Socially horrifying

In this week's issue of the New Yorker, professional provocateur Malcolm Gladwell talks about the David vs. Goliath dynamic, and how the underdog wins more often than not... which is to fight a different battle. (David broke ranks and used artillery; the Philistines stayed in classic battle formation.) He also goes into a long examination of an unheralded girls' basketball team from Redwood City, CA that used the full-court press every game and wound up going to the national championships, despite not being very good at anything but the full-court press. Relentless effort beats superior talent, because in the words of the late great Fred Shero, relentless effort is a talent.

In between lots of sniffing about how the outsider perspective is better, and that many teams should press (highly debatable, but besides the point here) rather than lose while fighting Goliath's battle, Gladwell hits on a central truth: to win using the David tactics is to consider options that are socially horrifying to the status quo. If you are used to a half-court basketball game with set plays, head to head defensive matchups, visible coaching stratagems and all of the other conventional bells and whistles, 48 minutes of trapping is about as appealing as a stick in the eye. It's ragged, without flow and prone to big runs in either direction, leading to a drama-free conclusion. If both teams press and run and do it well, it can be great, but most of the time, the styles won't match, and you get a mess. The same goes for any court sport (hockey, soccer, tennis, and for all I know, lacrosse and rugby).

And this is a key point: court sports have a higher standard to meet than games driven by individual actors (baseball, boxing, golf) or rare events (football). Listen to the Bad Tooth's podcast following the Celtics winning Game 7 against the Bulls (ok, actually, don't), and you can hear the palpable disappointment that the last game also wasn't close and a classic. That's not just a ridiculously spoiled fan's perspective; that's what someone who is watching pro hoop even if he doesn't have a rooting interest in the laundry feels. It's also why football and baseball fan thinks that hoop fan is something of a snob and/or ridiculous. In those sports, it's enough -- hell, much more than enough -- if your laundry wins. In court sports, the laundry has to win in a way that's easy on the eyes.

Socially horrifying shows up in football and baseball too, of course. In football you have the run and shoot or spread offense, the Wildcat formation, a million different ways to try to recover an onside kick and so on, and so on. In baseball, you have the Three True Outcome sabermetric softball players and the pitch count injury worriers, respectively. But the games are too closed for even radical innovations to have that much impact, and there is no socially horrifying way to play the game, really; you just can't get that far away from the median to reach that level. Though Lord knows, Andy Reid does try.

Anyway, something to keep in mind the next time your favorite team is going down to defeat against a heavily favored team, Are they prepared to take socially horrifying actions -- say, a blow to the head that prevents a game-tying layup, or a standard-setting elbow that prompts referee overreactions that favor the less physical team... or performance enhancing substance use? And if they aren't, are you OK with them really not doing everything they can to win the game?