Minefield

To talk about the travails of Simone Biles at the Olympics is to enter a minefield of race and gender. I’ll step into it with my daughter as a guide. “I didn’t care about pressure,” is how she puts it, and that’s true, Clare never shied away from it. However, as I pointed out in our phone conversation today, there were times when she gave up during an at-bat; the pitcher was better, both physically and mentally. Surrender didn’t happen often, and it never went beyond high school or travel. No, every strikeout and popup in college was the result of the second coming of the Bambino trying to launch yet another ball over the fence. My point here, and one Clare agrees with, is that athletics involves a competition of the mind as much as the body and the most successful athletes are the ones who commands both. Think Michael Jordan here. The will to win poured out of him like sweat. Some athletes are lucky not to have to worry about the mental side of their game, but I’d argue those folks are in the tiniest minority. Most athletes face something—doubt, anxiety, the yips, whatever—that can affect performance. The athletes who find a way to cope are the ones who are going to win. My job with Clare was to have her deal with her failures. This wasn’t fun or easy, but necessary if she wanted to excel. Early on, I had her read about Ted Williams because I wanted my child to have Williams’ mindset every time she steeped into the batter’s box. No one was better than her because she was Ted F******Williams. At some point, Biles’ support system failed to remind her of the same and allowed that “something” to get hold of her. I should note here that Clare would go one step further and say that, if Biles in fact was suffering from her version of the yips, this is not the same as being so wracked by depression or doubt that she couldn’t get out of bed. Put another way, you could argue that the yips are on one side of the mental-challenges’ spectrum, troublesome yet addressable. So noted. One aspect of this story that’s gone unnoted—and what a surprise (not) that—is the role NBC played in generating the pressure Biles may have felt going into the Games. Over the last nine months or so, Lester Holt and the nightly news made sure to tell us of Biles’ latest fantastic performance at a meet; you have to build an audience, I guess. Too bad nobody bothered to consider the effect of that strategy might have on the athlete in question. So, now we have sympathy for someone who wasn’t at the top of her game, and that’s a good thing. There but for the grace of God—along with a profound lack of talent—go I. But there will still be winners and losers as long as there are games. Only now we have a better understanding of what it takes to win.