How serious a subject is sport? We know it is dramatic and revealing, but beneath the veneer of action and celebrity does sport justify a more considered analytical approach? There is a dual aspect here: does thinking have much to do with winning, and, if so, can the lessons of victory enhance our thinking about other, more ‘highbrow’ spheres?
Michael Lewis — formerly of Salomon Brothers on Wall Street and this magazine — is at the forefront of those sportswriters who answer ‘yes’ to both questions. The heroes of his intimately researched sports books are the philosopher kings of sports coaching, men with original minds who rise above cliché-ridden sports chat. When brain defeats brawn in one of Michael Lewis’s sports books, you can almost hear the prose style lift off.
In Moneyball, Lewis’s brilliant bestseller about baseball, the object of his admiration was Billy Beane, manager of the Oakland Athletics and leftfield strategist. Beane took a poor, unfashionable team and enabled it to compete with, and often beat, teams with four times the cash and ten times the glamour. Beane had found a new way to win in an old sport. Other teams quickly imitated Moneyball methods and also succeeded against the odds.
The book also became a metaphor that extended beyond the sporting world — an example of how the scientific method could revolutionise unreformed but apparently sophisticated businesses. Whatever your profession, if you were analytical and unafraid to re-examine conventional wisdom, Moneyball was a pretty handy book to have up your sleeve.
There is also free-marketeer strand to Lewis’s sporting theory. Sports, like trading markets, occasionally throw up inefficient ‘blind spots’, areas where received wisdom underestimates the true value of a ‘piece’ of the strategic jigsaw. Find that inefficient blind spot, buy in the talent on the cheap, stick with your strategy — and count the wins and the plaudits.
In his new book The Blind Side, Lewis examines how Bill Walsh, all-conquering former coach of the San Francisco 49ers, did to American football what Beane later did for baseball. Walsh realised that everyone was looking at the wrong end of the field. The crowd and the football community naturally watched the glamour players — the quarterback and the wide receiver, whose job it was to complete the eye-catching passes that are the visual highlight of football matches.
Walsh’s insight was that the quarterback might have thrown the ball, but it was his offensive linemen — effectively the quarterback’s private guards — who enabled him to do so. The existing received wisdom had been that quarterbacks won football games. Accordingly, quarterbacks were very expensive and individually assessed, while offensive linemen were cheap and scarcely given an identity beyond being lumbering cogs in the offensive team. The new post-Walsh wisdom was that without good offensive linemen the quarterback doesn’t get much of a chance to throw the ball anyway because he’d be face down in the mud being mauled by three wildly aggressive opponents. Proof: the San Francisco 49ers won just as many games in 1987 with their reserve quarterback. Conclusion: play the right system and buy better offensive linemen.
I am not a big fan of American football, and yet my favourite parts of The Blind Side were thrilling descriptions of matches in which Walsh’s system of play came up against old-school brute-force conventional wisdom. Lewis has a great gift for developing his ideas within the structure of a broader narrative. When it works, you end up cheering for a team, a man and a system of thought all at once.
The second strand of The Blind Side is more personal, less strategic and not quite so compelling. Lewis traces the fortunes of Michael Oher, an athletically gifted but penniless black high-school student (he would later become the perfect Bill Walsh-style offensive lineman). Oher, a drop-out student initially believed to have an IQ of around 80, had slipped off the welfare radar in Memphis until he was adopted by a white millionaire Republican family. Oher’s journey — starting out as almost socially-retarded and ending up as a high- school graduate and college sports star — is radically altered by luck, charity, self-interest and love. It is, of course, an all-American tale.
The Blind Side may not have quite the broad range of Moneyball, but it still provides deep insights about sport and America. More centrally, if anyone could still doubt it, Lewis has once again demonstrated sport’s richness in conceptual material. Winning and losing is important enough. How you win and lose runs much deeper still.