Tonya Harding: Capitalist Hero

Tonya Harding had a problem, and the problem was named Nancy Kerrigan. Harding probably believed that she was a better skater than Kerrigan, and it's hard to come up with an objective way to judge the matter, except to note that in the sport of figure skating, it's the judges' opinions on the matter that set the standards. And the judges loved Kerrigan.

Well, sure. Kerrigan was tall, pretty, with high cheekbones and a toothy smile. She gave off the aura of aristocracy that the hard-scrabble Harding so obviously lacked. It was the Ice Queen vs Trailer Trash, and, really, who was going to win that deal?

Harding could have concentrated on improving the product. She could, perhaps, have spent even more time practicing (perhaps by inventing the 28 hour day). She'd already increased the difficulty of her routines, by adding the triple axle to her skills, a risky procedure, of course, and a bad enough injury could have ended her career. Or she could have worked on her looks, taken charm lessons, and so forth. But really, nothing short of cosmetic surgery was going to raise her cheekbones, and wouldn't the press have gotten a lot of mileage out of that?

So Harding did what any proper CEO would have done with a difficult competitor. She conspired to have Nancy Kerrigan kneecapped. I mean, after all, when Microsoft was competing with Word Perfect, you don't think they put all their efforts into making Word better, do you? Sometimes corporations buy their competitors instead, but that option is not available to Olympic athletes.

But she got caught, so morality carried the day, right? Harding appeared on the covers of both Time and Newsweek, but that was because she'd been bad, bad, and the 400 members of the press who were jammed into the practice rink in Lillehammer, Norway were there to insure that everyone got the proper moral lesson. Besides, she placed 8th, while Kerrigan placed second, and it was Kerrigan who later benefited the most from the figure skating boom that the sensationalism kicked off.

Still, once a celebrity, always a celebrity, and Harding had an internet sex tape released (with stills appearing in Penthouse), then later turned to boxing, first on the Fox TV network Celebrity Boxing event against Clinton accuser, Paula Jones, then later professionally in a short career. She should probably have gone for pro wrestling, where the villains make more money.

A cautionary tale? Perhaps. But a lot of people made a lot of money off of Tonya Harding, and she herself had more notoriety and more of a career than 99% of Olympic athletes. That she never managed to rise far enough to transcend her origins is unsurprising. Few do.

How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall?

When I was a regular on the old Compuserve Science Forum, the I.Q. debate came up fairly frequently, and one of the standard tangents was to start talking about sports and athletics. It is, after all, easier to see the consequences of athletic ability, and there are many, many statistics that are generated in sports as a matter of course, without having to create special tests to gather them.

One of the participants in one discussion reported that there was a considerable literature attempting to attribute success in sports to some separately testable ability, or even to correlate cross-sport success, to account for Bo Jackson, for example, although the case of Michael Jordan was also mentioned.

At any rate, our correspondent reported that all such statistical studies of sports yielded one primary component that correlated with success: the amount of time spent practicing and playing the sport in question. Everything else just vanished into the noise.

Now the "talent" side of the talent vs practice argument can come up with a quick explanation for the practice effect: self-selection. People who are naturally gifted at a given sport tend to enjoy playing and practicing that sport, so they practice more, etc. The difficulty with that explanation is that it is devilishly difficult to predict who is "talented" at a particular sport a priori, at least insofar as creating a testing matrix that will give a good prediction of later success.

There is a similar argument that has recently been made by the authors of Freakonomics.

Dubner and Levitt cite data that suggests that children who are some months older when they begin to play soccer (football to you Euros), owing to what time of the year the children were born, tend to be more heavily represented in professional teams. The argument here is that those few extra months of growth make the children a bit larger and quicker (on average) when they begin to play, so they have an extra edge, tend to do better from the beginning, and, hey, who doesn't spend more time on something that they're better at?

Notice, however, that we're talking about some pretty slim differences in ability here, equivalent to a few months worth of extra maturity, with the differences diminishing over time. So what you're really getting is a very strong feedback loop, where a little extra preliminary edge translates into huge differences in training and practice over time.

The Freakonomics source for this material is K. Anders Ericsson, who was probably the source for my original correspondent on Compuserve (thus do loops close on the Internet). Ericsson has been studying the practice effect phenomenon for several decades, and he's quite convinced that there is much less to talent than commonly believed. He does note that there are some sports that have physical constraints (no one has ever had to make the choice between being a Sumo wrestler or a jockey, for example), but other than that, Ericsson seems to believe that it's all about practice, and, more importantly, effective practice.

Again, drawing from sports, records are still being broken in most sports, on a regular basis. At some point, the total time spent on practice fills all available time, so there must be some improvements in how athletes practice in order for improvements to continue. And even if the improvements are such things as the use of anabolic steroids and HGH, there are still more (and less) effective ways of using those things. Weight training without steroids is more effective than the other way around, for example.

There's one other phenomenon that is often overlooked in the talent/practice debate, however, and that is the random factor. In sports, that is most obvious in how injuries can derail careers. Certainly some of the improvements in training over the past century involve learning how to train with less risk of being injured, but in the heat of the game, injuries happen. Then, later, great pressure is placed on the athlete to "play through it," and thereby increase the severity of the injury. It takes a really tough-minded coach to demand that a player wait until fully recovered before resuming competition. Most are going to go for the appearance of tough-mindedness; after all, there are always plenty more guys who want to play the game. Besides, it's hard to keep up the practice from the sidelines.

Bowling

[Crossposted at WAAGNFPN]

At Eastshore Aikikai, where I practice Aikido, we’re pushing the geriatric envelope pretty hard. I’m in my mid-fifties and I’m in no way the oldest person in the dojo; there are also several students who are only a few years younger than I am. Get off my lawn, you whippersnappers or I’ll throw you off.

My mother is in her 80s, though, and she still belongs to a bowling league. Granted, bowling is a lot lower impact than Aikido. It’s also the only one of two sports I know of where people regularly die during participation, the other being golf. Of course the reason for that is that both are sports that have participants of any age, including the very old.

Or the very young. Tiger Woods famously appeared on The Mike Douglas Show at the age of 2. I wasn’t that young when I began bowling, but I started before I entered grade school, although I didn’t join a league until some years later. My dad was manager at a total of three bowling alleys over the years, and I was in a league in all of them.

You’d think I would have gotten really good at it, but actually I was only in the upper reaches of average. The highest I ever scored was 236, and my league average hovered around 170 from late high school to the last league I was in, sometime in the late 80s. the highest it ever got was about 175. I’ve fallen away from the faith since then, so nowadays I bowl a little less often than I golf, which is to say every year or two, when I’m visiting relatives. My bowling is still a lot better than my golf, however.

Being in a bowling league is interesting from an intellectual snob’s standpoint. Despite numerous attempts to move upscale, bowling is still a pretty working class activity, so you wind up rubbing shoulders with truck drivers, beauticians, policemen, and mail carriers. That’s all to the good, in my opinion. It did become less fun when automatic scoring came in, since it eliminated my natural ecological niche: scorekeeper. In fact, I was keeping score in my parents’ leagues well before I belonged to a league on my own.

I’ve occasionally joked that I’m genetically selected for bowling, given that my parents met in a bowling league. It was better joke when I was bowling regularly and I could show people that my right thumb was bigger than my left. I still own two bowling balls, plus bags, shoes, etc.

After my car was broken into in college, where the thieves smashed a window to get in, I took to keeping my car unlocked, never leaving anything in it that was more valuable than repairing a broken window. The only significant thing that’s been stolen since then was my bowling bag, with ball. The humor there was almost worth the loss; a used bowling ball is worth maybe fifty cents, the bag a dollar or two. I like to imagine the thief hauling the sixteen pound ball into the pawn shop or thrift store, only to find out that he’d have made more money panhandling.

Some of my earliest memories are of bowling alleys (I still call them alleys, never having gotten used to saying “bowling lanes”). I’m just barely old enough to remember pin boys, before automatic pin spotters came in. In Nashville, they were invariably black, with the phrase “pin boys” echoing the generally demeaning practice of calling all black men in a service job “boy.” I don’t have any specific recollection of any of the pin boys, but I do have the general recollection that they were all teenagers, given the athletics necessary to hop up onto a perch above the pins when the ball came down the alley, then jump down and reset the pins when time came.

The woman who handed out the bowling shoes was not in her teens, however. She was a middle aged black woman whose name I don’t quite recall, but I want to say, “Miz Abigail,” or “Miz Abbey.” She befriended the little 2-3 year old tyke and let me stay behind the desk with her and hand out the shoes.

I learned, many years later, that the bowling league that my parents belonged to included a company team sponsored by the firm of Acuff-Rose, which included one of the principals, Fred Rose, and one of the artists managed by Acuff-Rose, Hank Williams. Williams died in 1953, and Rose in 1954. The dates are such that it’s just barely possible that I once handed Hank Williams his bowling shoes.

I’ve heard a possibly apocryphal story that Lyndon Johnson insisted on including the public accommodations portion of the 1964 Civil Right Act so that his old housekeeper wouldn’t have to “pee in the bushes” when she drove from Texas up to Washington to visit. It has the ring of truth, because Johnson took his politics personally. He might listen to varying interpretations of the commerce clause, but in the end he knew that politics came down to a pissing match, and a good many southern boys have at least one Miz Abigail in among their warmest memories.

I.Q.

Suppose you wanted to put together a test of athletic ability, maybe to aid in the scouting of players for some team. Here’s one way you could do it. Give the subject a series of tests, like how much can he bench press, how fast can he run the 100, the quarter mile, the mile, how high can he jump, etc? Be sure to include some eye-hand coordination tasks, some height, weight, and bulk measurements, in fact, put in everything you can think of.

Now just add up all the scores, and viola! You’ve got your “A. Q.” measurement.

Well, that isn’t very good, is it? At the very least, you’re probably double counting some abilities, at least partly. After all, the speed tests probably correlate to some degree, as do a lot of strength tests. So let’s put all our scores through a mathematical procedure called “principle component analysis” (PCA). That will “orthogonalize” our test scores, and give you a series of “principle components” or “principle factors” that do not correlate with each other. You might wind up with uncorrelated factors that largely correspond to “strength”, “flexibility” and “reaction time.” Alternately, you might wind up with factors that look like “weightlifter”, “swimmer”, or “racketball player.” In truth, what you’re going to wind up with is a series of mathematical constructs, whose sole reason for existence is that each one is largely uncorrelated to the others. Also, owing to the nature of PCA, you’re only going to wind up with two or three components before measurement variance turns the remaining factors into gibberish or noise.

You could, of course, then call the largest component “general athletic ability,” and call the second component “crystallized athletic ability.” That’s how it’s done with I.Q. after all.
With athletic tests, of course, it’s pretty easy to see the problem. We know that upper body strength is different from eye-hand coordination, and that neither of them have much to do with how fast you can run 100 meters from a standing start. To be sure, there might well be some correlation; someone who is old, sick, sedentary, or drunk isn’t likely to be very good at any of them and that is correlative. But it’s still obvious that they are different abilities.

Moreover, our hypothetical scout doesn’t give a damn about “overall athletic ability.” If he’s a baseball scout, he wants to know how well the player can play baseball. There’s a cluster of skill associated with baseball, and that cluster is different from other sports. There’s no other sport where being left-handed is rewarded to the extent that it is in baseball, for example.
Similarly, height is useful to a basketball player, in almost exactly the way that it isn’t helpful to a jockey. Nor will you see many people who are triple threats in weightlifting, pistol shooting, and figure skating.

So while our scout might very well give a battery of tests to a potential player, those tests will be different, or at least weighted very differently, from one given by a scout for a different sport. And in any case, the eventual test of the matter will be in how well the player plays the sport.
While this may be obvious when it is applied to physical characteristics, for some reason, people don’t find it obvious when applied to mental characteristics. Maybe it’s because mental characteristics are abstract that people want a number to go with them, but I don’t find that argument persuasive. After all, there are all those baseball statisticians.

For my own part, I’ve gone from once putting a lot of value on I.Q. testing and scores to putting almost no value on it at all. I’ll stipulate that testing has been very good to me, giving me access to an education and a profession that I’d not have had, given the other aspects of my origins. But I’ve known too many smart people who tested poorly, and too many people who test well whose judgment I would not trust on anything.

Moreover, I’ve become very aware over the years of all the different mental skills that people possess, and how often one very different trait can substitute for another. And I’ve also seen how many times test scores of one sort or another have been used to beat up on the disadvantaged, to cut them out of the opportunity to even play the game.