Essay: "The Game Ones"

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a very moving essay about the parallels between dogfighting and professional football in which he summarizes the medical research which shows that the rate of concussions in football is astonishingly high and provides a description of the horrors of dogfighting (the noted pastime of professional football player Michael Vick).

Gladwell then describes the quality of “gameness”: a dog’s desire to please the owner at the expense of itself. The owners of fighting dogs, apparently:

understand this desire to please on the part of the dog and capitalize on it. At any organized pit fight in which two dogs are really going at each other wholeheartedly, one can observe the owner of each dog changing his position at pit-side in order to be in sight of his dog at all times. The owner knows that seeing his master rooting him on will make a dog work all the harder to please its master.


For Gladwell, this is an appalling breach of trust. He argues that a parallel situation exists within professional football where athletes, selected for their “gameness”, are manipulated by their parents and coaches to destroy themselves for the entertainment of others. Gladwell, I think, wants to get around the strongest argument in defence of football; namely, that if people know the risks when they get started, they have a right to participate in a dangerous game.

I think, though, that Gladwell’s position in this essay is a little inconsistent with his book Outliers, which explores what makes people successful. Essentially, Gladwell’s thesis in Outliers is that personality traits are not solely responsible for success, but instead “hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies ... allow [some] to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways that others cannot.” One of Gladwell’s theories is that it takes ten thousand hours to become a master of something, and he provides examples (from Bill Gates to the Beatles) of supposed prodigies or natural talents who were actually the beneficiaries of opportunities to get their ten thousand hours in before everyone else.

What Gladwell doesn’t do (and in fairness, doesn’t really need to do for the purpose of his book) is explain why some people are such in such a rush to get their ten thousand hours in. That is a lot of time. It’s three hours a day, every day, for ten years. Bill Gates got those hours in on shared public computers which he (fortunately) had access to before everyone else. Great. But why did the young Bill Gates spend all his time dicking around on public computers instead of playing in the sunshine?

The normal answer is that, well, because Bill Gates was passionate about computers. Because that’s what he loved to do. And it’s the transcendent power of that love that put him in a position to become the richest man in the world.

And that’s okay, up to a point. But it’s not enough for me. I keep thinking of that dog, the one that was looking to its master for approval while it was struggling for its life. And I also reflect how desperately unhappy so many successful people seem to be.

Everyone knows that many celebrities attempt suicide or otherwise lose their shit when they seem to have everything they could want. It has been long established that artists have a much higher rate of substance abuse and depression than the general population. But so, for instance, do lawyers. One of my strongest impressions from working at one of the most respected corporate law firms in Canada (which I am far too classy to name here) was that some of the most diligent, successful and brilliant lawyers were motivated by fear, fear of looking stupid and fear of failure, and that it was striking how unhappy some of them were considering how much money they earned.

And I can’t help wonder whether part of the reason young Bill hung around that computer was not only because he loved to do so (although I’m sure he did) but because he felt like he had to. That he felt deficient in some way, and the only way to make up for it was to be way better at one thing than everyone else. Did he really not want to go outside? To meet girls or play sports? Was he maybe looking at his master, out of the corner of his eye? And trying to please him?

It’s not easy to succeed. You have to keep trying and trying when in many cases it would make sense to give up. What motivates you to keep going when others stop is the feeling, somewhere, in the back of your mind, that it’s not okay to fail. That it’s not okay to be a regular person, to just end up with a participant ribbon and to have a good time.

So to come back to Gladwell’s essay on football, I think he’s hit on something, but I’m not sure it’s what he thinks it is. Do coaches manipulate their players by sending them in to play when they shouldn’t? Sure. You can see this sort of thing in law firms too, where articling students kill themselves to impress their principals. But I was an articling student once, and the truth is that the master watching me fight wasn’t really outside the ring at all. It was in me. Unlike what Gladwell would have us believe, it’s not enough to ask coaches and mentors to lay off, because the pressure comes from the inside.

The sad reality is that there’s no way out for the game ones. For them, there’s no amount of success that will satisfy that figure moving around the edge of the ring, making sure that it’s always in their eye. And there’s no escaping it either because it’s inside them. They can’t help themselves and neither can anyone else. It’s a betrayal, but it’s a betrayal, somehow, of self. What a tragedy to think that so many of the people we admire may have been propelled to such dazzling heights by internal torments from which there is no relief.