John Lenon’s absolutely beautiful song “Beautiful Boy” was made even more famous as the title song for the movie starring Richard Dreyfus “Mr. Holland’s Opus.” In that song is the memorable line “Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans.” But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t plan. While the truism that defenses win championships is a huge part of winning, we can never underestimate the power of strategy. I have already written about the role of a coach and his team’s ability to make real time adjustments in winning. This blog is more about developing a strategy that requires preparation.
Preparation in professional and even college sports is a sophisticated combination of the science of performance, technology and scouting. In these ways teams can agi an upper hand by developing aspects of the game that will enhance their actual execution on the court or field. A team that recovered faster from injury, a team that knows the opponents tendencies and the team that knows who the opponents’ greatest assets are and plans accordingly will most often triumph. That is why all of the betting apps offer all of these insights and create their odds. Then there are the coaches who see something, invent something that raises the level of what the talent on the team is naturally able to achieve.
I know this is a little too theoretical, so let’s look at a specific example: a skillful coach combining natural talent, practice and insightful strategy. It is called the Triangle Offense in basketball. Here are the “X” and “O”’s.
The triangle offense is an offensive strategy used in basketball. Its basic ideas were created initially by coach Sam Barry. It was then developed by coach Tex Winter, who played for Barry in the late 1940s. Winter later served as an assistant coach for the Chicago Bulls in the 1980s and 1990s and for the Los Angeles Lakers in the 2000s, mostly under head coach Phil Jackson, who with the talent of Michael Jordan and Scottie Pipen and you can add any other Chicago Bull in the early 1990’s became nearly unbeatable. (Of course Michael Jordan could at any moment without any real strategy take the team on his back even suffering from the flu and beat pretty much anybody.) It was a brilliant adaptation, the kind that makes for athletic historical significance. Like players get better from watching other athletes, so too, coaches get better from studying other coaches.
It is the strategy, whether it be the initial strategy or the adjusted approach, that is at the core of any victory. While there are other factors that contribute to success, like the weather, injuries, talent it is the right method that is indispensable. That is why so many coaches or managers speak of players and entire teams “buying into the system,” or “trusting the system.” That is why at the core of every sport be it a team sport or an individual sport are the concepts of chess. (Go ahead, object that chess is not a sport, but hear me out.) Chess is the ultimate individual and team sport. There are individuals responsible for directing the action while it is still left to the capacity of the player or in this case piece.
- Professional chess has a timer.
- Chess has two opponents.
- Chess is about moving pieces (players) albeit slower than in other sports. The same could be said about soccer and hockey, which are essentially the same sport, with equally exasperatingly low scoring (and we wonder why so many fights break out).
- Each piece has a role and when they work well together they succeed and when asked to do what they are not capable of doing they fail.
- Chess is about controlling the board (which is just the name of the field it is played on.)
- Obviously, like all sports there are rules and etiquette, there are mistakes that are made and there are vulnerabilities that are exposed.
- Chess has its masters and its journeyman players and they all grow and learn as they play.
- Chess has an inner game, psychology and manipulation.
- Just like almost all sports injuries take its toll. In chess, taking players out is part of the game.
- In most team sports a few players work particularly well together such as a quarterback and a wide receiver, point guard and power forward making the game even more exciting to watch because even knowing it is coming it is hard to defend against. So too in chess. Watching or employing a connection between rooks or never lining up pawns on the same file are important inner parts of the game.
- In chess knowing when to speed up the game and when to slow down the game is important. Here I am referring to “hurry up offense” or “running out the clock.”
- Seemingly insignificant players can make a big difference, pawns can become queens.
- In most sports there is a key player that must be protected such as the goalie, the pitcher and the quarterback and there are players designated for protection. In chess, protect the King.
- Chess has an opening, a middle and end game in which the strategies change based on how far along in the competition they are.
- Like in wrestling or setting a pick in basketball pinning, rendering a specific player or players immoveable creates an advantage.
- Finally, in chess players retire because they can no longer play at the level they once did.
Like every sport, because of capitalism and globalization, we see the greatest players come from all over the world and are drawn to the sport because of great rivalries and because of the access to seeing them. In every sport there are people who transcend the sport and become household names. So too chess has its immediately familiar champions, Gary Kasporov, Magnus Carlson and of course Bobby Fischer. Just as in other sports, there are great movies and miniseries about chess. My favorites are the classic Searching for Bobby Fischer and Queens Gambit. And like every other sport, chess is a study in emotion filled with anxiety, intensity, momentum, strategy, reaction and execution and the more you understand the inner game, the greater the appreciation for those who do it well.
Like all sports, things don’t always go as planned. It just means you may have to alter them and in some cases learn and apply those learnings to the next game. Whether you believe in fate or destiny, all athletes and coaches trust that they participate in our own future just as they understand that not everything is in our own hands.
Things happen and we adjust. Whether we realize it at the time or not, we make singular decisions and life can take on an entirely new trajectory. And then we must recalibrate.