penfield | That's it, that's the list

"The hardest thing to do is to win with talent, when you're expected to win."
- Tony Kornheiser, Pardon the Interruption (PTI), January 4, 2008 and ibidem, ad nauseum.

If you're not a regular viewer of PTI as I am, Tony Kornheiser (one of the show's two hosts and a mostly respected sort-of columnist and radio personality for the Washington Post) has a number of go-to phrases that he automatically recites when prompted by certain key phrases. This is not uncommon for pundits, particularly old pundits approaching senility, especially particularly those in the conventional-wisdom-trumps-reason world of sports.

Most of the time I can tune out these knee-jerk observations and cliches, especially in Kornheiser's case because his old-man-Tony schtick tends to be mildly amusing and/or self-deprecating.

But the above-quoted remark was so passionately uttered and profoundly stupid that I must take issue. The hardest thing to do is to win with talent? Please. Even if we limit his statement to the world of sports coaching (in which the coaches are given way too much credit in the first place), this seems totally antithetical. Here is a list of things more difficult than "winning with talent":

1. Winning without talent. This seems pretty obvious. The Boston Celtics would defeat the Webster Schroeder High School Warriors at least 99 out of 100 times, even if Doc Rivers was on the sidelines in a coma. If Bill Belichick's New England Patriots were somehow to face the same Bill Belichick's Atlanta Falcons, Falcon Belichick would have to work twice as hard to score half as many points as Patriot Belichick.

2. Winning with injured talent. This is the same as winning without talent, except you had all these game plans for a specific set of players but now they're shot to hell because a different set of players is on the field instead. And you have to put in extra coaching time to show these (usually under-experienced, under-sized and/or under-skilled) scrubs how to play, in the hopes that they can execute your sophisticated strategy without botching the whole thing.

3. Winning when everyone hates you. And I'm not just talking about a coach's players, although Bobby Knight could probably testify to that. I'm talking about when fans, ownership, league officials and/or local government conspire to form a pervasive cloud of negativity around a team. It's like trying to be the prime minister of a soviet bloc republic; you're trying to implement your economic recovery plan -- which might work if everyone were on the same page -- but there are peasants burning effigies in the streets, the United Nations is pestering you about human rights inspections and Vladimir Putin has your cell phone on speed-dial. It takes a strong, hardworking individual to engage the proletariat in a productive discussion about the distribution of wealth rather than absconding to Fiji with the national treasury and state-subsidized flatware.

4. Winning for long periods of time. Winning one game can easily be a fluke. A winning season can be just as a fluky, especially if it is based on a fluke season or a concatenance of fluke seasons by certain high-leverage players. Winning for several seasons is less fluky, although it is often based on the highly influential play of one or a few elite players. When a team starts winning on a regular basis, or when writers start belching up the word "dynasty," that team has really accomplished something. And the leadership of that organization deserves some credit for that, because it requires managing the year-to-year changes in personnel and competition and maintaining consistency in preparation. Much of what the manager/coach does is strategy; students of game theory know that while early events are more subject to chance and can be compensated for later; strategic thinking increases in importance as the length of the game increases and attrition sets in. In coaching circles, this may be known as "Schottenheimer's Conundrum."

5. Winning in New York, Boston or Philadelphia. Yes, there are other media markets that place demands on sports teams, but none of them operate with the year-round intensity of the I-95 Northeast Corridor. The fans of these teams, who speak unironically about the team in the first-person collective and apparently believe that their tickets entitle them to nothing less than transcendent, orgasmic joy at the end of each and every ballgame, are uncompromising in their approach to quality and will shout at literally anyone to prove it. The high-decibel media in these markets -- including but not limited to newspapers, television, sports-talk radio, blogs and paparazzi -- are only too happy to nourish this clinically sociopathic behavior, creating tsunami waves of interference with the actual game-planning and -playing. Because of all this distraction, winning 100 baseball games in New York is more difficult than winning 100 baseball games in Oakland, which is why the A's typically spot the Yankees about $100 million in player salaries per year.

That's it, that's a man's list. It may not even be complete. Just for the sake of argument, let's look at Kornheiser's rationale: He says that winning with talent is most difficult because expectations are usually very high. He did not say -- though I believe he is accounting for the facts -- that talented athletes require constant appeals to their egos, and coaches may be under enhanced scrutiny because their salaries and reputations are usually commensurate with the talent under their watch.

I admit that these high expectations probably create some stress that wouldn't normally be there, and speaking as a person who has had to care and feed for a number of juvenile egos, I can say that it is indeed a difficult and thankless job. But my response is that these coaches, who have risen to the top of their profession, usually after years (sometimes decades) of apprenticeship and competition, are themselves egomaniacs and put enough pressure on themselves that the difference between modest external expectations and ambitious external expectations is like a drop in the proverbial bucket. And as for dealing with spoiled athletes, even the crappiest athlete on the crappiest team was probably the best athlete in his youth peer group and comes pre-packaged with raging self-confidence and emotional immaturity. The difference between Terrell Owens and Alvis Whitted is not as big as you think.

And theoretically, if a team is really talented, they shouldn't NEED coaching. Their superior abilities and instincts should produce positive results without excessive game-planning. Really, the biggest problem with coaching a talented team is that if they perform poorly in the spotlight, you're more likely to be fired. Which is really more of a danger than a difficulty.

What Kornheiser probably means is "The surest way to be fired is to underperform with a talented team." That's not exactly what he's saying, but I guess we should give him a break. After all, the hardest thing to do is to communicate when you know what you're talking about.