Sport Ethics: Leave it All on the Field

It's a movie cliche but also a real life cliche, in fact, it is more than a cliche, leave it all on the field possesses a moral imperative for individuals and teams  committed to a common goal. It is not an exhortation that can be called upon often, but it does possess a power and urgency that committed athletes and professionals will respond to under strong conditions. It remains an important if ominous moral resource.

Last week the women's volleyball team at UW came from behind 0-2 and won the match 3-2. Twice they were down and facing match point in the last game, but came back. When they won most collapsed too tired to move and some too exhausted even to cry with joy. The players simply kept drawing on "more." They kept pulling up strength and skill they did not know they had. Jim McLaughlin their coach summed up the experience, “To tap out emotionally like that, people just don’t know what it takes. They were so tired, so exhausted. That’s when you grow as a player, as a person. That’s when you learn what you’ve got.”

In movies and real life, this call to dig deep comes up under dire conditions where the stakes are high and immediate. Often the leader urges this not just when stakes are high and immediate, but the end game is in sight and people are tottering, exhausted and struggling to stay focused and competent. Sometimes it is spoken of in terms of great goals or future states, but my favorite movie line emphasized the absolute importance for successful athletes and professional to be totally present to their task in the moment. At the end of Varsity Blues the quarterback Jonathon Moxon and his teammates run off their  hallowed coach Kilmer to save a teammate from taking  painkillers. Moxon gathers them around and says, "Before this game started, Kilmer said "48 minutes for the next 48 years of your life". I say "fuck that". All right? Fuck that. Let's go out there, and we play the next 24 minutes for the next 24 minutes, and we leave it all out on the field."

Leaving it all on the field makes moral sense when the stakes are high, the urgency is great and normal endurance and performance levels probably will not achieve the goal. It invokes both a strong team loyalty ethic as well as an inner dialogue for each person with him or herself. 

This is an imperative sentence as well as an evaluative position.

When an athlete plays, whether for the whole game or as a two minute substitute, leaving it all on the field demands that the person give his or her best possible performance for as long as he or she is in the game.

This aspect of sport buttresses the imperative to be present to the moment, the sport and the opponents. It means that the player exists fully in that present moment offering up every bit of cognitive, emotional and physical talent and skill they possess. The athlete will give maximum performance while they are on the field. It does not matter if it is one special teams' play or 45 minutes of an overtime basketball game.

Leaving it all on the field first involves a person’s relationships to him or herself and to his or her field. Almost always when this imperative is called out, it requires the person to recall focus, energy and skill that they have spent years working to perfect. Its importance began early with the individual's time and effort to master and practice their expertise. It plays out early and durably during practice that refines the perceptual and attention tools, builds up the body memory and the physical and emotional endurance. Without this training, preparation, pattern recognition and experience, most individuals will not be able to adjust their energy level and maintain or draw upon resilience under immense stress.

If a person or player had not devoted the time to acquire this mastery, there would be little to call upon to leave on the field.

The second dialogue involves a moment of self-evaluation where the person asks him or herself—am I giving all that I can without destroying myself?  After the fact it involves the almost impossible question—could I have given more?

The other side of this question involves did I ever quit? No one who quits or gives up in a competition ever leaves it all on the field. In fact such quitting violates the most profound promise athletes make to themselves and their teammates--to be present with their full mind, body, and skill set during the competition. This extends to drawing upon their entire self to the fullest extent. Even  when losing or down or hitting a wall, they promise to challenge oneself and one’s team members to draw deeper and leave it all on the field.

In the end the challenge to leave it all on the field reduces not to “no excuses” but to NO REGRETS.

To crawl or stumble off the field or course, we have given all--our hearts, our bodies, our minds and above all our loyalty to each other--to achieve the goals the group set. 

This is where the contagion impact of teams and the fact that people possess different reservoirs of will and emotional talent matter. It also points to why good teams and organizations need several focal points of leadership and coherence. Teams, especially in contact sports, can get beaten down. They fall behind and start to splinter. Teammates need  the contagious confidence, drive or  pull of teammates who still possess robust endurance who can exhort, model and get in the face or encourage them when they are tempted to fold. Others may be tottering, but if a peer can model full energy and call up focus and reserves, others can try to dig deep and respond with similar discipline and focus, even if they do not immediately possess it.

Now the duration of the game and one’s performance will affect what this means. Most sports are not marathons but lumpy with moments of relative downtime followed by moments of intense and full effort required. The net sports and reset sports like volleyball, tennis or football exemplify this. But in that sprint mode, the athlete gives every once of attentive energy and skill they possess. This mastery lies in calibrating how much an athlete can give on each play while still possessing the reserves to continue to call forth that level of energy and attention.

Exerting maximum effort takes a special kind of discipline because it involves immense physical and emotional exertion on the part of the athlete. This calling forth and the electro-chemical aspects of it can negate the cognitive aspects of pattern recognition and execution required. Too unbalanced and emotional/physical burst of strength and endurance can draw down needed nutrients and vital attention from the brain and memory. Athletes need this reservoir to give form and effectiveness to strength when it is needed. Cognitive effort can be as depleting as physical effort during intense competition, and cognitive modeling and steely focus can be as important as physical endurance and courage.

Every athlete and every coach playing to leave it all on the field needs to regulate this balance given the length of the game. If done well by the end of regulation elite athletes will literally be exhausted mentally and physically. This accounts for the anti-climatic nature of so many overtime games where the players have so little left, and it takes amazing discipline and untapped reserves. Players are literally consuming their own muscle and mind to stay focused and effective in overtime situations. 

The length of season and number of games impacts a players and team’s ability to utilize this approach. In a football season or college Olympic sport season such as soccer, volleyball or lacrosse, the small number of games gives greater scope to the leave it all on the field since players have more time to recover between game or game sets.

At the opposite end of football season where every game is a “big game," baseball and to a lesser extent basketball—especially in its professional manifestation—have so many games, that no player can leave it all on the field each game and have the time to recover or renew. Baseball provides many opportunities within the game itself to renew physically and emotionally even as it requires relentless and intense attention and spurts of focused force and physical effort.

During games or seasons players “hit the wall.” Individuals reach a state of being where he or she believes they cannot draw upon any more skill, emotion, physical stamina or capacity. Literally they are stuck. At times they may “grind it out” to get through these periods, or they may “coast” or just get “benched.”

At certain points athletes may be so ground down or exhausted that all they possess is automatic pilot. They can barely think a coherent thought; their body screams, aches and burns; they find it hard to hear or process yelling coaches or fellow players. But the elite players continue on the field. 

Here all the practice, preparation, neural memory development, endless repetition with oneself and others prove their worth. Men and women play on, not as zombies, but as trained, exhausted professionals for whom skill carries only one aspect of their professionalism. The capacity to attend when exhausted, to focus when diffused, to act when confused, all emerge from the trained mind and memory of professional mastery.

This manifests itself in exhausted doctors in emergency rooms, FEMA workers and emergency workers in under duress working, not as zombies, but as trained ingrained professional expertise.

Carried to its unending extreme, this approach has a dark side. It can lead people to drive themselves into injury or psychological and emotional damage. It can lead to mistakes when people have gone beyond the ability of internalized pattern recognition and professional memory to carry on. A person can hurt themselves or their team by trying to leave it all on the field and in fact reaching the point where they no longer recognize they have nothing more to leave. Players in such condition or on automatic pilot given their exhaustion are more susceptible to fakes or errors.

Long seasons, long games slowly eat away at performance and erode emotional reserves, wear and tear physical skill and talent and can lead to sloppiness and wandering focus. Some games just will not seem as important and the sheer grind of a season wears down all three components required by elite athletic performance.

Ultimately no person can play this way every day. The sports and professions with downtime permit renewal and recovery. But the long sports with endless seasons or endless emergencies engender a different rhythm of performance and resilience. They can sap the reserves of players and teams.

But in the end, when necessary  elite athletes and professional possess the capacity in themselves and together with the team to "leave it all on the field."

The Cold Hard Eye of a Coach

The Seahawk’s coach Pete Carroll, he of perpetual optimism and glorious surfer zen, loves Lofa Tatupu. He recruited him at USC and coached him to an all American status. He inherited him as a five-year starter and the heart and mind of the Seattle Seahawks defense last year.           Pete Carroll  cut Loftoto last week.

He cut him cold and clean and cauterized the wound with bigger, faster, stronger rookies. Pete may love him, but love has nothing to do with coaching a professional team. Tatupu carried a salary that hurt the cap and had been slowed by nagging injuries the last two years. I once suggested that John Wooden  demonstrated that love of game and love of players informed his actions, including his disciplining. But Wooden coached college where coaches can afford to love their players and help them grow as human beings—they cannot really cut them for one thing, have a larger pool than pros, and they recruit and woo them and feel a deeper obligation.

But even at college a coach can have affection and even respect for a player and never play them.

At the core, college or professional, a coach must possess a cold clear third eye to assess the skill, talent and accomplishment of their players. This assessment remains their fundamental job and governs the heart of their relations to players.

I remember asking one of our football coaches what he looked for when he first viewed a young player, and he answered with no hesitation “body size and type.” Pure and simple, nothing else really mattered if the players did not have the basic physical shape, strength and speed to endure the rigors and grow into the skills required of elite competition.

Let’s go back and remember what we ask of coaches. We ask coaches to  WIN. 

What do we ask of coaches? We ask coaches to   WIN. 

All coaches, even the best and most committed to education and growth, know this. Owners and colleges fire coaches who do not win, no matter how many athletes graduate or how much athletes contribute to their community. If a coach does not win, the coach is fired.

A coach knows that they compete in a physical world. The body and skill/talent array are the foundations upon which everything else depends.

So a coach must analyze each player and group of players in a very straightforward way:

• Body: does a player possess the strength, health, and durability appropriate to task and achievement in the coach’s system.
• Skill Set: can an athlete  develop the high quality and split second physical, intellectual and judgment skills needed to bring disciplined strength and focused intelligence to bear under the heat of competition.
• Mental Makeup—Work Ethic, Focus and Teachability: does an athlete have the discipline and focus to show up with body and mind focused and to work constantly during off-season and practice to perfect the skill set, the body and the judgment needed to compete against elite opponents.
• FIT: not often discussed, but will the athlete’s mix of the above match the style of play and the particular strengths and mind set needed by players in this coach’s system.

Talent matters but only if connected to the rest. A fragile talented player is no help. A talented player without the ability to translate it to the skill under pressure is no help. A talented player who is unstable or does not work hard is no real help. Character issues including moral rectitude beyond the mental makeup issues matter only on the margin. High character guys who cannot produce are no help. In the end talent and character are secondary or even tertiary characteristics.

Now the coach must constantly assess players each game, each practice and each day. Competitive dynamics never stop evolving and what works one day, may fail the next. The coach must attend to this in each player.

The coach must watch the body unremittingly because the dings and attrition of play,  practice and injuries mount up and undermine effectiveness, durability and reliability. In Tatufo’s case slowly accumulated injuries and wear and tear eroded his resilience on the thinnest of margins.

The competition is so fierce and the margin of gain so fine in games, that coaches cannot afford slippage in performance over the season even by elite players.

They evaluate each player against the player’s own skill and potential, but most importantly coaches assess each athlete against any available replacements in the minor leagues, secondary markets or taxi squad. The baseball statistic WAR (wins over replacement) captures the statistical fungibility of players. If a coach can replace a player with a  better player or if a player declines and now is less than a potential replacement, a coach will replace them. A coach has to replace them given the coach’s obligation to WIN and their obligation to other team members to field the highest caliber and most effective players.

Not only is a coach always comparing a player to him or herself and to immediate replacements, the coach must compare the player to the competition. Competitors always are evolving and developing new plays, new systems and combinations. Every competitor is continuously bringing in new and more talented or younger and quicker or stronger players.

The coach has to keep each player in a constant matrix of cold-eyed calculation.

• Their own body and capacity and skill level.
• Their own skill and reliability relative to immediate replacements.
• Their own skills relative to the evolution of the competition.

When I think of a coach's eye I am reminded of Arnold Schwarzenegger's vision in the movie the Terminator. The computer assisted vision brought down a screen that measured and assessed data on speed, size, weight, effectiveness relative to opponent. The coach’s calculations lead to judgments of the player; there is no room for sentiment or love in deciding whether to play an athlete. Every player knows that they are watched and judged with cold precision every day, every hour, every minute, every play. Every player knows that loved or not, they can be benched or cut. That is the deal. In his own way Bill Belichcik exemplifies the ideal. Belichick loves the game, but he does not love players; they fit, succeed or fail, and he disposes of them with clean brutal efficiency, just like the Terminator.

A coach knows that no one is indispensable.

No one is indispensable, including the coach.

For folks who must compete every day in their lives at their jobs and succeed or watch their job disappear, Coaching provides an XRAY view of the core of their own life.