Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice

Matt Carré, director of the sport engineering group at the University of Sheffield has conducted a research project on the mechanics of Beckham’s trademark free kick. ‘It may look completely natural, but it is, in fact, a very deliberate technique,’ Carré said. ‘He kicks to one side of the ball to create the bend and is also able to effectively wrap his foot around the ball to give it topspin to make it dip. He practised this over and over when he was a young footballer, the same way Tiger Woods practised putting backspin on a golf ball.’

The arduous logic of sporting success has perhaps been most eloquently articulated by Andre Agassi. Reliving his early years in tennis in his autobiography Open, he wrote: ‘My father says that if I hit 2,500 balls each day, I’ll hit 17,500 balls each week, and at the end of one year I’ll have hit nearly one million balls. He believes in math. Numbers, he says, don’t lie. A child who hits one million balls each year will be unbeatable.’

What does all this tell us? It tells us that if you want to bend it like Beckham or fade it like Tiger, you have to work like crazy, regardless of your genes, background, creed, or colour. There is no short cut, even if child prodigies bewitch us into thinking there is.

Extensive research has shown that there is scarcely a single top performer in any complex task who has circumvented the ten years of hard work necessary to reach the top. Well, that’s not quite true. Chess master Bobby Fischer is said to have reached grandmaster status in nine years, although even that is disputed by some of his biographers.

A different question concerns the optimal route to the top. Given that thousands of hours must be clocked up on the road to excellence, does it make sense to start children at a very early age, before they have even reached their fifth birthday, like Mozart, Woods, and the Williams sisters? The advantages are obvious: the young performer has a sizable head start on anybody who commences their training, as is more common, a few years later.

Yet there are also very real dangers. It is only possible to clock up meaningful practice if an individual has made an independent decision to devote himself to whatever field of expertise. He has to care about what he is doing, not because a parent or a teacher says so, but for its own sake. Psychologists call this ‘internal motivation’, and it is often lacking in children who start too young and are pushed too hard. They are, therefore, on the road not to excellence but to burnout.

‘Starting kids off too young carries high risk,’ Peter Keen, a leading sports scientist and architect of Great Britain’s success at the 2008 Olympic Games, has said. ‘The only circumstances in which very early development seems to work is where the children themselves are motivated to clock up the hours, rather than doing so because of parents or a coach. The key is to be sensitive to the way the child is thinking and feeling, encouraging training without exerting undue pressure.’

But where the motivation is internalized, children tend to regard practice not as gruelling but as fun. Here is Monica Seles, the tennis prodigy: ‘I just love to practise and drill and all that stuff.’ Here is Serena Williams: ‘It felt like a blessing to practise because we had so much fun.’ Here is Tiger Woods: ‘My dad never asked me to go play golf. I asked him. It’s the child’s desire to play that matters, not the parent’s desire to have the child play.’

We will look more closely at the nature of motivation in chapter 4, but it is worth noting that only a minority of top performers start off in early childhood, and even fewer reach exalted levels of performance while still in early adolescence. This would seem to indicate – taking the widest possible perspective and recognizing that individual cases vary greatly – that the dangers of starting out too hard, too young, often outweigh the benefits. One of the skills of a good coach is to tailor a training programme to the mindset of the individual.

But, on the wider point, do child prodigies prove the talent theory of excellence? The truth is precisely the reverse. Child prodigies do not have unusual genes; they have unusual upbringings. They have compressed thousands of hours of practice into the small period between birth and adolescence. That is why they have become world-class.

A Tale of Three Sisters

On 19 April 1967, Laszlo Polgar and his girlfriend Klara married at a registry office in the small Hungarian town of Gyöngyös. The guests showered the newlyweds with confetti as they left the building for their three-day honeymoon (Polgar had to get back to the army, where he was midway through his national service) and commented on how happy they looked together.

What none of the guests realized was that they were witnessing the start of one of the most audacious human experiments of recent times.

Polgar, an educational psychologist, was one of the earliest advocates of the practice theory of expertise. He had written papers outlining his ideas and talked about them to his colleagues at the school where he worked as a maths teacher; he had even lobbied local government officials, arguing that an emphasis on hard work rather than talent could transform the education system if given half a chance.

‘Children have extraordinary potential, and it is up to society to unlock it,’ he says when I meet him and his wife at the family apartment in Budapest, overlooking the Danube. ‘The problem is that people, for some reason, do not want to believe it. They seem to think that excellence is only open to others, not themselves.’

Polgar is an extraordinary person to meet in the flesh. His face is etched with the wary enthusiasm of a man who has spent a lifetime trying to convince a sceptical world of his theories. His eyes sparkle with appeal, his hands work as he elaborates his thoughts, and his face undergoes a triumphant transformation when one so much as nods in agreement.

But back in the 1960s, when Polgar was contemplating his experiment, his ideas were considered so outlandish that a local government official told him to see a psychiatrist to ‘heal him of his delusions’. This was Hungary at the height of the Cold War, where radicalism of any kind was considered not merely eccentric but subversive.

But Polgar was not deterred. Realizing that the only way to vindicate his theory was to test it on his own future children, he started corresponding with a number of young ladies, in search of a wife. This was a time when having pen pals was not uncommon among Eastern Europeans, as young men and women living under state oppression sought to broaden their horizons.

A young Ukrainian named Klara was one of those women. ‘His letters fizzed with passion as he explained his theories of how to produce children with world-class abilities,’ Klara, a warm and gentle lady, a perfect counterpoint to her husband, tells me. ‘Like many at the time, I thought he was crazy. But we agreed to meet.’

Face to face, she found the force of his arguments (not to mention his charm) irresistible and agreed to take part in his bold experiment. On 19 April 1969, she gave birth to their first daughter, Susan.

Polgar spent hours trying to decide on the specific area in which Susan would be groomed for excellence. ‘I needed Susan’s achievements to be dramatic, so that nobody could question their authenticity,’ he says. ‘That was the only way to convince people that their ideas about excellence were all wrong. And then it hit me: chess.’

Why chess? ‘Because it is objective,’ Polgar says. ‘If my child had been trained as an artist or novelist, people could have argued about whether she was genuinely world-class or not. But chess has an objective rating based on performance, so there is no possibility of argument.’

Although Polgar was only a hobby player (and Klara not a player at all), he read as much as he could on the pedagogy of chess. He schooled Susan at home, devoting many hours a day to chess even before her fourth birthday. He did so jovially, making great play of the drama of the game, and over time Susan became hooked. By her fifth birthday she had accumulated hundreds of hours of dedicated practice.

A few months later, Polgar entered Susan in a local competition. She was so small she could barely see over the table on which the boards were placed, and her competitors and their parents looked on in amusement as she took her place to play her games, her eyes scanning the board and her tiny hands moving the pieces.

‘Almost all the girls qualified for my section were twice my age or older,’ Susan, an attractive and confident forty-year-old now living in New York, recounts. ‘At that point I did not realize the importance of that event in my life. I just looked at it as one chess game at a time. I was having fun. I won game after game, and my final score was 10-0. The fact that such a young girl won the championship was already a sensation in itself, but winning all my games added to people’s amazement.’

On 2 November 1974, Klara gave birth to a second daughter, Sofia, then, on 23 July 1976, to a third daughter, Judit. As soon as they were old enough to crawl, little Judit and Sofia would make their way across to the door of the chess room in the family apartment and peer through the tiny window, watching Susan being put through her paces by their father.

They longed to get involved, but Polgar did not want them to start too early. Instead he put the chess pieces in their tiny hands, encouraging them to take pleasure in their texture and shapes. Only when they turned five did he embark on their training.

The girls trained devotedly throughout their childhoods, but they also enjoyed it enormously. Why? Because they had internalized the motivation. ‘We spent a lot of hours on the chessboard, but it did not seem like a chore because we loved it,’ says Judit. ‘We were not pushed; chess fascinated us,’ says Sofia.

Susan concurs: ‘I loved playing chess. It expanded my horizons and gave me wonderful experiences.’

By the time they had reached adolescence, all three sisters had accumulated well over ten thousand hours of specialized practice, arguably more than any other women in chess history.

This is how they fared:

Susan

In August 1981, at the age of twelve, Susan won the world title for girls under sixteen. Less than two years later, in July 1984, she became the top-rated female player in the world.

In January 1991 she became the first woman player in history to reach the status of grandmaster. By the end of her career she had won the world championship for women on four occasions and five chess Olympiads and remains the only person in history, male or female, to win the chess Triple Crown (the rapid, blitz, and classical world championships).

Susan was also a pioneer. Despite huge obstacles placed in her way by the chess authorities – she was barred from playing in the 1986 World Championships (for men), even though she had qualified – she eventually paved the way for women to compete in the world’s most prestigious events.

She now runs a chess centre in New York.

Sofia

In 1980, at the age of five, Sofia won the under-eleven Hungarian championship for girls. She would go on to win the gold medal for girls at the world under-fourteen championships in 1986 and numerous gold medals in chess Olympiads and other prestigious championships.

But her most extraordinary achievement was the ‘Miracle in Rome’, where she won eight straight games in the Magistrale di Roma against many of the greatest male players, including the grandmasters Alexander Chernin, Semon Palatnik, and Yuri Razuvaev. One chess expert wrote, ‘The odds against such an occurrence must be billions to one.’ Kevin O’Connell, an Irish chess player, rated the performance as the fifth greatest, by man or woman, in history:

Sofia married fellow chess player Yona Kosashvili in 1999 and moved to Israel where they live with their two children. She now helps to run a chess website and is an acclaimed painter.

Judit

After a succession of record-breaking victories in her early teens, Judit won the world under-twelve championships in Romania in 1988. It was the first time in history a girl had won an overall (open to both men and women) world championship.

Three years later in 1991, at the age of fifteen years and four months, she became the youngest-ever grandmaster – male or female – in history. In the same year she also won the Hungarian championships, defeating grandmaster Tibor Tolnai in the final.

She has now been the number-one female chess player in the world for well over a decade, excluding a brief period when she was taken off the list due to inactivity when she gave birth to her first son in 2004 (to be replaced at the top of the list by her older sister Susan).

Over the course of her career, she has had victories over almost every top player in the world, including Garry Kasparov, Anatoly Karpov, and Viswanathan Anand.

She is universally considered to be the greatest female player of all time.

The tale of the Polgar sisters provides scintillating evidence for the practice theory of excellence. Polgar had publicly declared that his yet-to-be-born children would become world-beaters – setting himself up for a fall in the time-honoured tradition of science – and had been proved right. His girls had lived up to the pre-birth hype and then some.

Note, also, the public reaction to the girls’ success. When Susan stormed to victory in a local competition at the age of five, everyone present was convinced that this was the consequence of unique talent. She was described by the local newspaper as a prodigy, and Polgar remembers being congratulated by another parent on having a daughter with such amazing talent. ‘That is not something my little Olga could do,’ the parent said.

But this is the iceberg illusion: onlookers took the performance to be the consequence of special abilities because they had witnessed only a tiny percentage of the activity that had gone into its making. As Polgar puts it: ‘If they had seen the painfully slow progress, the inch-by-inch improvements, they would not have been so quick to call Susan a prodigy.’

Human Calculators