While talking with Latham, I mention that a few years ago, while working as a magazine writer, I’d had a private office with a lot of blank walls. One day I’d thumbtacked up the cover of an issue for which I’d written the cover story. A few days later, our thoughtful office manager put it in a cheap frame, and the next time I wrote a cover story, she framed it and hung it up, too. Over the next few years the wall came to contain images of the dozen or so cover stories I’d written. While I didn’t really notice them, they probably helped me feel more confident; as I struggled to write a new story, I could glance up at all the successful articles I’d written in the past. Subconsciously, those images probably prodded my mind to say: “I think I can.” I told Latham about the wall adornments, and how, when I’d left that old job and moved to a new office, I’d left them sitting in a box, never bothering to locate a hammer or rehang them.
“This research is still at the embryonic stage,” Latham cautions. “But I’d encourage you to hang them up.”
Chapter Six
HARNESSING ANGER AND RIVALRY
CAN FOCUSING ON COMPETITORS MAKE US STRONGER?
It sounds like a scene from Friday Night Lights. It actually took place on a Thursday afternoon in 1988, in a high school gymnasium in northwest New Jersey.
At a podium near center court, the four cocaptains of the Warren Hills Regional High School football team took turns talking into a microphone, as eight hundred students listen politely from the bleachers. The following evening, these players would represent Warren Hills in the annual matchup against its archrival, the Hackettstown Tigers. So this afternoon, students were excused from classes for a pep rally. The marching band played. Cheerleaders did handsprings. And the team’s captains talked about the importance of the game.
Hackettstown and Warren Hills are located nine miles apart and have been playing each other since the 1930s, but this year was special. The Warren Hills team, on which I was a benchwarmer offensive lineman, was going into the game undefeated, at 6-0. Beating Hackettstown would give Warren Hill good odds of achieving an undefeated regular season and making the state playoffs. But even without that context, this is a rivalry that always mattered. “You could have a season where you lost every other game, but if you beat Hackettstown, you could still be happy,” Andy Bordick, the team’s center, recalled years later.
In the middle of the captains’ pep talk, one of the gym doors opened loudly, interrupting the rally. A middle-aged man carrying a large white box walked straight to the center of the gymnasium, stopping in front of the principal. The football captains stopped speaking and watched, perplexed. Warren Hills is located in a town of only six thousand people, so many of the students recognized the man: He owned the local flower shop and had a son on the football team. The florist and the principal had a whispered conversation. The principal opened an envelope attached to the box, and then they motioned over the head football coach. The coach looked at the card and scowled. Then he carried the box to the podium.
“Boys, we have a special delivery,” the coach said into the microphone, handing the box to his captains. One of them read the card aloud into the microphone:
To the Warren Hills Football Team
Please accept our condolences on your upcoming loss.
We can’t wait to see you on Friday night.
Sincerely, the Hackettstown Tigers
Inside the box was a large bundle of carnations—blue and white, the Warren Hills team colors. Several weeks ago, these flowers were fresh and beautiful. By the time they were opened in the school gymnasium, however, they were rotting and putrid.
As the bleachers erupted in cries of dismay, one of the players threw a handful of carnations on the gym floor and began stomping them, like one of those cheesy, scripted scenes from a professional wrestling match. The coach grabbed the microphone and urged calm. The cheerleaders began a new cheer. And in the hours leading up to game time, the players seethed.
On the bus ride to the Friday night game, the players’ anger was palpable. One lineman brought the dead carnations onto the bus, and then placed them on the field during warm-ups. Years later, the players recalled how the dead flower insult increased the level of hostility we felt, even for an opponent we already hated. And in this case, that emotion seemed to be productive: Led by our quarterback’s strong arm and our stingy defense, Warren Hills won the game, 21-6, and went on to have their most successful season in years.
The dead flower delivery was one of those high school stories we remembered vividly. It was only years later, as we grew older, that we realized the Hackettstown team hadn’t sent us the flowers. In fact, our own coaches had orchestrated the delivery. This epic act of disrespect was actually a self-inflicted psychological ploy. Our coaches wanted to make us angry, because everyone knows you perform better when you’re filled with fury and resentment.
Right?
2.
During the 2016 Summer Olympics, the swimmer Michael Phelps was photographed moments before a race scowling intently at a South African opponent. Wearing headphones and a hood, Phelps’s face is pointed down in the photo. His eyebrows jut out over his eyes. His lips are jammed together so tightly that they create a series of frowny dimples. Some commentators said the visage reminded them of a dog who’s about to attack. The expression became known as #Phelpsface, and it quickly went viral. After the Olympics ended, the late-night host Jimmy Fallon invited Phelps on his show to teach him how he makes the expression.
Compare Phelps’s pre-performance anger with that of Bob Cousy, the legendary Celtics guard. While preparing for the final game of the 1963 NBA championship, Bob Cousy spent thirty-six hours alone in a Los Angeles hotel room. He ordered all his meals from room service. He didn’t answer the telephone. This would be the final game of Cousy’s career, and he spent most of these solitary hours meditating on his hatred for Frank Selvy, the Laker guard he’d be covering in the game.
“If [Selvy] had walked into that room I might have leaped at his throat and tried to strangle him,” Cousy recalled in his memoir. “If anyone had tried to touch me or even talked to me, I might have killed him, too.” For Cousy, preparing for an important game meant orchestrating a feeling of controlled rage for his opponent, a skill he recalls as “my most important asset as a competitor.” Cousy called it his “killer instinct.” Even in regular season games that weren’t particularly high stakes, Cousy would get angry before the games, and then hope an opposing player did something during the game—such as a dirty foul—to make him irate. “I played better when I was angry,” he wrote. For Cousy, fomenting that anger was a key part of getting psyched up.
Is there actual science to show that people perform better when angry? In fact, there’s very little, and the results aren’t very conclusive. The evidence suggests it depends on the person and the sport. “‘Old school’ or traditional approaches to coaching have often relied on the belief that getting athletes angry will enhance arousal, energy and motivation,” writes Paul A. Davis, one of the leading researchers into how anger affects athletes. Newer coaching strategies recognize it’s important for players to be able to stay in control of their emotions, lest they suffer penalties or ejections due to an angry outburst. Experimental research suggests getting angry prior to powerlifting or playing other explosive sports (such as football or boxing) can increase one’s strength and performance, but anger is likely to be detrimental in sports requiring fine motor skills, such as golf.
Outside of sports, the evidence is mixed, as well. Consider the practice of negotiation. Some people believe anger makes one seem more powerful or can scare an opponent, and therefore negotiating while angry will result in better outcomes. But research by Keith Allred, a former professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, shows that anger often harms a negotiation by “escalating conflict, biasing perceptions, and making impasses more difficult,” along with decreasing cooperation and raising the
rate at which offers are rejected, according to an article in Harvard Business Review. The article concludes: “Bringing anger to a negotiation is like throwing a bomb into the process.”
But simply thinking about “being angry” is too simple a construction. Psychologists think of emotions as manifesting in two ways: We can experience them, and we can express them. Experiencing an emotion is feeling it; no one else need know about it. When Bob Cousy is storming around his hotel room alone, he’s feeling angry, but since no one else sees his behavior, he’s not really expressing it. Expressing anger means making others aware of it, through words, facial expressions, or other actions. When Michael Phelps makes the #Phelpsface directly at an opponent, he’s very clearly expressing anger, whether or not he’s actually feeling it himself.
There’s a third and related, but slightly different, set of feelings that performers can harness, too. Even before the Warren Hills football team opened up the rotting flowers, we were focused on a specific opponent. The players didn’t start out angry—that came after the putrid flowers arrived—but we were thinking about our upcoming performance in a very specific context. We weren’t just focused on “doing our best” in isolation, the way we might if we were running a race alone for time. By focusing on an opponent, we were framing our performance as a rivalry.
That, it turns out, is another force that can affect the way we perform.
3.
Whether or not feeling anger can boost performance, there’s widespread belief that expressing anger at an opponent can throw him off his game. That’s why trash talk has become an integral part of modern sports culture. In sports like boxing, it’s an essential part of the way performers prepare before competing.
In the United States, professional basketball is the sport most associated with the practice. In one infamous 2013 incident, Kevin Garnett, a notorious smack-talker, baited opponent Carmelo Anthony by quietly telling him his wife “tastes like Honey Nut Cheerios,” leading Anthony to go berserk on the court. Though it goes by different names, trash talk is a global phenomenon. In cricket, they call it “sledging,” and the typical insults involve mocking a player’s cricket skills or, like Garnett, suggesting carnal knowledge of an opponent’s wife. “How’s your wife and my kids?” goes one familiar line.
Once, trash talk was limited to pregame and during-game, but social media has caused it to spread. Today athletes can trash-talk at each other 24/7 on Twitter.
The greatest trash-talker of all-time broadcast his rhythmic put-downs in a time before Twitter wars, however. In his memoir, Muhammad Ali describes how, very early in his career, he was booked onto a radio show with Gorgeous George, the flamboyant professional wrestler. When the radio host asked George about his upcoming fight, he replied. “I’ll kill him; I’ll tear his arms off. If this bum beats me, I’ll crawl across the ring and cut off my hair, but that’s not going to happen, because I’m the greatest wrestler in the world!” Ali went to the wrestling match that night and saw a packed house. George’s over-the-top rhetoric, Ali realized, drove fan interest and helped the bottom line. Ali recalled. “That’s when I really started shouting ‘I’m beautiful. I’m the greatest. I can’t be beat, I’m the fastest thing on two feet, and I float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.”
At times, Ali wasn’t just showboating for the fans. He was clearly trying to intimidate opponents. Before his first fight with Sonny Liston, in 1964, Ali made a careful plan to shout at and attempt to scuffle with Liston at the prefight weigh-in. “I rehearsed and planned every move,” Ali wrote later. “This is it, you big ugly bear,” Ali screamed at his rival as he stepped toward the medical scale. “You’ll be mine tomorrow night. . . . You’re not The Champ—you’re The Chump.” Ali lunges at Liston, ready to scuffle—a move he’d choreographed in advance with his handlers, who held him back. If you watch the clip even fifty years later, you’ll instantly recognize Liston’s expression. He looks scared.
The rhyming insults, the boasting, and the predictions about the round in which he’d knock out opponents continued, and they’re part of what made Ali such a charismatic figure. “He entertained as much with his mouth as with his fists, narrating his life with a patter of inventive doggerel,” wrote Robert Lipsyte in Ali’s 2016 obituary.
Few of us would have the ability to denigrate opponents as cleverly as Ali. But it’s worth asking: If we choose to give it a shot, will it help us perform better, or intimidate opponents into performing worse?
Ben Conmy grew up in England, where his father was a professional soccer player. The younger Conmy played soccer, too, and as the level of competition increased in his late teens, so did the level of trash talk. “The higher I went, the talk became much more pointed, more focused, vicious, and cruel—psychotic stuff, really, coming from sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen-year-old kids,” he says. Conmy had a tendency to respond verbally to trash talk, and sometimes it would make him play worse. His father routinely chided him to cut it out. “Completely ignore them. All it’s going to do is detract from you playing well,” his dad would say. Conmy couldn’t help himself. “To me, trash talk almost became a game within the game, and I was always fascinated with it.”
By the early 2000s, Conmy was pursuing a doctorate in sports psychology at Florida State University, and he wanted to focus his studies on trash talk. His academic advisers were against it. There was hardly any academic literature on the practice. “We don’t know how you’ll do a literature review, and how are you going to study this?” they said. Conmy was resolute. “To me, trash talk is just a fundamental part of sports, and it can impact a win or a loss,” he says, insisting it was worthy of study.
To placate him, his advisers allowed him to convene four small focus groups—two sets of eight female athletes and two sets of eight males—as a pilot study, to try to determine if this was important enough for a dissertation. In the focus groups, the athletes talked about their experiences giving and receiving trash talk. One athlete stood out. “There was this angelic-looking, lovely female lacrosse player,” Conmy recalls. She described how, before every game, she ran past the line of opposing players, screaming as loudly as possible: “I’m going to shove this stick up your ass.” “She’d yell things about their family,” Conmy says. “She wanted people to think she was completely psychotic before the game even began, and then she’d continue it throughout the competition.” Conmy had the focus groups transcribed, and showed the results to his professors. “They couldn’t believe the things she said,” he recalls. “They said ‘Okay, go ahead and research this.’”
In the resulting thesis, Conmy argues that trash talk is as old as the Bible. When David boasted to Goliath before their fight that “I will strike you down and cut off your head,” he was talking smack. Conmy defines the practice as “the deliberate act of verbal communication aimed at gaining a tangible advantage (psychological or physical) over an opponent,” and describes a conceptual framework in which trash talk affects performance by disrupting a rival player’s cognitive and affective states, interfering with perceived self-efficacy and perceived performance.
Conmy then surveyed 274 college athletes about their experiences with trash talk. The numbers demonstrated widely held belief in its effectiveness. Nearly 90 percent believe it directly affected an athlete’s performance, and three quarters said it could affect athletes’ belief in themselves. More than three quarters also said that trash talk “always” or “almost always” was evident in their sports, which ranged from basketball and football to track and swimming.
The data suggests that athletes see some opponents as especially susceptible to trash talk, while more confident and focused athletes remain relatively unaffected. All else equal, witty and clever trash talk is more effective, as is talk that’s repeated frequently. Although the athletes generally believed in the effectiveness of trash talk, they also believe it can backfire: More than 80 percent recalled an instance when trash talk directe
d at them inspired them to perform better.
For his dissertation, Conmy followed up the survey work with a controlled experiment in which forty men played a Madden NFL video game, in which some were allowed to trash-talk while some stayed silent. Those results showed most players prefer to trash-talk because they find it motivational, and although players didn’t actually perform better while trash-talking they did show increases in self-efficacy and positive affect.
Conmy’s work jibes with what little other academic work exists on the subject. For instance, a 2010 study by David W. Rainey and Vincent Granito of 414 college athletes found that males trash-talk more than females, that Division I athletes do it more than Division III athletes, and that the goals are the same: to motivate themselves and to destabilize opponents. Some of Rainey’s results are surprising. Respondents said they first used trash talk, on average, at age eleven. Ten percent said that trash talk often denigrates a rival’s family, and 7 percent admitted to using racial insults. Among female athletes, trash talk often focuses on appearance, with two insults predominating: “You’re fat” and “You’re ugly.”
After Conmy finished his dissertation, he left academics; he now works with athletes as a sports psychologist. Trash talk often comes up in his work as a challenge facing his clients. But he says that as he’s grown older, he’s become aware of how much the practice transcends sports. Some of the most ardent trash-talkers he knows are friends who work in banking in London. “They seek out the pub of rival hedge fund guys, and they go in there specifically to talk shit at the top of their voices about how well their portfolios are doing,” he says. He points to the character of Ari Gold on HBO’s Entourage series as another businessperson who’s constantly putting down others as a way to enhance his own performance.
Psyched Up Page 13
