tears that foreshadowed that Michael Jordan would strip his soul bare that night, and show the word who he really was.

He began with the question “What don’t you know about me?”. 20 minutes later, it became apparently clear that none of us really knew Michael Jordan after all. Sure there are those that will say we all knew that MJ was a competitive maniac bent on winning and destroying competition as much as possible. But that’s not what we found out on that Saturday night.

What we found out was that a sports star isn’t like a scientist or an artist where you are able to rise to immortality status with a spark of genius. Sports has a set limit of rules, sports is a direct competition with other equally equipped people, sports is a fixed mountain to climb where you need to constantly work and work and work to keep climbing and have a chance to stay at the top.

What we were reminded of was not simply MJ’s competitive spirit, but most importantly that heroes don’t exist.

For some, they would have like to swallow the blue pill and pretend they never had found out such a thing. It’s human nature to want to look up to something, to idolize something great. We would have liked to believe that Jordan was just supernatural, that he was special, that he was something we can never be. Some of us wanted him to close the history book of Michael Jordan on a Hollywood moment of perfection – like his shot against the Jazz in 1998 – and give us that honorable ending that true heroes deserve. But it wouldn’t be, just as his last shot in basketball, which we have conveniently forgotten, came at the freethrow line in April with his Wizards entering the wrong kind of lottery. Jordan decided that again, he wasn’t going to go out like the hero that most of us wanted…because Jordan knew that he wasn’t some fairy tale hero, he was just like any of us, a flawed but 100% human being who was determined to achieve extraordinary things.

Jordan revealed to us exactly what was the reason behind his success in his widely hated induction speech. Hardwork, that’s what it was..not something otherwordly or fabricated like what his brand ‘Nike’ pushed him to represent for his whole career.

He simply worked harder than anybody, tried harder than anybody, kept pushing himself to the limit like no one ever wanted. He simply was able to reach the max level of what a person could possibly do. That doesn’t make him a hero, it simply makes him one of the very very few who was able to push aside the pain, the complacency, the doubts, and reach his full potential. The fuel behind that wasn’t a simple decision from his basketball coach…nor was it really all the struggles and haters along the way he lengthily talked about in his speech. The fuel was that he wanted to succeed more than anything in the world, all those motivational tools could have been fabricated for all he cared..in fact most of them were. All those stories of people doubting him, people not believing in him – they might have motivated him to work harder, but above all it reminded him that he had not reached the status he believe he could reach. By pushing himself to the limit, he got there, and when he did he was ready to walk away from the game.

The lesson here is that life is a simple formula that we could all follow: choose something you want to succeed in, work as hard as you can, believe in yourself, and never give up until you reach the point which you believe you deserve . All along we have been fooled into thinking that it was something else, because that’s what we wanted to believe – we don’t like to believe in simple things. Looking at Michael Jordan as a hero took away from his accomplishments, it took away all that lifelong work and pain and criticism and replaced it with something fake –“hero”, “dream”, “magic”, “miracle”.

Most importantly, it took away from he wanted to teach the millions of children who have, who are, and who will look up to him. This time he wasn’t going to stand for it, he wasn’t going to care about his legacy, his Hall of Fame moment, his sponsorships, the media, not even the room full of esteemed past colleagues that was in the room before him. After 35,087 shots throughout his professional career, he had to make the final one count.

“Limits, just like fears….are nothing but illusions.”

Swish.

Related posts:

1. Michael Jordan: “I Could Have Scored 100 Points”
2. Sports Media’s Latest Victim: Gilbert Arenas
3. How to Increase Athlete Performance