Campbell watched as the CEO stood in the cafeteria on a Friday afternoon. “He was so unbelievably good,” Campbell recalls. “He said it in his words, from the heart. He needed to take a strong stand: ‘This is who we are, and this is how we’ll succeed.’” The employees responded well, Campbell recalled, and the speech became an important moment in the company’s turnaround.
Score another victory for the Nerd Whispherer.
3.
Five minutes into the film Rudy, about an undersized walk-on to the Notre Dame football team, a young boy stands in his bedroom as a phonograph plays. Through the crackle of the vinyl recording comes the voice of Knute Rockne, the Notre Dame football coach from the 1920s, recreating one of his pregame speeches: “And we’re going to go inside them, we’re going to go outside them. Inside them. Outside them . . . Don’t forget men, today’s the day we’re going to win. Fight! Fight! Fight!” As the coach yells, a young Rudy Ruettiger yells along, having memorized the words—the first sign of his intense relationship with Notre Dame football.
When Angelo Pizzo was around ten, someone gave him a record containing this Rockne speech. Pizzo memorized the words, just like Rudy. Pizzo recalls that when he was growing up in Indiana in the 1950s, Rockne, who died in a 1931 plane crash, was still revered. “The Knute Rockne speech—it became part of our media culture and our sports culture,” he says.
Angelo Pizzo is the screenwriter behind Rudy, as well as Hoosiers and some other sports movies. When he wrote the scene in which a young Rudy memorizes Rockne’s words, he was really describing himself. And over the last thirty years, Pizzo’s work has shaped the popular understanding of what coaches should say in those critical pregame moments.
“At this point I’ve written so many scenes of locker-room speeches,” Pizzo says wearily, admitting that he finds it hard to come up with new lines for coaches to say before the game. Pizzo, sixty-one, is sitting in his expansive study, which contains a massive triangular desk constructed from the hardwood floor taken from the University of Indiana basketball arena, which is a few miles north of his home in Bloomington, Indiana. “I don’t want to repeat myself, and there are only so many moves you can make in a locker room.”
The idea that a coach’s pregame speech can have an outsized effect on the players’ performance didn’t originate with Rockne. Biographer Ray Robinson notes that the early twentieth century, baseball managers John McGraw and Connie Mack each viewed the pregame speech as a powerful tool. Nor did the skill come naturally: As a young man, Rockne stammered badly, and it was only after diligent work with an elocution coach that he developed a level of comfort speaking in front of his players.
Once he did, however, he became known as a master of the form. Often his pregame speeches relied on theatrical tactics. Sometimes, Robinson writes, Rockne would break down in tears; in at least one instance, in a stadium with thin walls, Rockne remained silent and urged his players to eavesdrop on the opposing coach’s pep talk, which denigrated the Irish and served to fire them up.
Rockne is best remembered for his 1928 speech in a game against Army. Down 6-0 at halftime, Rockne told his players about the deathbed scene, eight years earlier, when Irish football standout George Gipp succumbed to pneumonia. “I’ve got to go, Rock,” Rockne recalled Gipp telling him. “It’s all right. I’m not afraid. Sometimes when things are going wrong, when the breaks are beating the boys, tell them to go out and win one for the Gipper. I don’t know where I’ll be then, Rock, but I’ll know about it, and I’ll be happy.”
The Irish rallied to win the game, 12-6, and the “Win one for the Gipper” speech became celebrated by journalists and filmmakers. (Ronald Reagan played Gipp in the 1940 film Knute Rockne, All American.) But the veracity of the tale has long been debated. It’s not clear Rockne was present during Gipp’s final hours, and during his life Gipp was never been known as “the Gipper.” Others question the timing. “The fact that Rockne never revealed a syllable of this remarkable valedictory until eight years later . . . must cast some doubt about its authenticity,” writes Robinson.
Nonetheless, the legend of Rockne’s pregame oratory turned the task of delivering inspirational pep talks into a job requirement for coaches.
As a filmmaker, Angelo Pizzo’s work would build on it. After attending the film school at the University of Southern California, in 1976 he took a studio job. “I made my oats going into a script, taking copious notes, breaking it down, analyzing it, and observing all the details to make it better,” he says. “I read probably a thousand screenplays before I wrote one.”
When he did, at age thirty-one, he depicted a small-town Indiana basketball team’s unlikely run to the state championship. The project bounced around Hollywood; eventually, Gene Hackman signed on and a studio green-lit the film; Dennis Hopper and Barbara Hershey came aboard in supporting roles. David Anspaugh, Pizzo’s fraternity brother, directed and Pizzo produced. They filmed Hoosiers over forty days in sleepy Indiana towns. As Gayle L. Johnson recounts in The Making of Hoosiers, they hired mostly nonactors to play the basketball players because they didn’t think they could teach actors to dribble and shoot. The film was nominated for two Academy Awards, but Pizzo blew off the Oscars to watch Indiana play for the NCAA basketball championship on television.
More than three decades later, the film enjoys an astonishing afterlife. When I ask leaders about pep talks, people in all walks of life—not just sports coaches, but military officers and C-suite executives—cite Hoosiers as a seminal influence. Bill Campbell told me he rewatched the film at least once a year.
But when you watch closely and analyze the locker-room speeches in Hoosiers, you’ll start to see that they’re all not about motivation, rah-rah, and energy.
In the movie, Hackman’s character, Coach Norman Dale, gives three distinct pregame speeches, and each is unique.
The first, twenty-five minutes into the film, takes place in a dingy basement locker room before the team’s first game. It focuses entirely on strategy: Pass the ball four times before every shot, Hackman nervously tells the team before the chaplain leads them in prayer. He says nothing that’s aimed at firing them up.
The second takes place during the semifinals of the state championship tournament. Instead of firing the team up, it urges them to put aside the emotions they may be feeling and to remember the basic basketball strategies that brought them this far. “Forget about the crowd, the size of the school, their fancy uniforms, and remember what got you here,” Dale says. “Focus on the fundamentals we’ve gone over time and time again. And most important, don’t get caught up in thinking about winning or losing this game. If you put your effort and concentration into playing to your potential, to being the best you can be, I don’t care what the scoreboard says at the end of the game. We’re going to be winners. Okay?”
This speech echoes research by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, who’s found that focusing on inputs (such as effort) instead of outputs (such as winning or losing) puts people into a “growth mindset” that helps them perform better and improve over time.
Coach Dale’s third speech takes place on the bench with nineteen seconds remaining in the championship game. The coach outlines a play in which star player Jimmy Chitwood is used as a decoy, and another player takes the final shot. The players silently protest, so the Coach relents, instructing Jimmy to shoot the game winner. The message is clear: The coach is no longer in charge because the team has earned the ability to motivate and manage itself.
Sitting in his study, Pizzo describes the sequence of Hoosiers pep talks this way: “It’s a classic Aristotelian three-act structure. Shakespeare used it. There’s a protagonist, at a critical point in the last act, who sees something he was blind to. ‘I once was blind but now I see.’ . . . I was looking for a place where Dale could let go and not be controlling. That came in that final scene. He realized they’re a team.”
Viewers may come aw
ay from the pep talks in Hoosiers feeling energized. Indeed, Michael Phelps watched the movie the evening before his Olympics competitions. But listen closely. They’re not just about winning one for the Gipper. Yes, they appeal to the player’s emotions, but they also focus on the game plan and the specifics of precisely what the team needs to do to win the game.
Maybe Coach Bill Campbell was only half right. Speaking from the heart is great, but conveying actual information and strategy is important, too.
4.
Centuries before the invention of basketball, and long before millennials toiled to sell online advertising to pizza parlors, leaders gave pep talks to soldiers in the moments before battle.
In 1991, Keith Yellin was a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin who was working on a dissertation about “battle exhortation”—his phrase for precombat pep talks. Like all writers, Yellin was procrastinating. But in the annals of procrastination, few have gone so far as Yellin.
While he was doing his research, the first Gulf War broke out. Yellin began watching CNN’s coverage of the war. He began to think his dissertation would benefit from some firsthand experience. He also felt stirrings of patriotism. So he put his dissertation on hold and enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps.
By the time Yellin completed Officer Candidates School, the Gulf War was long over. Yellin eventually attained the rank of captain, but he didn’t see many pep talks during his service. “There’s a striking difference between the way you hear about battle exhortation being delivered in histories and what actually happens on the modern battlefield,” he says. “Ancient battles, right up to the American Revolution, were often very formal, so two armies would draw up in a line, within eyeshot of one another, providing a perfect opportunity for the senior commander to turn to the troops just before the commencement of hostilities and say ‘Okay, this is it, boys.’ You might have five minutes or even fifty minutes to get your troops pumped up. But as warfare has evolved, it’s become huge, it’s become sneaky, and it’s become very fast. . . . In my experience in the Marines, the only battle exhortation you’d get was some memo published by the commanding general after hostilities had started.”
After Yellin’s discharge, he completed his dissertation, called Battle Exhortation: The Rhetoric of Combat Leadership. In it, he analyzed precombat speeches by the ancient Greeks and Romans and in Shakespeare’s plays. He points to Henry V’s “Once more unto the breach” oratory, which is, along with George Patton’s speeches to the Third Army before D-Day, considered the finest example of the genre.
He writes that changes in the speed and formality of battle are just one reason precombat pep talks seem to be on the decline. Another important factor: Today’s armies are professionalized, made up mostly of career soldiers who voluntarily enlisted. That’s in contrast with World War II, which was fought largely by very young “citizen-soldiers,” some of whom were drafted. In general, younger, less experienced people need more extrinsic (or outside) motivation (and can benefit more from a rah-rah pep talk, at least at first), while self-selected people who’ve experienced combat repeatedly are thought to be more intrinsically or self-motivated. They need less energizing and more information.
Perhaps the most useful piece of Yellin’s research is a chart in which he lists twenty-three “Common topics” that commanders use in the prebattle speeches he studied. Some of them are very focused on warfare and not particularly useful to someone trying to rev up a sales force. (Themes like “Death is glorious” and “Defend your country” probably won’t help motivate your sales team.) But some are useful to a leader giving a pep talk in any context. The “Unit is ready” talks about how prepared the team is for the fight. “Reputation” focuses on how one’s behavior will affect one’s future standing. “Reward” highlights the spoils and commendations of victory. “Force comparison” allows the leader to elucidate his team’s strengths versus the other team’s weaknesses.
Twenty-three variables is a lot to keep track of, so it’s not surprising that an on-the-ground commander may find a simpler formula.
Stanley McChrystal is a thirty-eight-year Army veteran and retired four-star general. He ran the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command from 2003 until 2008, and later commanded all forces in Afghanistan. (He retired in 2010, following intemperate comments about Obama administration officials published in a Rolling Stone article.) While leading JSOC, McChrystal commanded SEALs, Rangers, and Delta Force operators during some of the fiercest periods of fighting in the war on terror, giving him tons of experience in rallying troops facing a dangerous situation.
But when it comes to pep talks, his view echoes Yellin’s. Modern warfare has rendered the purely emotional pep talk far less important than in the past.
“If you went out with Delta Force or the Rangers or the SEALS in this last war, we were fighting every night,” McChrystal told me. “Sometimes, as the intelligence matured, they might do three raids a night, one after another. It was a different environment. It wasn’t a case of getting yourself up for the big game, like it was the Super Bowl, because you’re playing every night. This stuff is happening so fast, they’re all business. There wasn’t much room for that sort of psyching up. It was assumed that level of motivation was there.”
That last sentence is worth repeating: It was assumed that level of motivation was there. That’s why most Special Forces precombat discussion is strategic, focusing on the plan for the mission.
McChrystal offers some caveats. Earlier in his career, while leading a younger group of greener soldiers, he would sometimes offer final words that focused more on emotion and motivation instead of strategy. “The last thirty minutes or so, it’s more about building the confidence and the commitment to each other,” he says. But for the most part, instead of talking from his heart about winning one for the Gipper, McChrystal’s pep talks focused more on the specifics of the task at hand, what a football coach would call the Xs and Os, or a CEO would call the company’s strategy.
When McChrystal gives these talks, he tends to follow a simple, easy to replicate five-part formula: Here’s what I’m asking you to do. Here’s why it’s important. Here’s why I know you can do it. Think about what you’ve done together before. Now let’s go and do it.
There’s motivation in that formula, but the emphasis is on the first part, what exactly the soldiers should do.
For evidence that this strategy-focused methodology has become the dominant approach to military pep talks, it’s worth examining the oratory just prior to one of the most celebrated American military missions of the last fifty years: Operation Neptune Spear, in which twenty-three Navy SEALs flew into Pakistan and killed Osama bin Laden.
There’s some lack of agreement over exactly what the military leaders said in the moments before the 2011 operation. In his Esquire profile of the Navy SEAL who shot bin Laden, journalist Phil Bronstein reported that just prior to the mission, Admiral William McRaven, who succeeded McChrystal as head of the Joint Special Operations Command, gave “an awesome speech” in which he referenced Hoosiers. But other accounts dispute this. In No Easy Day, a former SEAL writing under the pseudonym Mark Owen reported that McRaven’s final talk was entirely strategic and unmemorable. “Nothing he said stuck with me, as my mind focused on what was about to happen,” Owen writes.
To sort this out, I requested interviews with McRaven, Bronstein, and Owen; each declined or didn’t respond. However, an officer present at the final mission briefing in Afghanistan offered clarification: It turns out both stories are true. Most of the premission briefing was focused on the strategic game plan, but McRaven did refer to Hoosiers during the talk.
“He referenced the scene in which Gene Hackman brings the players into the large arena [for the state championship game],” the officer said. According to this account, McRaven recalled how Coach Dale had one of the players measure the distance from the foul line to the basket (“fifteen feet”)
, and the height of the rim from the floor (“ten feet”), demonstrating that the arena’s court is the same as their home gym’s. “He went on to tell the team this mission was no different than any other mission they had done before, and that we would treat it just like another game,” this source said. It wasn’t a particularly emotional speech, and if anything, it urged the SEAL operators to tamp down their emotions and maintain their usual businesslike demeanor.
That approach seemed to work. During the ninety-minute helicopter flight to bin Laden’s compound, most of the SEAL operators were so relaxed that they fell asleep.
5.
The SEALs aren’t the only ones who tend to avoid the classic emotional pep talk. Many of the most celebrated modern sports coaches believe locker-room speeches are a cinematic contrivance, not a real-world tool.
Here’s how writer David Halberstam describes New England Patriots’ coach Bill Belichick, who rarely gives fiery locker-room speeches: “He was driven by his brain power and by his fascination with the challenge that professional football represented to the mind of the coach . . . He was much less skilled than [his mentor, Bill] Parcells at reaching his players emotionally and thereby challenging them to do more. This never came naturally to him; it was not who he was. In addition, he thought it was the wrong way to go, that it was too short-range, and that in the end you could only go to that emotional well so often, and then it went dry.”
Here’s how eleven-time NBA champion Phil Jackson describes what he learned while playing with the New York Knicks in the 1970s: “At that time most coaches subscribed to the Knute Rockne theory of mental training. They tried to get their players revved up for the game with win-one-for-the-Gipper-style pep talks. That approach may work if you’re a linebacker. But what I discovered playing for the Knicks is that when I got too excited mentally, it had a negative effect on my ability to stay focused under pressure. So [as a coach] I did the opposite. Instead of charging players up, I’ve developed a number of strategies to help them quiet their minds and go into battle poised and in control.”
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