ROCKET RONNIE
Why do athletes win? And keep winning? Like many simple questions, this has no simple answer. Talent plainly helps – as one of Michael Schumacher’s team-mates put it: “Before the season, I’d turn up two weeks early to get the cars into shape and, on his first day, he’d drive them all faster than me. You could give him an F1 car, go kart or tractor and he’d immediately drive it faster than anyone else.” Dedication comes into it, too. Malcom Gladwell’s idea that you must practice for 10,000 hours by the age of 20 is now discredited – the author of one study he quoted called it a “provocative generalisation” not a scientific theory. That said, Bjorn Borg’s habit of training hard in five-hour blocks partly accounted for the superhuman stamina which, in 1980, helped him recover from losing a fourth set tie-break 18-16 to John McEnroe and win the fifth set 8-6 for a fifth successive Wimbledon title.
All these factors have influenced the spectacular career of Ronnie O’Sullivan who won his first ranking title, the UK Championship, seven days before his eighteenth birthday. He was 49 in January when he won the World Grand Prix – his 41st ranking title, a record. He has reached, or won, a major final in 30 out of 33 years as a professional. (In two of those barren years, 2002 and 2011, he was suffering from depression.) The roots of his overachievement – and some of his demons – were laid in the snooker room his father built him when he was a boy, where, from 10am to 1am, he practiced daily, stopping only for a cup of tea, a sandwich and to watch some sport on telly.
The ‘Rocket’ tag is a slight misnomer. O’Sullivan certainly loves to play quickly – he believes that drawn-out matches are bad for snooker’s image – so opponents have tried, with varying degrees of success, to bore him into defeat by slowing play. But the nickname doesn’t reflect his longevity at the top which, in individual sports, bears comparison with Roger Federer’s.
What O’Sullivan hasn’t done, much like McEnroe (whose career was curtailed by injury), is devote every waking moment to his sport. The American tennis ace once told Esquire magazine: “You could understand someone willing to live like a monk if that extra 1% made the difference between losing and winning finals, like Ivan Lendl or Pete Sampras. I respect that but I wanted to have it both ways, be a Hall of Famer and get some perks – let’s forget the tour of Rotterdam and go on tour with the Rollins Stones – I’d take that one.” O’Sullivan likes his distractions too, be it running, co-writing novels or hanging out with friends like Damien Hirst and Jackie Chan.
O’Sullivan and Federer both compete in sports where there is no such thing as a draw. That makes playing it safe more complicated. In chess, a draw is the most common result among grandmasters. Indeed, Magnus Carlsen, Norway’s prodigious genius, criticised the great Indian player Viswanathan Anand for preferring to avoid defeat than to win. That charge has since been levelled at Carlsen, who admits he hates losing to lower ranked players which, when you have officially been the world’s best since 2011, complicates things.
The psychological phenomenon of loss aversion was identified in 1979 by Israeli academics Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Their research showed that, for people with this mindset, losing £100 was 2.5 times as distressing as the pleasure derived from winning £100. Their study of professional golf revealed that players were better at putting to maintain par than putting for a birdie.
The fact that many ancestors worried themselves sick about not losing their possessions – be it clothing, food or shelter – helped ensure the survival of our species. And in the world’s most popular, lucrative sports that deeply-embedded aversion is reinforced by the cycle of inflated expectations and industrialised outrage surrounding every unsatisfactory outcome, no matter how trivial. In November 1988, after England drew 1-1 in a meaningless friendly with Saudi Arabia, The Sun urged manager Bobby Robson: “In the name of Allah go!”
Most fans and journalists remain wilfully blind to the simple truth that in some sports, especially football, defeats often represent a reversion to the mean. As David Runciman observed in the London Review of Books: “The Manager of the Month award is an absurdity – doled out in each league to whoever has presided over an improbable run of four or five wins. Surprise is then expressed when these teams lose their next game, as they often do.” Defeat isn’t inevitable, he adds, it is merely that we remember the losses, and call them a curse, “because we can’t distinguish between statistically meaningless sequences and the march of destiny.”
The march of destiny myth becomes particularly useful when your opponents fall for it. O’Sullivan has attributed much of his enduring success to the fear he inspires in other players. As he lost in the first round of this year’s World and UK Championships, that aura might well be fading. It could be that, as with chess grandmaster Carlsen, the burden of embodying the sport, living at the centre of that circus for so long, is taking its toll.
O’Sullivan’s prosaic explanation for his last defeat – partly that he played too well in practice – was psychologically healthy but could signify a waning appetite for snooker. Borg’s first wife Marianna Simnescu has said he “was very placid and humble until he lost a match – then he wouldn’t talk for three days.” After being beaten in the 1981 Wimbledon final by McEnroe, the Swedish ace realised that it no longer hurt as badly. Three months later, after losing the US Open final to the same opponent, he quit for good. He was 26. You can have all the talent, training and luck in the world but to keep on winning, as the hoary old cliche has it, you need to want it.
Paul Simpson