Sports Logic: Soccer & Mêlée Sports

In medieval England, villages would play a “sport” called mêlée  that involved entire villages rampaging across the countryside. No rules, just who could get from here to there fastest. The "players" used an inflated oval bladder of an animal and drove the ball towards a goal. Tradition says the first ball was the head of a Dane. Bumping, kicking, biting, hitting, fighting permitted as everyone ran, threw, punched, kicked, and drove the object to the goal. The “game” resembled a battle or rather a  mêlée      In French, a melee represented a specific kind of battle where order had broken down and individuals fought each other one on one or gangs on gangs with little order or direction.

In that medieval game no one quite knew who won or what the purpose was except to let off lots of energy and barely controlled non-lethal violence. But the sport involved chaotic, nonlinear and unpredictable interactions with everyone striving to get through the chaos and achieve something like a goal. These melee sports or melee moments hide among many sports and have their own logic and skills that are worth remembering.

The modern Rugby scrum resembles this moment with everyone pushing, shoving and mauling to get control of the ball. Modern roller derby resembles a melee on wheels with shoving and pushing and barely controlled violence. Scrambles to recover a fumble or onside kick in American football have some of the same chaotic nature. A player once remarked to me, “you would not believe what goes on down at the bottom with scratching, hitting, head buts, biting, anything to get control of the ball.” The melee can erupt in many spots such as distance running or peloton in cycling.

At melee moments individuals collide to fight for position to gain an advantage either to control the object or control position in a race or unfolding play. Either way the chaotic jostling involves serious physical contact or muscling against each other. But the muscling and strength only tell part of the tale since the entire point of the fray is to escape with a tactical advantage. Preparation involves strength but also emphasis upon scenario practicing and pattern recognition to address surprise in nonlinear conflicts.

In the scrum model, players push and shove. They must be prepared physically to endure a physical free-for-all. They have to be both physically well trained and strong, at the same time, they must have a trained eye to see the moment when the object can be snatched and passed out to be free. In American football it can be grabbed and protected. But in Rugby it requires seeing the moment to pass it out and release. Similarly in “traffic” in American basketball, it involves seeing the crease and accelerating to break away or pass through the melee. A similar melee moment exists in American football when a play breaks down and in a melee offensive and defensive lineman battle each other in scrum like manner and the half back or quarter back waits for a seam to open an cuts to it.  So much of this involves a combination of strength, perception to assess the force vectors at play on oneself and others, patience while applying force and quick response to push, pass or commit when a seam opens.

Such skills involves a resilient strength to take the knocks inflicted by others and keep one's integrity of purpose and skill intact. It also depends upon a capacity for trained improvisation in response to emerging patterns from the chaos of the melee moments.  The players work to forge the conditions and see the moment of release.

Many sports have mêlée moments and can be combined with different logics. For instance many running events start as parallel sports, some remain that the entire way with  enforced lanes. But others can alternate between bunched scrums and breakouts. Apollo Ohne the three time Olympic speed skater described his own sport as requiring short but "chaotic bursts of athleticism" and at moments reduced to "mayhem" as speed skaters careened around jockeying for position while maintaining balance and speed. Similar combinations can be found in cycling or cross country events and football which is an organized start over sport has quick intense mêlée moments woven through its texture.

The moment of release can differ in each sport but requires the same trained eye abetted by physical prowess. In racing competitors struggle to find some ordered advantage in the nonlinear and chaotic groupings. Inside the groupings of runners, what cyclist call pelotons, runners seek to draft behind a runner to reduce drag and energy expenditure. At other times they fight off efforts to box him or her in and prevent a break out seam. The pushing and shoving for position balance against the tactics to save energy through drafting. At the same time, just as in scrums, runners look for the seam and precise moment to release from the group and break away. The break away might work, it might not, but success depends upon the combination of managing the disordered group with the pattern recognition and energy management of when to fight loose and run free.

These  mêlée sports and moments reward clear types of individuals:

1)   He or she needs the strength to survive and hold their own amid the scrum jostling. The strength need not be overwhelming but designed to hold integrity of form and purpose against the jostling.

2)   The athlete needs to enter the mêlée with a particular intention of taking advantage of it for a goal whether to recover a object, pass it out or release and break away.

3)   The athlete needs a high capacity to improvise in light of intent and chaos. Mêlée oments, even in tightly rule bound sports, defy predictable outcomes and create surprise given the numbers involved and multiple and random force vectors.

4)  An athlete needs to keep a cool head even as he or she exerts maximum pressure to both push and shove and keep their position amid pushing and shoving. Often the battle in the mêlée sports or moments may be hidden given the tight packed nature and the ability of experienced players to conceal their digs and jabs fighting for position Too often melee moments seem to reward berserkers when the opposite is true.

5)   Adapting to these moments puts a high premium on pattern recognition, but also the ability to see patterns emerge in new unplanned forms. The improvising athlete can recognize the seam or open space but these opportunities do not open in predictable ways. Often a new schema or play suggests itself from the play and pattern recognition of the melee.

6)   It can be possible to train players and teams to respond to exactly such moments and create a play from the chaos by practicing and coordinating the ability to see and improvise.

The word  mêlée  derives from the French word for uncontrolled fight where strategy and even tactics leave off. The fight occurs amid chaos and plans give way to resolve and improvisation. Strategy or tactics may have brought the warriors to this moment, but not is degrades to blunt force trauma fights.

These moments still exist in many sports and still call upon ancient and practiced disciplines of strength, energy deployment, finding the right moment to release or escape or capture. The improvisation depends upon trained pattern recognition and the practice in dealing with the surprise of chaos. Good teams and athletes can make this an art.

Sport Ethics: Resilience

Athletic competition grinds down everyone. Athletes lose and fail constantly. In baseball the best hitters fail two-thirds of the time, in basketball fine shooters miss half the time. Developing and elite athletes make mistakes, lose and fail often. The consistency of failure discourages and weeds out many would be athletes, but the ones that stick it out learn from their errors.  I believe that successful athletes and teams master a fundamental virtue of professional success—resilience.

Resilience is a foundation of successful individuals and organizations. It presents itself in two related ways. 

The first begins with a baseline of performance. A person or organization performs at a particular level, hopefully high. This performance grows from the unfolding of the commitment, skills, coordination, knowledge and practice in a competitive environment. This level of performance is earned and critical to the individual or group's success. The baseline of achievement represents one way to measure resilience.

Resilience emerges and is tested in a particular environment with a particular group of people. A group or person can be performing at this baseline and then confront  misfortune or  shocks. These impacts hit the person or team and throw them off. The impacts can be internal, injuries, or external, new challenges, and threaten the integrity of the performance. A person or team can fall apart quickly when facing these hazards. Resiliency helps the person or team return to its baseline level after staggering from a difficulty. They "bounce back." This form of resilience depends upon keeping intact the integrity of purpose and performance under new and challenging tests.

The second aspect of resilience involves adapting and changing while keeping integrity of purpose intact. This response transcends just recovering from a blow to return to the baseline. Here the person or team  don't just bounce back; they change and thrive through the challenges. These adaptations empower the person or team to increase their performance and get better in response to distress or turmoil. This suggests that integrity of purpose itself can grow in light of new knowledge and challenges so that direction and performance adapt but remain intact to purpose.

Resilience is critical to success because all individuals and teams fail, make mistakes or face traumas that can undermine their confidence and performance. Everyone faces surprises and resilience undergirds response to surprise. If not handled, the trauma of misfortune or surprise can undermine their emotional, cognitive and relational performance.

During a competition or season of competing, shocks and surprises will occur. External shocks involve changing the environment of competition. New owners, new coaches, new talent can reenergize competitors who suddenly start to win. New tactics, techniques or strategies can throw off individuals and teams stymieing their ability to succeed. This changed environment challenges the competitive equilibrium of the person or team. These changes can induce shock, surprise or paralysis. 

The shocks need not just be external. Internal trauma requires just as much resilience. An athlete may fail or not perform up to expectations. Personal misfortune can undermine confidence or slowing physical skills can lead to sudden and unexpected declines in performance. Players might fail, be traded, or benched which erodes well choreographed relations. Injuries take away critical actors and skills, and new persons  suddenly appear and have to be integrated into a cohesive pattern of emotional and cognitive responses. All these throw off the internal equilibrium or coordination that enabled the team to perform at a high level. 

Whatever the cause, the performing baseline can no longer be achieved and is often no longer sufficient. To find success requires that individuals on the teams create a new balance among relations and skills and achieve new coordination and commitment. They need to reassemble resources to restore integrity of purpose and performance. 

This demand to restore integrity of purpose and performance under stress suggests critical dimensions of resilience lie in imagination and learning. Resilient individuals and organizations can see new possibilities and adapt beyond simply replicating what no longer works. 

Resilient individuals and teams have to be able to absorb the consequences of the changes, the losses or defeats, without falling apart emotionally, cognitively or relationally. Failure, trauma, assault generate chaos and confusion out of which the individual and team generate resources to restore relations and performance. 

The counterpoint of resilience lies in brittle or fragile individuals or groups. The person or group may feel robust and successful. These persons or teams may be brilliant performers when things are going well. They succeed within a definite scope and set environment, but when faced with sudden changes that upset established patterns, they struggle. The point of being fragile or brittle is that stress breaks them. Individuals or organizations do not recover when misfortune hits them. 

Brittle or fragile individuals or teams collapse. Facing sudden changes or new challenges the emotional, cognitive and relational balance of individuals gets skewed; they cannot bring the focused attention and relational coherence to bear under the stress of competition and the new experiences.

Under stress relations  can explode with recrimination and anger when members turn on each other. Individuals turn on themselves and cannot grapple out of their slumps. They might also implode into a silent spiral of panic and despair where players and coaches keep trying harder and harder patterns that replicate and reinforce the failed approaches and do not adapt to the new internal or external circumstance. Sometimes, the resilient action may involve simply dismantling a team that has fallen apart, and beginning the process of rebuilding.  

More than a few superb athletes or professionals remain startlingly brittle when they begin to struggle. They have been so successful so long and are so used to success, that they have not developed the emotional or cognitive capacity to accept the breakdown, adapt and work through it in ways that permit them to succeed again. The key here for individuals and teams lies in not seeing integrity as a hard and unchanging core, but understanding that integrity builds outward from purpose and outward manifestations of performance can change but be consistent with inner purpose and integrity. This often means individuals must change  aspects of their style or approach. Often trades of individuals who thrived in one ecosystem of support or competition will result in degraded performance because the athlete no longer possesses the support system that sustained them. What looked like individual accomplishment had been sustained by team and culture.

The first aspect of resilience involves the ability to absorb without disintegration. The second requires the team or individual to adapt and grow from changes. This adaptation under press of competition really defines true competitive  resilience. Simply not disintegrating does not suffice. If an individual just continues to absorb punches and continues to fail; they might be resilient, but only in a limited way. At the core this requires individuals keep their attention and focus under control even when things go badly. This permits people to improvise, test and adapt under pressure.

Real resilience means individuals and teams learn from their failures and mistakes. This requires emotional and cognitive suppleness and abiding confidence. Resilient individuals or teams do not cannibalize their emotions with self-doubt or recrimination, but get down to business of analyzing what is not working, how it can be fixed. Such an approach depends upon both self-mastery and forms of team and self-leadership.

Resilient individuals and organizations keep their attention and  ask critical questions facing these challenges:

1. What has changed? 
2. How can I identify how those changes have impacted my style and performance? 
3. How can I change my approach, training, tactics or strategy to respond to the new challenges of the environment? 
4. How can I adapt my internal game and skills to adapt to new teammates? 
5. What does the team need to do in terms of its commitment, training and roles to achieve the level of performance we lost and need to regain?

These questions grow from attention to common efforts as well as individual efforts. They shape reflection and improvisation and testing to find what works under the new conditions.

Modern professional and college sports entail incessant and often chaotic environmental changes. Free agency, trades and high injury rates lead to endless in season and game adaptations for teams. Individuals and teams have to reinvent themselves each year and sometimes several times during a season. Each year new classes arrive on college campus, old ones graduate and players now leave early. At the same time transfers and injuries make rosters much less stable. Successful teams and individuals must develop resilience.

In his book Eleven Rings Phil Jackson illustrates how teams can develop resilience and success in different ways. His early Chicago Bull teams won on the basis of a strong core of six or seven players who played together and grew into a remarkable “tribe” that played with trust, joy and skill. His later Los Angeles Laker teams built far more heavily around two players and a rotating caste of role players who came through the team. Both approaches worked but both required constant adaptation by the coach and the team as they had to work through the ups and downs and shocks of games and seasons. Jackson explains how the more resilient teams built upon a deeper set of relations and purpose that bonded the team members together. He also emphasized that resilient teams possessed  a wide range of experience and possessed several focal points of leadership who can step up and help teams reorganize and regain coherence. 

Organizations dependent upon just one star or leader are far more vulnerable to shocks, just like companies. 

This resilience grows into a cornerstone of successful professional and institutional careers in a chaotic world. Any learning process should build the capacity for resilience because growing and learning depends upon making errors, understanding why the mistake and then correcting the error, achieving success and moving forward. Ideally persons who learn in this process should develop an emotional and cognitive capacity to deal with failure and mistakes they make. Well played athletics  achieves this in a very powerful and sustainable way.

Sports Competition & the Culture Wars

Recently I got a Moron Alert warning me about the end of Western civilization. The Moron Alert quoted Arnold Toynbee to prove that Western values are

collapsing and cited the drafting of the first gay NFL player as the proof of the decline. What fascinates me about this linkage is how people see sports as a reflection and driver of culture. To many folks sports epitomize American values and can be a harbinger of decay or progress.

The American self-narrative about fairness and meritocracy—(talent + dream + hard work=success) is manifest in athletic competition. The media coverage and movies memorialize these values in their sports stories. At various times such as Olympics, sports even becomes a surrogate for political and moral superiority across political systems and countries.

This personal connection of sports to identity mean athletic competition has been entwined with the American culture wars around race, gender, religion and other differences for the last 100 years. Sports have often served as a weather vane for issues of inclusion and fair chance against cultural bias to exclude individuals and groups from domains of life. Athletics’ role is often symbolic; it can open paths for fame and economic success but also provides a public morality play where the excluded fight for the right to achieve acknowledgement and success through competition, merit and fair rules.

This public battle for a fair chance to compete in a brutally transparent environment marks sports convergence with the American cultural narrative At certain points it even permitted sports to nudge or move ahead of society. This ability to move ahead is not due to altruism. First, athletic talent is at a premium in elite sports competition and market pressure pushes owners and coaches to seek the best talent—period. Second many individuals from lower economic or immigrant groups do not have fair access to education and traditionally have chosen entertainment or sports as a way out. This creates the incentive and reward for teams to open competition to excluded individuals if individuals possess the talent and work ethics. It can even give teams competitive advantages if they get to the population pools first.

This inclusion of the excluded through sports does not transform society and can be premature, purely symbolic and falsely reassuring. The case of Jesse Owens carrying the banner for the United States against Germany in the 1936 Olympics illustrates such an anomaly. His victories connected to no movement to change and his personal life never could capitalize on the fame and achievement. However, the promotion of Jackie Robinson from the Negro Leagues to be the first black player in the major leagues both symbolized and fed a country-wide battle on civil rights and including the excluded. His promotion and success set a precedent where many other black players followed him to professional baseball.

Two recent controversies illustrate the intersection of culture wars and sports competition. The St. Louis Rams picked defensive end and SEC co-defensive player of the year MichaelSam in the 7^th Round of the NFL draft. The pick was a straight up football pick of a possibly marginal player with an upside. National controversy erupted because Sam had come out as a gay football player several months before. In being drafted and entering the NFL as a gay player, Sam challenges what is regarded as one of the most homophobic and traditional male cultures in sports and the country—of course that can have been said of the army a decade ago.

Sam’s announcement and his drafting lead to serious and hysterical discussions over the nature of American culture. The nexus of the hard right assault against his draft is similar to their resistance to gays in the military. Gay football players would subvert the sacred violence and ritual brotherhood of the military or that most violent of sports, football. To many on the American cultural right, this draft pick defiles and endangers one of the last bastions of a traditional domain of manhood linked to strength and violence and competition. The threat unfolds in two ways. First, it publically permits such a person to enter the domain; second and even more dangerous it means that the excluded persons might actually prove that gay men can succeed in the world of manly violence and competition, much as gay soldiers and basketball players succeed their domains.

This one action represents only one play in a national long-term culture war over the role of gay individuals in public and professional life. It also matters because it challenges so many of the implicit stereotypes about being gay that deny gay men the right to be considered male by traditional standards. Interestingly it complements already widely acknowledged and accepted female athletes in professional sports from basketball to tennis or golf. It also extends the boundaries that courageous individuals have pushed in less public sports and recently in professional basketball.

The point here lies in extending the public and transparent morality play of American sports where excluded individuals—East European immigrants in the twenties and thirties; black players in the fifties and sixties; women in the eighties and nineties; Latino and gay players today—these individuals consigned to the margins of society prove their work ethic, talent, capacity for loyalty, self-discipline and teamwork and for achievement under pressure before the millions who follow the sports. Their success in sports undermine many of the character stereotypes that people use to exclude them from other fields.

This public morality play also pushes out in the culture at large where celebrity and role models influence not just citizens but also children. A critical line from Jackie Robinson movie 42 where Branch Rickey tells Robinson, “I saw a young white boy wanting to be like a black man.” This stood as a revolutionary moment for American culture in the fifties, but feels a norm today where white children aspire to the images of minority athletes.

But the proof of players competing conquers one symbolic layer—individuals can prove that he or she can compete in the game with its rules and clarity of competition and skills. But another level of power looms that involves moving into layers of authority and ownership. When the Brooklyn Dodgers drafted Jackie Robinson as the first black baseball player to play in the major leagues from the Negro leagues, the team had to fight against other owners who threatened boycotts and banishment to the owner Branch Rickey. At a critical level, owners could “own” players and still be racists or sexists and exploit the players for the profit of the team. Rickey deployed power and wiles and courage to achieve his goal and he proved that Negro players made his team better; but it took power to make the change stick.

Now the battle moves not just along the lines of gay players, but moving minority players who dominate the largest revenue college and professional sports into positions of authority in coaching and management and ultimately ownership. This involves another level of culture battle. It involves not just opening up competition, but demanding power not just employment. For instance the NFL created the Rooney rule to require NFL teams to interview minority head coaches when an opening existed. The rule resulted in immediate gains as well as the slow and steady progression of minority coaches up the coaching ladder in professional basketball, football and college basketball and at a much slower rate college football.

Now the culture wars in sports is playing out at a very different and startling level—ownership. For years people have known that the NBA owner of the Los Angeles Clippers Donald Sterling had a long history of discriminatory behavior against minorities in his real estate holdings and rumored in his NBA actions. NBA great Elgin Baylor termed his team a “plantation culture.” The NBA benignly looked the other way under his friend Commissioner David Stern; but four months ago Sterling was caught on tape slurring minorities and blacks. The slurs were caught in a very strange almost poignant and very confused private conversation with his girl friend. He concludes by asking his mixed race girl friend—he is married—to not bring black players to his games and not appear on her facebook site pictured with black people.

This private conversation became public and unleashed a national firestorm of criticism that went far beyond the sports media. It singed players who were well paid millionaires employed by a racist billionaire. Here in a sports dominated by the talent of black players, the owner expressed sentiments quite compatible with an ante-bellum plantation owner.

Today in all walks of corporate and sports life, executives, players and coaches can be fired or severely reprimanded for racist and sexist comments. The Sterling problem posed the question of whether the same standards applied to the owners of capital, not just the hired help. The NFL was grappling with a much lower profile issue of whether Jim Irsay the owner of the Indianapolis Colts should be allowed to return to executive status after drunk driving indictments.

The power dynamic changed here as the players union got involved and prominent black coaches spoke out. BomaniJones had identified Sterling’s consistent racist history of employment and discrimination in 2006; now this information entered the public domain again and fed the firestorm. Other owners who knew little or had sat passively by were embarrassed by the plantation imagery and Sterling’s words and actions. Minority coaches demanded action; players, caught between very high salaries and fear of losing a year or two off their very short careers, had little to say but relied upon the union and coaches.  The story had legs and Sterling’s protector David Stern no longer had his back.

It is important to remember that the NBA is corporate association with strong rules on membership and behavior with the ability to wrest control of franchises away and ban coaches and player and even owners from participation in the sport. The new Commissioner Adam Silver took full advantage of these corporate powers.

Adam Silver had no patience with the moral ugliness implied in Sterling’s words and history. He consulted the players and union and acted decisively.

Silver expressed his “moral outrage” at the “hateful opinions.” He publically apologized to the black community and players and especially to Magic Johnson who had been singled out by Sterling. Silver orchestrated a “lifetime ban” from Sterling participating in the operation of the team or even going to games. The owners unanimously supported him. With some grumbling they also followed him to force a sale of the team upon Sterling. At this point it became complicated and was revealed that Sterling’s own judgment might be impaired—suddenly four weeks later the Clippers had been bought for a record amount and the case was over

Sterling’s befuddled racist comments to his mixed race girl friend resulted in the ownership group setting new boundaries upon the racist behavior and rhetoric of owners of professional sports teams with their symbolic and community stewardship responsibilities. The full weight of this sudden precedent may play out later; but here the culture wars have moved into the owner’s suite. The owners themselves probably do not understand the full implications of the new rules they have set for themselves and will probably migrate to other professional sports leagues.

An owner was removed and forced to sell. Capital attacked capital; billionaires policed billionaires and stated that ownership of NBA teams, and by implications public professional sports teams, involved a level of public stewardship about race and inclusion that the league and owners would now enforce, not just on employees, but upon owners themselves.

The actions of the NBA, to be honest, make the drafting of Sam pale by comparison. Sam’s drafting represents one more breakthrough against a set of collapsing dams around the country on gay exclusion; but the Silver and NBA action against an owner changed the rules of the game.

This precedent demands that rhetorical and behavioral respect for individuals and groups extend not just to players and managers, but to how the real powers frame their rhetoric and judgments.