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Hurricane Scale
September 2nd, 2019Born in 1917 in Brooklyn, NY, this man grew up to be a civil engineer. At the age of 30 he went to work for Dade County, Fla., updating the local building code. Important work to be sure, but nothing glamorous or historic. But one thing would set this hidden gem apart. He had developed a very specific fascination for one aspect of his work — hurricanes. According to Wikipedia, he became a leading advocate for stricter codes in hurricane-prone zones. In 1965 while working on a United Nations-commissioned study of windstorm damage on low-cost housing, he developed a scale to categorize the intensity of hurricanes. His name was Herbert Saffir, and you often hear about his work. Today, hurricanes — like the Category 5 Hurricane Dorian — are measured on to the Saffir-Simpson scale.
Valerie Harper’s Secret Weapon
September 1st, 2019Valerie Harper, who died Friday, knew more people than other children did when she was growing up. That’s because her family moved often. They lived in Massachusetts, California, Oregon and New Jersey. Harper said in her memoir, “I, Rhoda,” that she made friends easily.
It makes you wonder how many of those children with whom Harper crossed paths looked at her on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and remembered her as the kid in their school. And it makes you wonder further if any of those children could ever have predicted that this classmate would achieve such fame.
They might have seen the future had they known Harper’s secret.
The secret was Harper’s mother.
She was a teacher.
She taught all eight grades at once in a one-room schoolhouse in Saskatchewan, Canada.
Why is that important?
Anecdotal evidence suggests that children of teachers and coaches might achieve more than others.
That nugget comes from John Cook, longtime volleyball coach at the University of Nebraska. He has noticed a special quality in such offspring, and he attributes it to the fact that teachers and coaches love what they do. They’re not in it for the money, and they understand that success requires hard work.
Again, the information is anecdotal only. (It would make a marvelous 20-year study for those of you looking for an interesting doctoral thesis.)
What did Harper’s mother do?
Among other things, she encouraged the children to be open to new experiences. So at a young age Valerie would go to New York and soak in the culture. When it came time for the family to move back to Oregon from New Jersey, Valerie’s mom insisted she stay behind to continue her dancing lessons.
It paid off. Not only did Valerie get better, but she was closer to auditions. Before long, she was in show business and things took off from there.
Falling Football Stock
September 1st, 2019Drafted with high hopes in April, cut in August. That’s the reality for Jachai Polite, taken by the Jets in the third round of the NFL draft. This story in the New York Post explores the how and why of Polite’s fall.
Polite came to the Jets via a 68th-overall pick, a move that now looks like a mistake. GM Mike Maccagnan, who made the selection, is out of a job, though not for this pick only.
Polite is still just 21 years old, which means there is still time for him to make a career in pro football. Will he prove the Jets wrong for letting him go? Will another team pick him up? Or was the whole thing a mistake from the start?
On one level, Polite’s story is just another reminder of how hard it is to predict performance. But there’s also reason to think that enough warning signs were there on Polite. Said the Post: “(He) was projected as a first-round pick by some before the scouting combine, but his draft stock plummeted after a poor workout and some bad interviews. There were also questions about his maturity. The Jets felt they were getting a steal in the third round, but it is pretty clear that coach Adam Gase was not on board with this pick by Maccagnan, who was fired a few weeks after the draft.”
The Jets thought they were getting steal. But now it appears they were left empty-handed.
The Tyler Skaggs Tragedy
August 31st, 2019The silver lining, if there could ever be such a thing when it comes to a fatal drug interaction, is that the death of Angels’ pitcher Tyler Skaggs could bring more attention to the issue of opioids.
After all, big-league athletes are not supposed to die. Not when they are in full youth. And yet Skaggs did. He had fentanyl and oxycodone along with alcohol in his system, an autopsy found.
At a time like this, people search desperately for the why. To think that such a death could have no meaning would be unbearable.
It is a fact of life — though unfair — that the death of a celebrity gathers more attention than the demise of someone who isn’t known by the general public.
In this light, it would not be surprising to Skaggs’ death bring fresh urgency to a scourge that claimed 47,000 American lives in 2017.
Addiction on the court
August 31st, 2019Here’s a side of tennis you don’t often hear about. But this story just underlines the fact that addiction does not discriminate. Your race, color, creed, religion, skill level, line of work, achievements, or gender … none of it matters.
Interviewed by Dr. Lipi Roy, 1993 French Open doubles champion Murphy Jensen discusses the highs, the roots of his addiction, his recovery and his effort to help other addicts.
It gives new meaning to the phrase, “All in.”
Nobody Wanted Him. Now He’s a Star
February 18th, 2019You can bet that more than one Division I basketball coach would love a 6-foot-6 guard/forward with a scoring touch. Well, hundreds of coaches had a shot at just such a player — and passed.
Meet Raiquan Clark of LIU Brooklyn, leading scorer in the Northeast Conference. He’s a star. Four years ago, in search of scholarship money, he emailed every D-I school in the country.
“Every school, I promise you,” Clark recently told The New York Post. “I’d wake up and do some, and do some more before I went to sleep, and I kept going for like a week. And I just waited for a reply.”
Only two schools bothered to reply, and neither one offered anything. So Clark walked on at LIU Brooklyn.
“It’s not like he was a recruited walk-on,” former LIU coach Jack Perri said. “It was like, we need another body, and we didn’t want a 5-9 kid. It was, as long as he understands it’s something where he’s not gonna be playing and he’s gonna be a practice player.”
Clark is no longer a practice player. He’s just another example of a hidden gem — a superstar hiding in plain sight. It wasn’t long before Perri knew he had a player with extraordinary focus, driven by a wish to help his mom with tuition.
“He’s a tremendous athlete and he has a unique motor, and by the end of the year, it was obvious he was going to be in our plans going forward,” Perri said. “He was getting shots in at 7 in the morning, he was working out at midnight. He was obsessed with, ‘I’m getting myself good enough so that you have to give me a scholarship, so my mom won’t have to pay for college.’ I have such immense respect for him for the hard work he put in. He just willed himself.”
That’s the thing about hidden gems. You can’t measure what’s inside them. You can’t see what drives them. But you can give someone a chance. Because there are hidden gems everywhere.
Derek Kellogg, Clark’s current coach at LIU Brooklyn, is one of the coaches who passed on Clark. He used to be at Massachusetts and, “I probably got one (email) and shuffled it aside.”
Now Kellogg knows that you never know.
“The second pick in the draft is gonna come from Murray State [Ja Morant],” Kellogg said. “That goes to show there are a lot of players out there. You just have to find the right ones.”
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Whatever you’re doing, you can use The Improvement Factor be better at it.
How Much of Making the Hall of Fame Is Pure Chance?
December 13th, 2018The recent election that put Harold Baines and Lee Smith into baseball’s Hall of Fame sparked more dispute than an umpire’s mistake.
Baines, in particular, is seen by critics as a good player who does not deserve to be enshrined with the sport’s immortals. And Tony La Russa, himself a member of the Hall of Fame, dismissed Baines’ critics with a terse shot of profanity. It made for colorful TV, especially in a week in which the sport’s annual Winter Meetings failed to produce much in the way of news.
But leaving aside the question of qualifications, what if we instead were to ask, “How much does pure chance have to do with achieving greatness?” How much can brief but significant events explain those two perplexing groups:
1. Draft flops — those who are chosen high but who never make it?
2. Hidden gems who emerge as stars?
Smith belongs to neither group. He was a highly regarded prospect, making it big after being taken in the second round of the 1975 amateur draft. But his life had its share of pure chance. First, baseball was not on young Smith’s radar screen. But, according to a Society of Baseball Research article by Neal Poloncarz, “One day in his junior year of high school, as he walked across the outfield of a softball field during practice, a ball rolled to his feet, beyond the outfielders. Lee picked it up and heaved it to home plate. After the softball coach witnessed this, Smith was switched from the softball team to the baseball team.”
That episode alone did not put Smith on a track to baseball. Tall and sturdy, he could have chosen basketball, and indeed planned to play at Northwestern State in Louisiana. After a chat with Joe Adcock, a former player, Smith turned pro in baseball.
Four years into his career, Smith was still in the minor leagues. Randy Hundley, minor-league pitching coach for the Chicago Cubs, suggested he become a relief pitcher. It turned out to be fateful advice, but Smith didn’t see it that way. He took it as a demotion, and returned to basketball.
That’s when Billy Williams, a Cubs great, paid Smith a visit and persuaded him to give baseball another try. Back in baseball, Smith got advice from, among others, future Hall of Fame pitcher Ferguson Jenkins, and noted pitching coach Billy Connors.
So:
What if Smith had never wandered across that outfield during softball practice? What if he had ignored the ball at his feet instead of hurling it to home plate, or rolled it back in? What if the softball coach had not seen his prodigious throw? What if Adcock had told Smith to go to college and pursue basketball? What if Randy Hundley had never made Smith into a reliever? Or if Billy Williams had never bothered to come to Smith’s house?
The constant thread in Smith’s young life, of course, was his enormous strength and undeniable talent. But lots of people have that, and never go anywhere. But fate put the right people in Smith’s path, and he was smart enough to seek out and receive advice.
The Worst Hiring Decision in NFL History
September 20th, 2018It goes without saying that a single hiring decision can affect an organization for years. No one needs to remind fans of the New York Giants and New England Patriots.
That’s because either one of those teams could have wound up with superstar coach Bill Belichick — and only one of them did.
The story comes in a new book “Belichick: The Making of the Greatest Football Coach of All Time,” by Ian O’Connor.
In 1991, the Giants needed a new coach. Bill Parcels had retired, having led them to championships in Super Bowl XXV and Super Bowl XXI.
At the time, Belichick worked for the Giants, an invisible gem, a superstar hiding in plain sight. He wanted the head coaching job, according to O’Connor’s book. But George Young, the Giants’ general manager at the time, did not want Belichick. Here are the reasons for that fateful choice. “This is an ex-lacrosse player,” O’Connor relates Young’s thinking. “He’s a disheveled-looking mess most of the time.”
Young was right about the way Belichick dressed and about Belichick’s lacrosse background. But his decision on whom to hire could not have been more wrong.
Under Belichick, the Patriots have made it to eight Super Bowls, winning five. They could get there again this season.
Meanwhile, the Giants — who did win two Super Bowls since letting Belichick get away — have lost their first two games this season and have made the playoffs only once in the last six years.
As for Handley, the man the Giants hired instead of Belichick, he lasted two seasons as a coach in the NFL. He won 14 games and lost 18. And remember that Young hired him in part because he made a better appearance than Belichick did.
It’s easy, of course, to criticize hiring decisions once they have been made. But it’s also useful to know that for every hiring decision, there is an invisible gem being overlooked. The Patriots found one. The Giants lost one. And the rest is history.
What Made Jerry Garcia Great
August 9th, 2018On the 23rd anniversary of his death, some people are listening to Jerry Garcia’s music.
Not all people, but some people.
And that would have been fine with him.
“We’re like licorice,” Garcia once said of his iconic musical group The Grateful Dead. “Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice.”
And that’s what made Garcia great. He didn’t try to make music that everyone would like. He tried to make music that he liked.
And some people really liked it.
“There was nothing he liked more than playing music in a band in front of dancing people,” said writer Blair Jackson. “He didn’t care if the group was acoustic or electric or if the audience was large or small — it was all about hearts and souls coming together through music.”
As a young man, Garcia was an invisible gem, a superstar in plain sight. He got into trouble in school, and his experience in the Army wasn’t much better. He preferred playing the guitar to answering roll call.
In fact, he preferred playing music to almost everything else. Once the the Grateful Dead formed, they developed a loyal group of fans known as Deadheads. They were the ones who liked licorice.
“We didn’t invent the Grateful Dead, the crowd invented the Grateful Dead,” Garcia would say. “We were just in line to see what was going to happen.”
What happened was that the Grateful Dead made history. They toured for decades. Garcia formed or played with other bands along the way. It was always about making music.
“You need music, I don’t know why,” he said. “It’s probably one of those Joseph Campbell questions, why we need ritual. We need magic and bliss, and power and myth, and celebration and religion in our lives and music is a good way to encapsulate a lot of it.”
So on the anniversary of his death, some people will listen to Grateful Dead songs. Like these from their last show.
With lyrics like these from “Black Muddy River,” the last song Garcia sang on stage, just a month before his death:
“I will walk alone by the black muddy river,
And sing me a song of my own.”
It’s a life lesson. Do what you love, and others may love it, too. The song of your own might be just the one that others want (and need) to hear.
When a Hire Just Doesn’t Work Out
August 8th, 2018Let’s face it.
The more people you hire, the more chance you have that something will go wrong.
And, boy, is that true for the Baltimore Orioles baseball team this year.
Chris Davis, a high-profile and highly paid player of theirs, is having an historically bad season. And he’s getting paid more than $20 million for it. Even worse, the contract runs through the 2022 season and Davis is 32 years old, so the odds of things getting better are not very good.
Davis and the Orioles are not alone when it comes to relationships that begin with great hope and then for whatever reason do not turn out the way everyone hoped. Of the millions of hires made each year, some people just never fit in. Others get sick and can’t deliver. Still others wind up as little performers with big resumes.
None of this is meant to pin blame on Davis. You can have a legitimate debate on how much he was worth when he signed his seven-year, $161 million deal in 2016. You can argue whether or not the Orioles overpaid for a one-dimensional player.
But you can’t dispute that things are a mess now, and the Orioles find themselves stuck with an asset who is not an asset. What does any organization do in a situation like that?
The options aren’t great.
First, the Orioles could keep putting Davis in the lineup in hopes that he can work his way out of his slump. There is the belief in baseball that only by playing can a hitter “find his stroke.” The obvious question is how long can the team afford to wait when the production simply isn’t there? Patient managers can get fired.
A second option would be to put Davis on the bench and give someone else a chance. But then the team would be paying somebody $21 million a year to do nothing.
In either of those two options, the Orioles can support Davis with the considerable resources available to any big-league team — video analysis, tips from coaches, sessions with a sport psychologist, etc.
A third choice, if his contract allowed it, would be to send Davis to the minor leagues. The demotion would be embarrassing both for the team and for Davis, but he might benefit by getting out of the big-league spotlight for a while. He could even play winter ball — a high calibre of ball that, again, is out of the spotlight.
Finally, the team could release Davis and eat the contract. Kissing the remaining $80 million goodbye isn’t something any team would want to do, but, as noted earlier, there are no good options at this point.
To sum up, whether it’s baseball or any other organization, there are only a few options when a hire doesn’t work out. One is to keep the performer and provide coaching. Another is to shift the person’s role and hope that some down time can help. Finally there’s the worst option — letting the person go.
The best thing is to understand that hiring is the most important thing a any company does.