Patience, grasshopper

An article by Matty

Something that really bugs me with the modern human being is that we’ve managed to wear ourselves extremely thin when it comes to our levels of patience. Especially in sports, nobody has any patience anymore. We want the quick fix right now. We want to win right now. And if you don’t win a trophy? Everybody sucks, blow up the team, they clearly won’t ever win. Growing up, I was really fascinated by the idea of team-building. Finding the right cast of characters to achieve the common goal: winning a championship, a trophy. Possibly multiple. Of course, as time went on I continued to dive into the world of the GM or sporting director, figuring out what type of style I wanted my teams to play with, who’d be good fits for it, strategies on how to build my team. I really wish I had access to console gaming, I’d have done so many career mode saves in Fifa.

One of the tenets of team-building that I developed over time was patience. In many sports, especially in America, we have this idea of tearing things down to the studs and building back up. Otherwise known as a rebuild. Some teams you can’t do this because of existing personnel, so you reshuffle the deck chairs and see if the new supporting cast works well with the existing stars. This is called a retool. But patience is more necessary in a rebuild. Rebuilds typically take 3-5 years to truly begin to bear fruit. It’s a long slog sometimes, but you must have faith that it works out at the end of the journey.

I like the intricacies of a rebuild, signing and developing young talent you picked and watching them achieve greatness over a number of years. It’s great for the fans, getting to make connections to homegrown talent and watching them stay in the same place for a decade or more, watching them hopefully reach the mountaintop of the sport. Yet it seems most people took the wrong ideas from these sports video games. It seems like in most sports now there’s an incredible lack of patience. Athletes are seen as nothing more than cogs in the machine, video game characters with stats on a screen. They are tossed around from team to team, with no care given for anything except the pursuit of perfection. Teams hunting for as many big stars as possible, throwing their young prospects into the trash just for the chance to sniff a star’s jockstrap.

Society has done a brilliant job of dehumanizing athletes. At every level they are treated like robots. The fans demand excellence every game without fail. The team doctors optimize every part of their lives, from their dieting to sleep schedules to training. I guess this is why Klopp has always been a breath of fresh air to me. He values his players as people, treats them like actual human beings. And I imagine the players greatly appreciate this as well. Something many top managers also seem to understand is that it doesn’t always take the world’s best eleven to get the best team. There are such things as chemistry gained over time, players that aren’t extremely popular but are perfect fits for the system the manager uses. I wish more teams could understand this. As brilliant as stats are, the downside to them is that they’ve helped create the soulless idea that every player is easily replaced.

So why am I so patient and why do I lament the way the game’s gone? I’d like to think I enjoy the emotion, the human aspect of sport. I’ve always had a soft spot for players that work hard every game, they may not be the best player but they’re always determined to leave their mark on the game. The Milners and Hendersons, the Ginis and Manes of the world are the ones I’ll always go to bat for. These players tend to be undervalued, the players deemed easily replaceable. And then as soon as injury hits or God forbid they’re let go, their impact is seen to be much greater than one could’ve thought. I’d rather be patient in getting the best out of them than getting upset and demanding they leave for not immediately living up to standards.

As I’ve learned in my somewhat limited yet ever growing experience as a teacher, every human is different. And instead of most teachers who take the cookie cutter approach and have one singular way of teaching, I tend to try to understand what makes the student tick and work with them to get the best out of them. Some students can take more harsh criticism, some need more constructive feedback. Some students can make a correction right away, others need to hear it 2-3 times for it to stick. The greatest lesson you can learn from teaching is patience.

I’m working with one particular student now who’s made massive improvements in the last month, I gave her a lot to work on right at the start and she’s done very well handling it. But now she’s hit a bit of a lull in development mainly because a lot of the stuff she needs to work on cannot be fixed quickly. I could be harsh on her, demanding she focus on getting it fixed quickly. Or I can draw from my past experience, know what she’s going through, and provide encouragement. I chose the latter. Because as much as I want her to achieve success, I also recognize she’s still very young, still has a long way to go, and has a lot going on in her life. I know I do as well. And it surprises me that my teacher who’s 30-something years older than me doesn’t realize this, yet I do. I guess it’s because, in her eyes, success is the only thing that matters. And success is all she’s known in the 35 years she’s run my dance school. In my eyes, success is the most important thing but it’s not the only thing. And I try to focus on everything about the person, not just treat them like a machine.

So what is the point of all this? I guess in many ways I’m maturing even more and realizing that the sports world isn’t what I remember it to be. That some people really need to get out of their houses more often to see the real world. That the demands of perfection are unreasonable, and this is coming from someone who always strives for it. I guess I’ve become much more aware of what burdens people, doesn’t mean I particularly care about it but I recognize it’s there. We are much more complex beings in a much more complex world than the simplistic black and white context I used to use in my judgements on this world. And in this way I’ve gained more patience for people. Patience that seems to be extinct in most aspects of life. Everybody seems to be in some massive rush all the time, not realizing we all have the same finish line. I’d rather enjoy myself, enjoy my experiences, live with a sense of urgency but take things one step at a time.