Good and Great Guys
"Be good or be good at it.” Lil Wayne
One or the other, people cannot be both according to Wayne. Being "good at it" requires a focus and narrow mindedness that isn't compatible with being a good person. Wayne suggests that if you're not going to commit all the way to being "good at it," then it's better to be a good person.
For my purposes, by great I mean best of the best. Someone who wins over and over. This isn't achievable by most. The best of the best need to be elite in several areas, and, according to Wayne and I, one of them is not being a good person.
I will focus on two athletes who were the best of the best for several years. Athletes who weren't satisfied with giving their best. It was winning or losing. It is the obsession with winning that separates the good from the great, both athletically and morally.
I'm sure there are some outliers, but, until then, I bring to the stage Michael Jordan and Lance Armstrong, two of the most competitive humans in history.
Michael Jordan
I remember a story of Jordan losing his cool over losing a game of Monopoly, a game largely based on luck. It ended with him and his teammate getting into a physical altercation.
In The Last Dance (a documentary I highly recommend), BJ Armstrong (former Bulls teammate) was asked if Michael Jordan was a nice guy. BJ Armstrong said, “Was he a nice guy? He couldn’t have been nice. With that kind of mentality he had, you can’t be a nice guy. He would be difficult to be around if you didn’t truly love the game of basketball. He is difficult.”
Another former teammate Jud Buechler said. “People were afraid of him. I mean, we were his teammates, and we were afraid of him."
One more by another former teammate Will Perdue said.“Let’s not get it wrong. He was an asshole, he was a jerk, he crossed the line numerous times. But... he was a hell of a teammate.”
These quotes are out of context, but if you watch the series for yourself, you can see the dynamics. Jordan wasn't a nice guy, but he was great. He is and was very respected. Could he have been that determined, could he have pushed and motivated his teammates, could he have had the focus, if he was a good or nice guy? Maybe, but I suspect not.
Lance Armstrong
Lance Armstrong is like Michael Jordan. Both were multi-sport athletes. Both were the undisputed best at their sport during their careers. One big difference, Armstrong has been practically erased from cycling for doping. His character has been completely ruined by the lengths he took to hide his lies. ESPN's 30/30 Lance is another documentary I recommend if you're interested in Lance Armstrong's rise and fall.
This is a continuation of my previous post, Rereading Lance Armstrong.
Rereading Lance Armstrong
I finished rereading It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life. I enjoyed rereading it. I started rereading it with a friend, who quickly abandoned the book. My friend couldn't get over Armstrong's ego and deception in the opening paragraphs. To enjoy it, you have read it a certain way. If you read it as you did 20 years ago, you're going to hate it. If you read it as a novel, it's still not that good. You have to read it knowing who Lance is. You have to read it wanting to look inside the mind of a narcissist.
From the opening pages, Armstrong comes off as an asshole. It's clear who he is, his mom too. They seem proud of it. His arrogance and pride comes off even more shallow when he has his cancer revelations. In hindsight, as an older reader, it's clear that Armstrong isn't a good or nice guy.
What's most remarkable is how long people held on to the fairy tale. Partly because cycling is a European sport and Americans knew/know little if anything about it. More so because people want to believe in miracles. It's wild how long people, myself included, continued to believe Armstrong against overwhelming evidence to the contrary..
Armstrong used his cancer, his recovery, his wife, his marriage, and his child to create his myth. He supposedly learned the importance of life and how to live. He overcame his obsession with cycling and winning, except he didn't.
The interactions Armstrong describes later in the book display how he hasn't changed. If you read the book as fiction, he's a very flat character. Outside of his determination and arrogance, he is a boring character. The scenes within the story show Armstrong is a boring story teller too. His story is structurally simple. Guy beats cancer and beats everyone else with his grit and hard work... Take away cancer and winning, and all you have is a narcissist and sociopath.
Armstrong gives a disclaimer about cancer killing indiscriminately. He suggests that it doesn't matter how hard you try. Then he goes to describe and brag about how hard he fought cancer. He says he printed, bought, and read everything on cancer and could speak the lingo to the doctors, yet his descriptions in the book come off as some jock talking about cancer.
Some of these factors make me think the co author Sally Jenkins saw through him and didn't fix these discrepancies in the narrative. This is my favorite way to read the story. Jenkins knew who Armstrong was and let him tell his story in a way that would expose him.
Game Theory of Doping
"Doping is an unfortunate fact of life in cycling, or any other endurance sport for that matter. Inevitably, some teams and riders feel it’s like nuclear weapons—they have to do it to stay competitive within the peloton. I never felt that way, and certainly after chemo the idea of putting anything foreign in my body was especially repulsive," said Lance Armstrong in It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life.
The first two sentences are true. It's an arms race. Pure game theory. If your opponents cheat and you don't, your opponents will have a huge advantage. If you cheat and your opponents don't, you'll have a huge advantage. If everyone cheats, no one has any additional advantages from cheating. The best action in each given scenario is to cheat.
(You never know for sure if your opponent is cheating. Even now, with drug testing getting a lot better, I'm not sure athletes who really want to win can ignore that their rivals and other competitors are trying to find legal and illegal advantages.)
Armstrong came into cycling during a time when everyone was cheating. Cheating was part of the sport. Armstrong and his team were determined cheaters. They were doing everything. Even running around town secretly doing blood transfusions the mornings of races.
For Armstrong, everyone knew everyone was cheating, so cheating wasn't optional. You don't cheat, you don't compete.
So the problem becomes not getting caught.
The Lie
The book is part of not getting caught. The cancer foundation may have been part of not getting caught too. Here are a few of my favorite snap shots of the lie. All of the following are from the book.
Regarding doping, "certainly after chemo the idea of putting anything foreign in my body was especially repulsive."
"I WAS MAKING ENEMIES IN THE ALPS. MY NEWLY acquired climbing prowess aroused suspicion in the French press, still sniffing for blood after the scandal of the previous summer. A whispering campaign began: 'Armstrong must be on something.' Stories in L’Equipe and Le Monde insinuated, without saying it outright, that my comeback was a little too miraculous."
"I had absolutely nothing to hide, and the drug tests proved it... the drugs tests became my best friend, because they proved I was clean. I had been tested and checked, and retested."
“My life and my illness and my career are open... There was nothing mysterious about my ride at Sestriere: I had worked for it. I was lean, motivated, and prepared. Sestriere was a good climb for me. The gradient suited me, and so did the conditions–cold, wet, and rainy. If there was something unusual in my performance that day, it was the sense of out-of-body effortlessness I rode with– and that I attributed to sheer exultation in being alive to make the climb."
No comments:
Post a Comment