Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice

What was going on? In a nutshell, when chess masters look at the positions of the pieces on a board, they see the equivalent of a word. Their long experience of playing chess enables them to ‘chunk’ the pattern with a limited number of visual fixations in the same way that our familiarity with language enables us to chunk the letters constituting a familiar word. It is a skill derived from years of familiarity with the relevant ‘language’, not talent. As soon as the language of chess is disrupted by the random positioning of pieces, chess masters find themselves looking at a jumble of letters, just like the rest of us.

The same findings extend to other games, like bridge, and much else besides. Time and again, the amazing abilities of experts turn out to be not innate gifts but skills drawn from years of dedication that disappear as soon as they are transported beyond their specific realm of expertise. Take SF. Even after he had built up the capacity to remember an astonishing 82 numbers, he was unable to recall more than six or seven random consonants.

Now let’s shift up a gear by taking these insights into the realm of sport.

The Mind’s Eye

In December 2004 I played a game of tennis with Michael Stich, the former Wimbledon tennis champion from Germany, at the Harbour Club, a plush sporting facility in west London. The match was part of a promotional day pitting journalists against top tennis players to publicize an upcoming competition at the Royal Albert Hall. Most of the matches were light-hearted affairs, with Stich hamming it up and giving the journalists the runaround, much to the amusement of onlookers. But when I came up against Stich, I wanted to conduct a little experiment.

I asked Stich to serve at maximum pace. He has one of the fastest serves in the history of the sport – his personal best is 134 mph – and I was curious to see whether my reactions, forged over twenty years of international table tennis, would enable me to return it. Stich smiled at the request, graciously assented, and then spent a good ten minutes warming up, loosening his shoulders and torso to gain maximum leverage on the ball. The onlookers – around thirty or so club members – suddenly became very curious, and the atmosphere a little tense.

Stich came back on to court sporting a light sweat, bounced the ball, and glanced across the net, as was his routine. I crouched down and focused hard, coiled like a spring. I was confident I would return the serve, although I was not certain it would be much more than a soft mid-court lob. Stich tossed the ball high into the air, arched his back, and then, in what seemed like a whirl of hyperactivity, launched into his service action. Even as I witnessed the ball connecting with his racket, it whirred past my right ear with a speed that produced what seemed like a clap of wind. I had barely rotated my neck by the time it thudded against the soft green curtains behind me.

I stood up straight, bemused, much to Stich’s merriment and that of the onlookers, many of whom were squealing with laughter. I couldn’t fathom how the ball had travelled so effortlessly fast from his racket, on to the court, and then pinged past my head. I asked him to send down another, then another. He served four straight aces before approaching the net with a shrug of the shoulder and a slap of my back. He told me that he had slowed down the last two serves to give me a fighting chance. I hadn’t even noticed.

Most people would conclude from this rather humbling experience that the ability to connect with, let alone return, a serve delivered at more than 130 mph must belong exclusively to those with innate reaction speeds – what are sometimes called instincts – at the outer limits of human capability. It is an inference that almost jumps up and bites you when the ball has just rocketed so fast past your nose that you’re relieved at having avoided injury.

But I was forbidden from reaching any such conclusion. Why? Because in different circumstances, I have those extraordinaryreaction speeds. When I stand behind a table tennis table, I am able to react to, and return, smash-kills in the blink of an eye. The time available to return a serve in tennis is approximately 450 milliseconds; but there are less than 250 milliseconds in which to return a smash-kill in table tennis. So, why could I return the latter and not the former?

In 1984 Desmond Douglas, the greatest-ever UK table tennis player, was placed in front of a screen containing a series of touch-sensitive pads at the University of Brighton. He was told that the pads would light up in a random sequence and that his task was to touch the relevant pad with the index finger of his favoured hand as soon as he could, before waiting for the next pad to light up. Douglas was highly motivated, as all the other members of the team had already undergone the test and were ribbing him in the familiar manner of team rivalry.

First one pad, then another, lit up. Each time, Douglas jabbed his finger towards the pad, his eyes scanning the screen for the next target. After a minute, the task ended and Douglas’s teammates (I was one of them: at thirteen years of age, I was at my first senior training camp) gave him a round of applause. Douglas grinned as the researcher left the room to collate the results. After five minutes, the researcher returned. He announced that Douglas’s reactions were the slowest in the entire England team: he was slower than the juniors and the cadets – slower even than the team manager.

I remember the intake of breath to this day. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Douglas was universally considered to have the fastest reactions in world table tennis, a reputation he continues to command more than ten years after his retirement. His style was based on standing with his stomach a couple of inches from the edge of the table, allowing the ball to ricochet from his bat using lightning reflexes that astounded audiences around the world. He was so sharp that even the leading Chinese players – who had a reputation for extreme speed – were forced to retreat when they came up against him. But here was a scientist telling us that he had the most sluggish reactions in the whole of the England team.

It is not surprising that, after the initial shock, the researcher was laughed out of the room. He was told that the machine must be faulty or that he was measuring the wrong data. Later, the England team manager informed the science staff at Brighton that their services would no longer be required. Sports science was a new discipline back then, and the England manager had shown unusual innovation in seeing if his team could benefit from its insights, but this experiment seemed to prove that it had little to teach table tennis.

What nobody considered – not even the unfortunate researcher – was that Douglas really did have the slowest reactions in the team, and that his speed on a table tennis court was the consequence of something entirely different. But what?

I am standing in a room at Liverpool John Moores University. In front of me is a screen containing a life-size projection of a tennis player standing at the other end of a virtual court. An eyetracking system is trained on my eyes, and my feet are placed on sensors. The whole thing has been put together by Mark Williams, professor of motor behaviour at Liverpool John Moores and arguably the world’s leading expert on perceptual expertise in sport.

Mark hits the play button and I watch as my ‘opponent’ tosses the ball to serve and arches his back. I am concentrating hard and watching intently, but I have already demonstrated why I was unable to return the serve of Stich.

‘You were looking in the wrong place,’ says Mark. ‘Top tennis players look at the trunk and hips of their opponents on return in order to pick up the visual clues governing where they are going to serve. If I were to stop the picture in advance of the ball being hit, they would still have a pretty good idea about where it was going to go. You were looking variously at his racket and arm, which give very little information about the future path of the ball. You could have had the fastest reactions in history, and you still would not have made contact with the ball.’

I ask Mark to replay the tape and adjust my focus to look at the places rich in information, but it makes me even more sluggish. Mark laughs. ‘It is not as simple as just knowing about where to look; it is also about grasping the meaning of what you are looking at. It is about looking at the subtle patterns of movement and postural clues and extracting information. Top tennis players make a small number of visual fixations and “chunk” the key information.’

Think back to the master chess players. You’ll remember that when they looked at a board, they saw words: that is to say, they were able to chunk the position of the pieces as a consequence of their long experience of trying to find the best moves in chess games. Now we can see that the very same thing is happening in tennis.

When Roger Federer returns a service, he is not demonstrating sharper reactions than you and I; what he is showing is that he can extract more information from the service action of his opponent and other visual clues, enabling him to move into position earlier and more efficiently than the rest of us, which, in turn, allows him to make the return – in his case, a forehand cross-court winner rather than a queen to checkmate.

This revolutionary analysis extends across the sporting domain, from badminton to baseball and from fencing to football. Top performers are not born with sharper instincts (in the same way that chess masters do not possess superior memories); instead, they possess enhanced awareness and anticipation. In cricket, for example, a first-class batsman has already figured out whether to play off the back foot or front foot more than 100 milliseconds before a bowler has even released the ball.

As Janet Starkes, professor emeritus of kinesiology at McMaster University in Canada has put it, ‘The exploitation of advance information results in the time paradox where skilled performers seem to have all the time in the world. Recognition of familiar scenarios and the chunking of perceptual information into meaningful wholes and patterns speeds up processes.’

The key thing to note is that these cannot possibly be innate skills: Federer did not come into this mortal world with knowledge of where to look or how to efficiently extract information on a service return any more than SF was born with special memory skills (he wasn’t: that is precisely why he was selected by Ericsson) or chess players have innate board-game memory skills (remember that their advantage is eliminated when the pieces are randomly placed).

No, Federer’s advantage has been gathered from experience: more precisely, it has been gained from a painstaking process of encoding the meaning of subtle patterns of movement drawn from more than ten thousand hours of practice and competition. He is able to see the patterns in his opponent’s movements in the same way that chess players are able to discern the patterns in the arrangement of pieces on a chessboard. It is his regular practice that has given him this expertise, not his genes.

You might suppose that Federer’s speed is transferable to all sports and games (rather as one is inclined to assume that SF’s memory skill is transferable), but you would be wrong. I played a match of real tennis – an ancient form of tennis played indoors with sloping roofs called penthouses, a hard ball, and entirely different techniques – with Federer at Hampton Court Palace in the summer of 2005 (part of a promotional day for his watch sponsor). I found that, for all his grace and elegance, Federer could scarcely make contact with the ball when it was played at any serious speed (neither, for that matter, could I).

Some of the onlookers were surprised by this, but this is precisely what is predicted by the new science of expertise. Speed in sport is not based on innate reaction speed, but derived from highly specific practice. I have regularly played table tennis with world-renowned footballers, tennis players, golfers, boxers, badminton players, rowers, squash players, and track and field athletes, and discovered that they are all dramatically slower in their table-tennis-specific response times than even elderly players who have had the benefit of regular practice.

Recently I went to the Birmingham home of Desmond Douglas, the Speedy Gonzales of English table tennis, to try to figure out how someone with such unimpressive innate reactions could have become the fastest man in the history of one of the world’s fastest sports. Douglas welcomed me through the door with a friendly grin: he is now in his fifties, but remains as lean and fit as when he was terrorizing players around the world with speed that seemed to defy logic.

Douglas offered the suggestion that he has a ‘great eye for the ball’, which is the way quick reactions are often ‘explained’ in high-level sport. The problem is that researchers have never been able to find any connection between sporting ability and the special powers of vision supposedly boasted by top performers. In 2000 the visual function of elite and non-elite footballers was tested using standardized measures of visual acuity, stereoscopic depth, and peripheral awareness. The elite players were no better than their less accomplished counterparts, and neither group recorded above-average levels of visual function.

It had to be something else. I asked Douglas to tell me about his early education in table tennis, and the mystery was instantly solved. It turns out that Douglas had perhaps the most unusual grounding of any international table tennis player of the last half-century. Brought up in working-class Birmingham, struggling and unmotivated in his academic work, Douglas happened upon a table tennis club at school. The tables were old and decrepit, but functional.

The problem is that they were housed in the tiniest of classrooms. ‘Looking back, it was pretty unbelievable,’ Douglas said, shaking his head. ‘There were three tables going along the length of the room to accommodate all the players who wanted to take part, but there was so little space behind the tables that we had to stand right up against the edge of the tables to play, with our backs almost touching the blackboard.’

I managed to track down a few of the others who played in that era. ‘It was an amazing time,’ one said. ‘The claustrophobia of the room forced us to play a form of “speed table tennis” where everyone had to be super-sharp. Spin and strategy hardly came into it; the only thing that mattered was speed.’

Douglas did not spend a few weeks or months honing his skills in that classroom, but the first five years of his development. ‘We all loved playing table tennis, but Des was different,’ another classmate told me. ‘While the rest of us had other hobbies and interests, he spent all his time in that classroom practising his skills and playing matches. I have never seen anyone with such dedication.’

Douglas was sometimes called the ‘lightning man’, because it seemed that he was so fast he could duck a bolt from the blue. His speed baffled opponents and teammates for decades. Even Douglas was perplexed by it. ‘Maybe I have a sixth sense,’ he said. But we can now see that the solution to the riddle is simple. In essence, Douglas spent more hours than any other player in the history of the sport encoding the characteristics of a highly specific type of table tennis: the kind played at maximum pace, close to the table. By the time he arrived in international table tennis, he was able to perceive where the ball was going before his opponents had even hit it. That is how a man with sluggish reactions became the fastest player on the planet.

It is worth pausing here to anticipate an objection or two. You might agree with the thrust of the argument that expertise in table tennis, tennis, football, or anything else requires the performer to have built up a powerful knowledge base drawn from experience. But you might still sense that something in this account is missing.

In particular you may feel that recognizing the patterns in an opponent’s movement and framing the optimal response (a cross-court forehand, say) is a very different thing from actually executing the stroke. The former is a mental skill drawn from experience, but the latter seems to be more of a physical talent requiring coordination, control, and feel. But is this schism between the mental and the physical quite what it seems?

It is often said that Federer and other top sportsmen have ‘amazing hands’, which neatly emphasizes the supposed physical dimension of hitting a winning smash or dabbing a delicate drop shot. But is there really something in Federer’s fingers or palm that sets him apart from other tennis players?

Or would it not be more accurate to say that his advantage consists in the sophistication with which he is able to control the motor system (the part of the peripheral nervous system responsible for movement) such that his racket impacts the ball with precisely the right angle, force, speed, direction, and finesse? Or, to use computer parlance, is not the genius of Federer’s shot execution reflected in a supremacy in software rather than hardware?

This is not to deny that any tennis player needs an arm and a hand (and a racket!) to make a return, but simply to emphasize that the limiting factor in making a world-class stroke is not strength or brute force, but the executive control of fine motor movement to create perfect timing.

The key point, for our purposes, is that this is not something top sportsmen are born with. If you were to go back to the time when Roger Federer was learning technique, you would find that he was ponderous and sluggish. His movements would have been characterized by conscious control of the skill, lacking smoothness or unity. Only later, after countless hours of practice, were his skills integrated into an intricate set of procedures capable of flexible execution.

Today, Federer’s motor programmes are so deeply ingrained that if you were to ask him how he is able to play an immaculately timed forehand, he wouldn’t be able to tell you. He might be able to talk about what he was thinking at the time or the strategic importance of the shot, but he wouldn’t be able to provide any insight into the mechanics of the movements that made the stroke possible. Why? Because Federer has practised for so long that the movement has been encoded in implicit rather than explicit memory. This is what psychologists call expert-induced amnesia.

It is also worth noting that the development of motor expertise (skilled movement) is inseparable from the development of perceptual expertise (chunking patterns). After all, perfect technique is hardly useful if you fail to hit the ball – think of a totally blind person trying to play tennis. Highly refined, instantly chunked perceptual information is necessary to integrate the movement of the body with the movement of the ball (hand-eye coordination). Without this information the motor programme would be nothing more than a stab in the dark.

Great shot-making, then, is not about developing ‘muscle memory’; rather, the memory is encoded in the brain and central nervous system.

The ascendancy of the mental and the acquired over the physical and the innate has been confirmed again and again. As Anders Ericsson, now widely acknowledged as the world’s leading authority on expert performance, puts it: ‘The most important differences are not at the lowest levels of cells or muscle groups, but at the athletes’ superior control over the integrated and coordinated actions of their bodies. Expert performance is mediated by acquired mental representations that allow the experts to anticipate, plan, and reason alternative courses of action. These mental representations provide experts with increased control of the aspects that are relevant to generating their superior performance.’

In other words, it is practice, not talent, that holds the key to success.

Knowledge Is Power

At 3.00 p.m. on 10 February 1996, Garry Kasparov strode into a small room in the Pennsylvania Convention Center to contest one of the most anticipated chess matches in history. He was smartly dressed in a dark suit and white shirt and wore a look of intense concentration. As he sat down at the match table, he glanced across the board to the man on the other side: Dr FengHsuing Hsu, a bespectacled Taiwanese-American with a quizzical expression.

In the room, besides Kasparov and Hsu, were three cameramen, one match official, three members of Kasparov’s entourage, and a technical adviser. A strict silence was enforced, with the five hundred spectators packed into a nearby lecture hall to witness the event on screens fed from three TV cameras and live commentary from grandmaster Yasser Seirawan. The atmosphere was, by common consent, quite unlike that of any other chess match in living memory.

Kasparov is almost universally considered to be the greatest player in the history of the sport. His ELO rating – an official score measuring relative skill – remains the highest ever recorded: 71 points higher than that of Russian grandmaster Anatoly Karpov, and 66 higher than that of the great American player Bobby Fischer. Kasparov, at the time of the contest, had been the world number one for ten straight years, and his mere presence before a chessboard was enough to intimidate some of the world’s most revered grandmasters.

But his opponent on this day was susceptible neither to intimidation nor the other mind games for which Kasparov was famous. His opponent was oblivious to Kasparov’s status and reputation for guile and audacity. Indeed, his opponent was not even in the room, but many miles away in a large, dimly lit building in Yorktown Heights, New York. His opponent was a computer. Its name was Deep Blue.