Wayne Gretzky and the Mysteries of Athletic Greatness | Hacker News Reader

Wayne Gretzky and the Mysteries of Athletic Greatness

newyorker.com

34 pointsgringoDan47 comments

Although there are many in my circle of friends that are apathetic to sports, I can't help but be drawn into the idea of "superhuman" feats and statistical outliers that always seem to permeate major sports.

We live in an era where being a 40 year old quarterback is not only possible but can play at top 1%. An era where an NBA player who entered after highschool has played for more than 15 years and has not had a major injury despite playing nonstop and has single highhandedly put a no name basketball team on the map. An era where not one but two of the greatest soccer players have played and peaked at the same time.

And all this is happening as teams hire more Post Docs in Stats and Math to find the secret sauce that makes teams great or find ways to break the game in their favor.

If you like Wayne Gretzky I suggest you look up interviews regarding the work ethic and impressive mental skills of other top players like Kobe Bryant and Cristiano Ronaldo, these guys are geniuses in their field but are absolute work horses with incredible discipline.

I like to play sports (participate). I dont care to watch them - unless its my kids. For me, I think of great sports people like other top tier predators on the planet. Sure, they can be exciting to watch, but its just entertainment no? Do I (or we as humans) stand to learn something important from them?

I think there's something that can be learned from witnessing excellence in any area - writing, coding, music, sports...seeing the processes, discipline, out-of-the-box thinking, teamwork, etc. that lead to a great outcome can transfer over into other fields. Yes, sports are mainly for entertainment (and a series of never-ending cliches) but are also a microcosm of life.

That being said, I agree that you'll learn much more from reading books, taking a course, etc. than sitting down and watching sports for the equivalent amount of time.

I coach soccer for my kids. The primary obstacle to players development is that they've never watched a game therefore you have to teach them everything.

>you learn more about sports from reading than watching

I'm not sure that's true, game tapes - if strategically cut together - can be very effective in teaching strategy and individual techniques for sports. Video games can also be very effective in this regard. This works because it activates mirror neurons when you imagine you're doing the thing you're watching.

To clarify, I meant you'd learn more (in a general sense) from activities other than watching sports.

If you're looking to build expertise in a given sport, I agree that watching it is probably one of the best ways to do so.

Didn’t bliblah’s last paragraph address this? Also, so what if it is just entertainment. It’s still fascinating to some people how much of an outlier among outliers these people are.

I did mixed martial arts for 10 years and sparred with someone who eventually went on to be a semi finalist on The Ultimate Fighter. He easily destroyed me and he couldn’t make it in the UFC. How much more of an outlier is Khabib or Mcgregor? I did Ph.D. studies in mathematics at a group 1 reasearch imstituion. Went to a talk by a graduate student from Berkeley in the same area as me and in school for the same length of time as me. It was clear I would never know as much as him or be as good as him. I quit my Ph.D. program shortly afterwards. I knew I wasn’t good enough to do worthwhile research in math. Outliers among outliers.

Athletes are performing difficult, demanding physical and mental tasks, in a team environment, and without a "safety net". Programmers are not performers, and we have a huge set of safety nets, but we can still learn focus, how to stay cool under pressure, and how to reach 'flow' from athletes. Exercises like Yoga and Tai Chi stress the mind body connection more explicitly than the NFL, but it's there in every sport.

Their exercise, nutrition, recovery, and rehabilitation regimes are valuable information for the rest of us. Michael Phelps' affinity for fast food aside, professional athletes tend to adopt newer technologies and fitness modalities years befoe they become mainstream.

This is a good point. When I grew up in Chicago during the Bulls dynasty era, Michael Jordan’s trainer Tim Grover wrote a book on explosiveness training mainly through body weight type exercises and flexibility versus heavy weights, now which is finally in vogue 20 years later. Meanwhile, Phil Jackson was very into mediation, which was adopted years later by Google with mindfulness training, and now mindfulness studios are popping up everywhere. Today, information is more accessible, but it’s still probably better to learn what Federer or Lebron does versus what your local trainer is recommending.

Well, games and play have been a part of the human condition for thousands of years. It's not rational, but its definitely human.

Instead of thinking "what can I get?" just revel in the players own sense of joy and mastery.

Jaromir Jagr is 46 and still playing professional hockey (not in the NHL anymore though). He was famous for staying at the practice rink until everyone else left.

How much of that is luck/genetics? As a Mets fan, David Wright is an easy counter example of someone who was known to work hard and then struggled with injuries.

Speaking of Ronaldo, if anyone hasn't seen this documentary, they definitely should. It show's his insane athleticism and reflexes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWR_ku1AAtM

And yet there's Messi https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/lionel-messi-is-impossi...

Ronaldo is peak human, Messi is supernatural.

I really liked this Messi article:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/messi-walks-better-than...

To me, it really exemplifies that often it is better to slowly move into the right area, and save your resources for when it’s optimal to move quickly with a burst. I think a good analogy to this is when Warren Buffett talks about investing, he often talks about waiting for the right pitch. Often, the preparation might seem like no action or result in to action to the outside world, but enable you to be ready when the right situation arises.

That only works if you are Messi. If entire tea starts to take that approach, you are gonna have big problems.

Add men's tennis to that list. As we speak it's being dominated by three players who are over 30 (Djokovic 31, Nadal 32, Federer 37!!!). We are not saying they are still competitive but rather they are absolutely crushing everybody else including the youngin's. Even more phenomenal is that all three of them are candidates for THE GREATEST male athlete who has ever graced tennis fields.

This was simply unimaginable even a couple years back when for decades ATP tennis had been considered a 20-something year olds' game.

Ah you are absolutely right! I recently read this article and it blew my mind to imagine that there are is such a concentration of talent in the older players.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/there-are-officially-ze...

Who are the two soccer players?

Messi and (Cristiano) Ronaldo

> I can't help but be drawn into the idea of "superhuman" feats and statistical outliers that always seem to permeate major sports.

Because sports is just as much entertainment as it is sports. These leagues need someone to be the face of their product in order to draw crowds and make money.

Jordan and the bulls were such a product of the 90s to save the NBA from the end of the lakers-celtics dominated 80s.

Gretkzy, like montana, was part of a super team through with the NHL and NFL built their brands and generated interest in the 80s.

Brady and a bunch of QBs were beneficiaries of the NFL's move toward more passing and increased scoring to generate interest. The NFL found out that most fans love passing and scoring while the few purists loved defense and the running game. So they changed the rules to handicap defenses, especially against the pass. Now every year, we get superhuman passing records being set.

Look at the curry, durant and the golden state warriors today. Beneficiaries of NBA's move to handicap defenses and allow more scoring - which is what NBA fans, especially fans overseas ( particularly china ) like.

The days of the dominant center in the NBA or the running back in NFL is over, until the climate shifts and the they need to rebrand the product.

All these "superhuman" statistics are a result of "sports" + "entertainment". It's partly earned through athletic prowess and it's also manufactured by rules changes, refs "managing" the game, etc.

Was gretzky that much better than messier ( his teammate ) or lemieux as the stats seem to imply? Absolutely not.

Was jordan that much better than pippen ( his teammate ) or dominique wilkins as the stats seem to imply? Absolutely not.

But someone has to be the face of the product the leagues are selling. And the NHL before gretzky and the NBA before jordan was facing problems which was magically solved by gretzky and jordan.

This is a fascinating and insightful analysis.

What NFL rule changes handicapped defenses, just curious?

There are a bunch of rules - mostly protecting QBs from high and low hits and protecting receivers from contact and vicious hits.

http://www.realclearlife.com/sports/nfl-rule-changes-created...

https://www.foxsports.com/nfl/story/cam-newton-tom-brady-sho...

One of the things that doesn't get talk about enough or at all in these kinds of conversations is the support system that gets built around these "greats".

For example if a team believes they have an amazing talent they're much more likely to spend money to surround them with other great/good talent on and off the ice/field/court.

The "tanking" strategy being employed by a lot of teams the past decade or so is more evolved version of this. Teams will basically lose on purpose to stock up on high valued draft picks for years then pay for high end coaches and veterans of the sport once they believe they have enough talent.

I believe this can also be applied outside of sports like education with private tutors, etc.

"Tanking" is a strategy that is talked about ad nauseam by sports radio gas bags, but is not likely to be an actual tactic being employed by organizations.

What makes you think that? The NBA team 76ers for example would severely limit the number of minutes their high value draft picks played during the "rebuilding/tanking" seasons. The team even has a meme about it.

https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/trust-the-process/

Tanking is a big enough issue in sports that a few months ago, the commissioner of the NBA sent a memo promising to severely punish any team that deliberately loses. He wrote that memo shortly after fining Mark Cuban $500,000 for telling his team that losing was their best option.

The Colts did it:

https://www.sun-sentinel.com/sports/miami-dolphins/fl-omar-k...

Tanking is just a new word for rebuilding. Trading proven talent for young prospects, which in turn means a few years of development and losing, which leads to accumulating more young talent via the draft. The 76ers were just more blatant (and their young prospects kept getting injured).

LeBron James has a similar ability to recall plays, http://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/11067098/lebron-james-gre...

No doubt Gretzky was great, but part of his greatness was the way hockey was played at the time - his greatness was as much a product of the rules as it was his passion for hockey.

He was a hockey “hacker”, he exploited (intentionally or not) all sorts of rules that forced the NHL to update them. Today’s game seems to be fairly well guarded against this, though it does still happen (they had to rule against the 1-3-1 defense recently, for example). And teams are now very well aware of superstar players and will shut them down very quickly (eg. Sydney Crosby basically getting beat up any time his skates touch the rink).

It’s a better game now, but a shame that we probably won’t see hockey superstars for a while.

Watching McDavid or Crosby on the ice, live, makes it very clear that they are still absolutely in a class of their own. I think these types of players are so good that they change quicker than the game can adapt. Crosby had some trouble in his earlier years, but not anymore.

Oh no doubt! They are good, and fun to watch. But in Gretzky’s best season, he scored 212 points. The closest anyone has gotten recently has been Ovechkin at 112. The game has changed, you couldn’t get a Gretzky again.

Fair enough, that does make sense. It's hard to understand how much the game has changed until you watch an older game from the 80's, it's a different flow entirely.

On an unrelated note, I am lucky to have some very cherished memories of sneaking down after bedtime and being welcomed onto my father's lap to watch Wayne Gretzky and the Oilers play. Sports can have a bad rap in tech communities, but I'll never forget the feeling of excitement (and warmth) watching those games in the dark.

215 (163 assists alone). 4 seasons over 200. Check out the insanity: https://www.quanthockey.com/nhl/records/most-points-in-one-s...

(Unless you mean 212 season was best due to 92 (lol) goals)

Rule changes to level the playing field because either someone found an exploit or just got too good is moderately common across multiple sports.

1) In basketball they have widened the lane twice because of talented big men[1] 2) They also made goal tending illegal because of talented big men[1] 3) For a short period of time dunking was illegal in the NCAA[1] 4) Bob Gibson was so good at pitching that they lowered the mound 5) David Berkoff was so good a swimming underwater that Fina made swimmers come up at 15 meters (he would do 40 sometimes)

[1] https://www.school-for-champions.com/sports/basketball_playe...

A very recent example is how the NBA changed how shooting fouls work to directly combat a technique that James Harden mastered/exploited to get fouled while shooting to the point that he (the individual) had more three point three throws than any other team in the league.

[1]https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/james-harden-gets-foule...

[2] https://sports.vice.com/en_us/article/59wyb8/the-harden-rule...

The Mundanity of Excellence: An Ethnographic Report on Stratification and Olympic Swimmers came up yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442600 . It has interesting things to say about greatness. I wonder if what separates the very best of the best (e.g. Gretzky) from the best (professional Hockey Players) is analogous to what separates the best from everyone else. Or if it's just a matter of degree, not qualitatively different.

Similar edge case in cricket is Bradman. Most great cricket batsmen Test batting average is around 50-60 and Bradman's average is 99.94

http://stats.espncricinfo.com/wi/content/records/282910.html

When I was a kid growing up in Australia, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) always described its mailing address in each state as "PO Box 9994 in your capital city".

Years later, I discovered this number was assigned in homage to Sir Donald Bradman's batting average.

Less well known is the ABC's national telephone number 13 9994.

Gretzky was also Robin Thicke's babysitter, though not so great at it

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.sportsnet.ca/hockey/nhl/supe...

Interesting coincidence, I just had lunch in the booth next to Wayne. He's a kind person.

Most impressive Gretzky stat may be Bernie Nicholls scoring 150 pts (70 goals) while on Gretzky's line.

Good point. Perhaps the only player the hockey gods were as kind to as Nicholls was Kevin Stevens when he broke the 100 point level twice in the early 90's while playing on a line with Mario Lemieux and Jaromír Jágr.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com