Sports Ethics: Play Through Pain

“Pain is your friend.”  “Pain lets you know you are still alive.” “Pain is good.” So Master Chief yells at the beleaguered SEAL recruits in a great movie G.I. Jane.

This lesson, so central to military life, pervades the moral culture of athletic competition. Every athlete trying to be a warrior, and here athletics draws heavily from millennial old origins as preparation for life combat, must learn to fight through pain and to seek goals despite  hurt and obstacles. Playing through pain is a central moral tenet of sports. It exemplifies three virtues critical to athletic success: self-mastery; courage; sacrifice.

It does not matter the moment we tune into sports, but pain splays through the games and the wounded fall before us with startling regularity. If we were not so inured to the carnage, we would be appalled by our callousness. This last month twenty five and counting baseball starters are out for at least three months. Seven Boston Red Sox outfielders alone are on the disabilities list. The first week of NFL pro to-practice saw at least three players end their seasons before even doning pads.  Derek Rose writhed on the floor with an ACL and the Chicago Bulls saw their playoff hopes collapse. The great Junior Seau committed suicide, too much pain. The NFL continues to try to bring to justice the players who deliberately attempted to end the effective careers of other league players through injuring them, not just pain. And this is only one month! 

All this endless pain in sports and life means we should not forget master chief’s lessons.. Pain is our friend, because pain signals to the athlete that his or her body has stressed beyond the point where it can continue to function at full efficiency and still be healthy. Pain signals deeper injury, inflammation, nerve overload, neurotransmitters warning and adrenalin flooded emergencies. The body floods itself with chemicals to deal with pain; some seek to quiet the pain, others to kick up the level  of awareness or body performance for a short time to get through the pain. Sometimes the body narrows the focus of the mind and eyes to prepare for and overcome the danger that body announces.

The ability of an athlete to be aware of and monitor their pain is important. In every sport every athlete lives with attrition of physical skill and strength over a season. They realize there are times when as an athlete they need to play with the pain because it is bearable and will not detract form their performance level. There are moments when they need to demonstrate courage to their teammates and encourage them to also play with a reasonable level of pain out of loyalty to each other; the contagion of a leader, if he or she can do it, so can I.

Last year Washington State University started a redshirt freshman quarterback Connor Halliday against Utah. It was his first start after a stunningly successful first game the week before. He played on cloud nine full of energy and adrenal protection. During the game he took some hard hits and suffered contusions and injuries, nothing that seemed out of the ordinary for the normal pain and injury that football inflicts upon its players. Yet later that day he ended up int he emergency room with a lacerated liver. The WSU doctors had run all the regular and protocol based tests when he was injured and nothing came up. This type of injury remains internal and not immediately evident; its pain should have alerted the quarterback of the severity. But like so many young athletes in the thrall of competition and loyalty and cortisol induced protection from pain, Halliday did not recognize the signals or refused the listen to them; he was going to play come hell or hi water.  To understand the culture of sport and athletes, it is important to listen to what his coach said after complimenting him for  "unbelievably courageous outing." "He hung in there and took hits and threw the ball under duress and pain. I'm very proud of his toughness and grit."

Yet even bearable pain may be a reason to leave the field. First, as in the case of the young quarterback, it may be the tip of an extensive set of damages not yet fully unfolded. It may be the warning signal that the body is pushing limits and catastrophic failure is shortly to occur. Playing on may intensify injuries or magnify the range of the loss. Secondly, even a bearable injury can detract from performance. It may be that a player hurts her or his team by staying on the field as an act of courage or self-mastery. Yet this important point is often missed and when Jay Cutler left the field of play for this reason the NFL's professional football semi-finals, he was vilified.

Pain serves a survival function and as an early warning system to people about the need to protect and attend to their body. It alerts athletes that worse is on the way if they keep pressing against the signals of the body. The young quarterback could have destroyed his life.

Pain manifests as a real physiological phenomena exhibited by neural and chemical responses. But pain is also experienced subjectively, and many persons have different responses to the same physical impact; they read their body differently. Individuals can be trained to deal with higher levels of pain, physical or mental, over time. Dealing with high levels of pain can be learned, and levels of pain that would paralyze a person at the beginning of training can be tolerated and functioned through later.

People experience pain subjectively, and the classic medical scales ask patients to rate pain 1-10. In real life, people might talk of mild or unbearable. It might be stabbing or throbbing or intermittent. It might explode or linger and thrum. The scaling and different manifestations make diagnosing and living with pain an art, not a science.

Sometimes the pain recedes because the pain initially signaled a level of muscle, vascular or pulmonary performance that the sport required pushing past. Pushing past meant experiencing the braying complaints of lungs, muscles and mind as the athlete learns to develop higher levels of endurance, strength or odd skills that require unique vascular and muscle specializations. The capacity of the body to function without hurting itself grows with practice and strength.

At other times the pain simply reflects bodily disorder and breakdown. The picture of Curt Schilling with blood flowing from a bone sticking through his foot as he pitches the Red Sox to a World Series win exemplifies the play through pain mystique and myth and imperative of sports. Jack Youngblood finishing a football game with a broken leg also ranks in the pantheon.

The key to remember is that  playing through pain has serious short and long term costs. First, pain distracts the athlete. It takes indirect concentration and focus to keep the pain at bay, and this distracts from utter complete presence to the task at hand. Second, the pain diminishes actual physical performance and limits physical actions. When a player is injured, they can often keep playing with adrenalin and team loyalty and support holding them together. But once on the sideline the adrenaline falls, the contagious strength of a huddle falters and the full measure of pain explodes and debilitates the player. The next time they go out, the deterioration of performance becomes obvious.

Finally, pain’s early warning nature signals later cost. Players who keep playing through the pain like a torn meniscus just tear the meniscus apart until they play bone on bone. Players with a ripped muscle continue to fray the muscle or micro-fracture grows into a greater break in the bone. Players compensate on the field and in compensating put excessive stress on other unprepared bones and muscle and end up multiplying injuries. The longer the player plays through the pain, the longer the healing and the greater the possibility of more injury and hence even longer healing. In my world of college athletes, the most common medical reason for waivers after major immediate injuries like ACL or broken bones involves players coming back too early, not giving their injury or body time to fully heal.

It makes perfect sense to play through certain types of pain. The accumulated aches, pains, strains, twists and bruises of a season nag at performance and harass a player’s focus. Good athletes know their own bodies well. They usually know when their body has reached its limits. Good athletes, like good professionals, learn to master these physical pains. They also learn to master and play through the mental pains that arise from daily life that ensnare daily suffering or worries about family or child or finances or breakups or friends. Playing through these pains mirrors a primary moral requirement of life.

The legendary status of playing through pain deserves its moral status. To do this humans manifest honor, strength of will, loyalty to goal and team. These are admirable traits and deserve praise. So modern athletes will “power through.”

But we have learned that more often than not playing through the pain of major injuries or threatening injuries makes no sense for athlete or team either in short run or long run. This is especially true for younger athletes who do not have the fine grained sense of their bodies or a well developed sense of self-preservation. This is why college and high school athletics must have independent and empowered doctors on the field to stop the athletes and stop the coaches when they prefer to risk the Achilles Choice that I have often discussed  to seek glory and victory.

The sacrifice of playing through pain makes little moral sense for young or college athletes. Players and doctors know this, even if coaches regularly forget it.

Bull Durham—the Costner Baseball Movie Trilogy

Well the baseball season has reached the 30.9% mark. Interleague play has begun and the Mariners are on their way to another 90 game loss season. I thought I would celebrate by reminding myself of another great baseball movie and the middle movie of the Costner baseball trilogy—Bull Durham.

Baseball is a discipline of failure. The greatest hitters fail two-thirds of the time, and the greatest pitchers fail to throw strikes half the time. Succeeding in a world saturated by failure takes self-mastery and resilience. The protagonist Crash Davis of Bull Durham, one of my absolute favorite moves, embodies the stoic dignity of failure.

Kevin Costner as Crash Davis, a little thicker, still carries his lanky handsome athletic build and grace (he actually hit two home runs in the making of the movie) plays a professional minor league player. Crash has earned his skill as an accomplished catcher and manager of pitchers who could not quite master major league hitting. He’s grizzled, cynical, self-educated and droll. Unlike the Costner character in Field of Dreams, but similar to his character in For Love of the Game, Crash lives alone with baseball as his path and profession. He has been known to “howl at the moon.”

Crash lives in the shadows of the glory of the major leagues in the grubby perpetual minors. Annie (Susan Sarandan), the movie’s narrator and muse, upholds upholds baseball’s mythical status. As part time community college lecturer in Durham, she introduces the movie with a reminder, “I believe in the Church of Baseball. I've tried all the major religions, and most of the minor ones. …I know things. For instance, there are 108 beads in a Catholic rosary and there are 108 stitches in a baseball...You see, there's no guilt in baseball, and it's never boring…It's a long season and you gotta trust it. I've tried 'em all, I really have, and the only church that truly feeds the soul, day in, day out, is the Church of Baseball.”

At this Triple A graveyard for perpetual veterans and launch pad for hotshots, Annie picks one player each year to initiate into the church through reading poetry and love-making. In Bull Durham she has adopted to mother and play with Eby Calvin LaLoosh (Tim Robbins) an immensely talented fire-balling air-head with the focus of an amoeba.

Crash Davis is approaching the end of his baseball career having once been blessed 21 wondrous days in the show, the Major Leagues.  By a fluke of longevity and talent he needs only 1 home run to achieve the minor league record of 247 home runs. The Durham Bulls bought his AAA contract to tutor the incredibly talented picture and Annie’s protégé “Nuke” LaLoosh. Nuke has just pitched a game in which he walked 18, hit, stuck out 18 as well as hitting the sportscaster, public address announcer and the mascot bull—he has “serious shit.” More to the point Crash announces he has “a million dollar arm with a five cent head.”

As the “player to be named later,” Crash enters just as the manager of the Bulls tells a young player “the organization has decided to make a change,” and a very young player’s dreams end. The movie highlights how genuinely young all the players are and how many will fall by the wayside trying to gain the holy grail, the Bigs, the Show, the Majors.

The cold ruthless culling of all elite sports looms in the background just as the incredibly fine difference between making it and failing. Yet the players are playing a game that flows from joy, fun and intense competitiveness. A desperate player points out it beats selling appliances at Sears. Crash recognizes the man-child in them all. He can still sneak out with the very young players one night to flood the field, slide in the mud and create a rain day. When the manager complains that the team is not paying attention, Crash reminds him, “they’re kids, scare’em.”

The manager follows his advice with one of the greatest explanations of sport in movie history. Throwing bats on the floor in the shower and cowering the team in the shower stall, the manager screams,

“it’s a simple game, you throw the ball, you hit the ball, you catch the ball .”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is baseball, pure and clean. I mean how hard can it be hit a rotating 2.78 inches ball at 97 mph with a 2.75 inch piece of ash?

You throw the ball. You hit the ball. You catch the ball.

The movie reminds us that at the core of sport is simple, based upon natural human actions. Yet like great baroque music, these singular themes permit infinite variations that demand high skill from players and induces joy and satisfaction in the spectators.

Crash reluctantly becomes big brother to the young players. With Nuke, Crash has to break Nuke of the habit of relying on talent with no discipline and teach him how to learn. In one memorable incident, Nuke repeatedly shakes off his catcher to throw his “heater.” Crash smiles and lets Nuke throw, of course Crash tells the batter what is coming and the batter hits it a mile, a country mile. Crash gloats over how far the home run travelled and alerts Nuke that Crash let the hitter know to prove to Nuke who is boss. Nuke will have to relearn the lesson constantly.

Despite his callow flakiness, Nuke does not have a bad heart but is spoiled by a world that has value his talent and never asked that he grow up or mature. When Nuke tells Crash “you don’t like me.” And Crash lays out a professional’s credo, “Because you don't respect yourself, which is your problem. But you don't respect the game, and that's my problem. You got a gift….When you were a baby, the Gods reached down and turned your right arm into a thunderbolt. You got a Hall-of-Fame arm, but you're pissing it away.”

Slowly, with pain and wit, Nuke learns these lessons, sort of. He even learns Crash’s famous critique of strike-outs and defense of off speed pitches, “Relax, all right? Don't try to strike everybody out. Strikeouts are boring! Besides that, they're fascist. Throw some ground balls - it's more democratic.”

The slow comic arc of learning to grow up and take a child’s game seriously is held together by a fun and sexy romance. The movies draws us into the world of aspiring dreams and uneven talent. Not everyone we meet will make the major leagues, in face most will fail. Crash and the movie teach about about resilience and about failure while reminding us, like Field of Dreams, that beneath the game lies the reality and importance of love.

Costner provides a tired lonely dignity to a man who has found his path. He purused it with passion, skill and dignity only to just miss. He scored a “cup of coffee” in the majors and remembers it as a shining moment he can share with the rookies whom will never see the promised land,  “yeah, I was in the show. I was in the show for 21 days once - the 21 greatest days of my life. You know, you never handle your luggage in the show, somebody else carries your bags. It was great. You hit white balls for batting practice, the ballparks are like cathedrals, the hotels all have room service, and the women all have long legs and brains.”

The movie reminds us that desire, effort and practice are NOT enough. A player needs a gift, a talent from the gods. Even that is not enough, you need the talent and the discipline and respect to make it all come together. This becomes the lesson that Crash must hand on to Nuke. In the end Nuke does get called up with his gift and the seeds of maturity that Crash has planted, he may have a chance.

At the end the depth of Costner’s own loss and failure are revealed. After Nuke’s call up, Crash ends up at a bar—alone, drinking, ruing his loss. Nuke comes by to thank him, and Costner explodes in fury at the merciless statistical cruelty of baseball. His monologue spits out that the difference between 250 and 300 is 25 hits. 25 dying quails, flares. 25 hits that’s all kept him from the promised land, and he can only stare with awe and anger at the world Nuke will enter with his gift, a world Nuke neither understands or appreciates.

Throughout the movie the triangle among Nuke, Annie and Crash has unfolded with Annie and Crash realizing they belong together in a relation of mature equals, but they can’t act on it during the season to protect Nuke's own fragile ego and burgeoning success.

In the end Crash experiences what we saw at the beginning, “management has decided to make a change,” his manager tells him as he is released. But the manager also tells Crash that he will recommend Crash to be a coach next season, a perfect fit for Crash and baseball. Crash leaves, picks up with the Ashville Tourists and breaks the record, only Annie notices. The movie ends with Crash returning to Annie to begin a real relationship with a woman he can love.

The movie accepts the mythical sense of baseball’s uniqueness and inner joy but does not fall in bloated allegory like The Natural or reverence like The Lou Gehrig Story. Instead it weaves the joy and beauty of the game with the flawed, loopy and intense folks who inhabit its reality. Crash Davis learns and so does Annie that baseball can sustain you but it cannot fulfill you. 

Crash still loves the game and respects its incredible difficulty. He can hand this wisdom on to the next generation and others have seen this. His manager recommends him for a coaching job even as he must cut him. But baseball will be woven into the texture of his life, not be his life, as he move sin with Annie.

As Annie reminds us, “Baseball may be a religion full of magic, cosmic truth, and the fundamental ontological riddles of our time, but it's also a job.”

Resilience and Attrition Regression

A radio commentator I respect recently mentioned "attrition regression" as he talked about how important depth is to a football team as the predictable progression of a season lead to injuries to major players but also a systematic aggravation or deterioration of skill and achievement over a season. I liked the term, sounds very sophisticated, and it  highlights how important resilience is in the design and creation of a sport team and its culture. Watching the NFL draft which is driven so much by considerations of depth and resilience or watching 40 baseball players end up on the injured reserve list before the season is one month old illuminate how critical resilience is. 

Resilience defines the ability of an organization to respond to external or internal shocks. A resilient organization expects and prepares for a range of problems that will arise and threaten performance or survival. Stress and shocks pervade sport life and  good and high reliability organizations build in redundancy, cross training or depth. If an organization is not designed to be reliant, the normal or sudden stresses or shocks of life will destroy it. 

Athletics involves physical risk and required physical performance under stress, often with contact with others. At the same time the fine-grained requirements of strength and skill require very high and sustainable levels of micro skills and talent. At the very thin margins of elite competition, minuscule differences in speed, strength, quickness, time or technique have immense consequences. Teams must accommodate these razor thing margins and work to generate durability and competence to fight off the surprises and costs of the daily demands of consistent physical play. 

In sport this contact and engagement occurs not just in games but in practice and preseason and sometimes off season where many young male athletes play other sports or engage in high risk (ie stupid) behavior. Last year the Superbowl champions had fifteen of their projected season starters on the injured list during the course of the year. This year in baseball with the season less than one month old has already seen 40 players go on the disabled list. Last year the Seattle Seahawks had 284 roster transactions during the year and had churned 53 percent of their roster by opening day. So preseason, practices, games, even conditioning exact incessant wear, tear and cost to the athletes.  On many teams internal competition for playing time amplifies the intensity of competing and physical wear and tear. 

Every team faces  continuous attrition over the course of a season. A cumulative exhaustion creeps as endless games mount up. The exhaustion can be physical with players having lower energy levels and lower endurance levels in games where they cannot play as long at their highest level of performance. But the exhaustion can be mental as well. Players need to bring focus to their games and practice to refine skills and address weaknesses. Nonstop stress and decision make take their toll in missed cues, sloppy plays and mental mistakes.

Team resilience builds upon quality of individual judgement and toughness. The toughness plays out day to day where individuals assess the seriousness of their accumulating injuries or their attrition of skills. They monitor that but also calibrate how much they can play and play through injuries or play with a certain level of pain. This requires them to compensate or work or rehab to keep an elite level of performance or play at the level they can. Teams need players who are resilient who can play, but not play to the point where they destroy their ability to contribute.

But team resilience is more than the sum of the mental toughness of their individuals. Additive health costs slowly degrade performance at the micro level across a team. The accretion of wraps, tapes, braces bear witness to the rising level of internal pain that each player must manage. Minute gradations in speed or quickness change with each injury or "ding" and at elite levels of competition, micro-second changes can result in performance threshold declines. Teams need to rest players, find space for them to recover or when asking them to play adapt to lower or limited performance levels. This requires backup players of comparable skill or at least able to fit into the demands of the system played. The team must do this resting while maintaining a competitive level of play even with their best players out.

Beyond resting, renewing and managing performance limitations, teams need depth to address injuries at any position but especially key positions. So the creation of depth matters, but depth is not enough. The depth in personnel must also fit the system and style of play. Teams do not just need stockpiles of players, but they need players of  a certain style and competence. At the same time managing backup depth of players who fit is hard. Quality costs money. Many players who could be starters prefer to be on other teams starting rather than waiting for potential injuries. The costs of waiting for someone to get injured or getting very limited playing time can anger or degrade a player's performance and attitude; it can poison a team. The money spent on depth often means money not spent upon starters or the limits on money mean severe drop offs in quality from starters to backups. While resilience matters for the long long run, I am focusing just upon the need for resilience to get through a season. So teams need pipelines for one season but also for the long developmental arc.

This requirement to anticipate and address regression attrition over the course of a season accounts for why coaches manically stockpile players. Drafting may be as much about building numbers of potential talent as grappling for the perfect superstar.  In college ranks, the stockpile seems a zero sum game, if a team gets a play, another team does not have them. Pro teams develop very different ways to manage depth and fit. 

Resilience is as important as talent in winning. Resilience is not just about one player at a time but a culture and system of talent acquisition, training and management that builds up the necessary flexibility and mental and cognitive toughness for groups of players to adapt to the adversity, injuries, pain and attrition any season brings.