source: The New York Times Sports Magazine
How to grow a super-athlete - what is athletic talent? can it be taught, or are you born with it?
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Trying to wrap my head around the metamorphic process through which a too-slow kid could become . . . her, well, it left me utterly at a loss, able only to fumble for such useful scientific terms as "magic" and "miracle."
Fortunately, there are more rational people to consult, and perhaps the most rational is K. Anders Ericsson, who has devoted much of his life to studying phenomena like Dementieva and Spartak. Ericsson, a native of Sweden and a professor of psychology at Florida State University, is co-editor of "The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance," published in 2006. If talented people can be thought of as a singular species, then Ericsson is its John J. Audubon, and the handbook is his painstakingly annotated field guide.
The handbook runs to 901 pages, so, in the interest of time, allow me to sum up. Every talent, according to Ericsson, is the result of a single process: deliberate practice, which he defines as "individuals engaging in a practice activity (typically designed by teachers) with full concentration on improving some aspect of their performance." In a moment of towering simplification, "The Handbook" distills its lesson to a formula known as the Power Law of Learning: T = a P-b . (Don't ask.) A slightly more useful translation: Deliberate practice means working on technique, seeking constant critical feedback and focusing ruthlessly on improving weaknesses.
"It feels like you're constantly stretching yourself into an uncomfortable area beyond what you can quite do," Ericsson told me. It's hard to sustain deliberate practice for long periods of time, which may help explain why players like Jimmy Connors succeeded with seemingly paltry amounts of practice while their competitors were hitting thousands of balls each day. As the tennis commentator Mary Carillo told me, "He barely practiced an hour a day, but it was the most intense hour of your life."
Ericsson also discusses the Ten-Year Rule, an intriguing finding dating to 1899, which shows that even the most talented individual requires a decade of committed practice before reaching world-class level. (Even a prodigy like the chess player Bobby Fischer put in nine hard years before achieving his grandmaster status at age 16.) While this rule is often used to backdate the ideal start of training (in tennis, girls peak physically at around 17, so they ought to start by 7; boys peak later, so 9 is O.K.), the Ten-Year Rule has more universal implications. Namely, it implies that all skills are built using the same fundamental mechanism, and that the mechanism makes physiological demands from which no one is exempt.
This is not to suggest that the only difference between an average Joe and Michael Jordan is a few thousand hours of deliberate practice. Almost all of the scientists I spoke with agreed that inheritance is a huge factor in potential, if perhaps not in quite the way we've commonly assumed. (Perhaps, as George Bartzokis suggests, Jordan's greatest natural gift was his powerful oligodendrocytes.)
All in all, Ericsson's theory sounds logical and appealing, but part of me rises up in rebellion. What about geniuses? What about young Mozart's famous ability to transcribe entire scores on a single hearing? What about Shakespeare or Leonardo or those 14-year-old Ph.D. candidates? What about savants, who walk up to the piano or a Rubik's cube and are magically brilliant?
T = a P-b would be the reply. In his 1999 book, "Genius Explained," Michael Howe of the University of Exeter speculates that Mozart studied some 3,500 hours of music with his instructor father by his sixth birthday, a number that places his musical memory into the realm of impressive but obtainable party tricks. Savants, it is pointed out, excel within narrow domains that feature clear, logical rules (classical piano, math, occasionally art - as opposed to, say, jazz clarinet). Furthermore, savants typically possess prior exposure to those domains, such as listening to music around the home. Savants' true expertise, the research suggests, is in their ability to practice obsessively, even when it doesn't look as if they're practicing. As Ericsson succinctly put it, "There's no cell type that geniuses have that the rest of us don't."
So let's return to the initial question: how does Spartak do it? If the new science is right and myelination is to talent as photosynthesis is to plant growth, then Spartak makes it abundantly clear that photosynthesis alone is never enough; you also need soil, water, air, sunlight, luck. The question becomes, which variables are helping Spartak's myelin grow to such riotous abundance? Four factors stand above the rest:
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1. Driven Parents. The hunger and ambition of Russian parents is uniquely strong, particularly when one considers how hard life is in Russia right now and also that the patron saint of Russian tennis parents is the ex-Siberian oil-field worker Yuri Sharapov, who came to America with less than $1,000 and his 7-year-old daughter, Maria, who now earns an estimated $30 million a year in endorsements. On the other hand, while they are intense, Russian parents aren't all that different a group from the parents in Serbia, the Czech Republic or Mission Viejo, Calif.
2. Early Starts. The kids here start young and specialize early. They are tennis players, and not much else competes for their attention (only a handful owned video games, according to my informal poll), and they also benefit from a Russian culture that's built to select athletes and shield them from academic pressures. Incidentally, there were indeed elite athletic genes floating around at Spartak: Alexandra's parents were famous figure skaters, and another kid was Myskina's cousin. So good genes probably play a role, or (just as likely, to my mind) there's a beneficial effect to growing up in an environment of working athletes.
3. Powerful, Consistent Coaches. Most tennis coaches I saw were treated with a respect reserved for university professors. The tennis clubs I visited were patrolled by a squad of Brezhnev lookalikes who offered advice that seemed hewed from stone. Their institutional specialty is biomechanics, but the point is perhaps not so much in the details of that coaching, but rather in the passion, rigor and uniformity with which that coaching is delivered. This, incidentally, is the opposite of the entrepreneurial system in which many American tennis coaches operate, as they often compete with one another, relying on their ability to sell their services to sometimes anxious parents. American coaches have to be unique to survive; Russian coaches are mostly the same.
4. Cultural Toughness. As poets have pointed out, the intrinsic hardiness of the Russian woman is legendary. Historically, this might have something to do with the hardships of life under Communism and the loss of 11 million soldiers in World War II. Whatever the cause, the immediate effect is a tangible mental toughness and a work ethic second to none. After all, at Spartak, they don't speak of "playing" tennis. The verb they like to use is borot'sya - to struggle.
If I gave in to the uncontrollable Ericssonian urge to put Spartak's success into a formula, it would read something like:
Intense Parents + Young Kids + Rigorous Technique + Toughness = Talent
Alongside it, we could write another equation:
Deliberate Practice + Time = Myelin = Talent
But in the end, as I look around the court, it can't come down to a formula because formulas are rational, and whatever Spartak is, it isn't entirely rational. It's a bunch of kids in a dumpy club who are burning to be here, for whom every swing is meaningful, who wake up in the morning and say, "Today is my day with Larisa Dmitrievna!" It's deeply and purposefully irrational, because it's built on a love of sport and country that can't be explained but holds everything together anyway. Spartak is not science; what happens here is not analogous to what happens in a factory or a laboratory. It's closer to what happens in a garden, a forgotten, rundown garden that somehow produces marvelous tomatoes, summer after summer. 7
Thwock . . . thwock . . . thwock . . . thwock.
The Little Group was smacking it now, the balls zipping over the net and ricocheting off the far wall. Preobrazhenskaya, the gardener, watched with a smile, occasionally correcting a backswing or a grip, nudging the kids on with a murmur of praise and instruction: "Clever boy." "Good girl." "No." "Correct." "Not there." "That's it."
On my last day at Spartak, I met one more player. Her name was Kseniya; she was 5, and she'd come for a tryout. Her parents, an upscale pair, ducked through the low door and asked Larisa Dmitrievna if she might have a moment. Kseniya had black pigtails held in place with pink ribbons. She wore new silver tennis shoes. She walked solemnly, one step behind her parents, carrying a tiny pink racket. Something in the precision of her walk, in her air of self-possession, reminded me of my daughter Zoe.
Preobrazhenskaya put her arm on Kseniya's shoulder and walked her to the corner of the court, out of the parents' earshot. The girl looked up into the coach's face. "She has good eyes," Preobrazhenskaya said later.
Preobrazhenskaya rotated Kseniya's arms in a wide circle, feeling for looseness in her muscles, which she regarded as a good sign. Preobrazhenskaya then showed Kseniya a new tennis ball, and told her what was about to happen. Kseniya listened closely, and nodded. Then the coach tossed the ball lightly, and Kseniya, her small body coming alive at once, ran to catch it.
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1 In September, as part of an ongoing effort to revive American tennis, the United States Tennis Association plans to centralize its player development program at the Evert Tennis Academy in Boca Raton, Fla., a new complex that will feature 23 courts (14 lighted), dormitories, a state-of-theart video lounge and a staff of 30, including a mental-conditioning coach. Tuition with room and board will cost as much as $42,000 a year. By comparison, the Russian Tennis Federation's total youth-development budget is estimated to be between $300,000 and $400,000.
2 Timing is vital because neurons are binary: either they fire or they don't - no gray areas. Their firing depends solely on whether the incoming impulse is strong enough to exceed the neuron's threshold of activation. To explain the implications of this effect, Fields had me imagine a skill circuit in which two neurons need to combine their impulses to make a third, high-threshold neuron fire - for, say, a golf swing. In order to combine properly, those two incoming impulses must arrive at nearly exactly the same time - sort of like two people running at a heavy door to push it open. The time window turns out to be about four milliseconds, or roughly the time it takes a bee to flap its wings once. If the first two signals arrive more than four milliseconds apart, the door stays shut, the crucial third neuron doesn't fire and the golf ball soars into the rough (or, as I was reflexively picturing, Zoe swings and misses the purple ball). "Your brain has so many connections and possibilities that your genes can't code the neurons to time things so precisely," Fields said. "But you can build myelin to do it."
3 These studies shine a new light on the neuro-anatomist Marian C. Diamond's 1985 finding that the left, inferior parietal lobe of Albert Einstein's brain, though it had a typical number of neurons, had significantly more glial cells than her other samples, a study that neurologists at the time considered so meaningless as to be nearly comical but that now seems to make sense, bandwidth-wise.
4 The list of myelin-related pathologies is long and, Bartzokis believes, includes multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer's as well as a wider range of conditions, like schizophrenia, dyslexia, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and autism, all of which can be understood as disorders of impulse timing.
5 Venezuela is a more recent example of this phenomenon. In 1989, the Houston Astros opened the first of what are now nine major-league academies there, and a few years later, the number of Venezuelans in the big leagues started to rise. Since 1995, 125 Venezuelans have broken into Major League Baseball, 51 more than had appeared in all the years up to that point.
6 In children, myelin arrives in a series of waves, some of them determined by biological code, some of them dependent on activity. These waves last into young adulthood. Until this time, the brain is extraordinarily receptive to learning new skills. Though adults retain the ability to myelinate throughout life (thankfully, 5 percent of our oligos remain immature, ready to answer the call), anyone who has tried to learn a language or musical instrument late in life can testify that it costs a lot more time and sweat to build the requisite circuitry. The effortlessness is the first thing to go.
7 Replicating the Spartak system in the United States (or, for that matter, installing Dominican-style baseball academies or forcing young golfers to practice only at driving ranges) would likely not create a sudden wellspring of stars. The reasons that the United States is losing ground on the talent map have less to do with training mechanisms and more to do with bigger factors: a highly distractive youth culture, a focus on the glamour of winning rather than on the brickwork of building technique and a sporting environment that is gentler than those found in many of the world's harder corners.
"You can't keep breast-feeding them all the time," Robert Lansdorp, a tennis coach in Los Angeles, told me. "You've got to make them an independent thinker." Lansdorp, who is in his 60s, has coached Sharapova, along with the former No. 1-ranked players Pete Sampras, Tracy Austin and Lindsay Davenport, all three of whom grew up in the same area and played at the same run-of-the-mill tennis clubs near Los Angeles. "You don't need a fancy academy," he said. "You need fundamentals and discipline, and in this country nobody gives a damn about fundamentals and discipline." Lansdorp also mentioned that he'd visited Spartak last year to teach a clinic. "It was a pretty different place," he said. "But that Larisa, she sure knows her stuff."
