The failure to think in sport and life has a high price
How do people deal with unscripted reality?
The perfect sporting example of this is a cricket umpire suddenly facing a bowler and fielders screaming “HOWZAAAAAAT.” Infuriated audiences for many years watched slow motion replays that showed just how defective some of these decisions were. How long did it take cricket boards worldwide to concede that any unclear decision would be logically and far easily settled using television as a third umpire? An obscenely long time. Since then the same logic has been applied to other sports like rugby (but not, tennis or soccer).
When the uncertainty factor is high, the last thing people want to do is think. Thinking about real issues scares us. When we’re usually thinking whatever it is we like to think about it is commonly a fairly meaningless jumble. We mostly avoid thinking that involves clear concentration, and careful and precise evaluation. Because at the end of it we have to make choices. Yet exactly what is required when facing unscripted reality is this: thinking out of the box.
Here’s a firsthand example:
This Saturday morning I arrived at the registration tables for a cycle race. Not just any fun ride, but a Provincial Event. As a result of plenty of botched communications, and a failure to follow up on my part, I was told that if my name didn’t appear on a list I would not be able to ride. I asked: “Is it absolutely impossible that I can ride my bicycle in today’s race?” The woman whose job it was to find names on a list kept insisting I fall in line, and then proceeded to ignore me in favor of people not in line, proffering their licenses. The lawyer in me stormed, somewhat reluctantly, into action. I pointed out that I had called the event’s organizer, I had spoken to numerous heads of state in my club, and although promises were made and intentions were declared, my registration was left undone. Deaf ears.
Then, after indicating that I had just returned from a 10 day, 850km cycle tour, in part to prepare for this event, an impromptu meeting was held on my behalf. It was decided that since someone else had also been turned away, I should be turned away too, since no exceptions should be made. It occurred to me only a few moments later, with time to the start of my event fast running out, that unlike the other gentleman who had completely forgotten, I had made attempts to register and ultimately assumed backroom work had been done on my behalf. The problem was, everyone else had made similar assumptions. In the end, I didn’t ride. While the riders gathered for the 100km race, I got into my car and drove home with my bicycle in the back.
The point of the above is you have a problem with an unclear solution. If you want to hide in the paperwork you can confidently proclaim that without a license, in this case, without a name on a list, you cannot participate. That may make sense, especially if your job is to work with and administer pieces of paper. It may also make sense if your job is to write rules for cycle races. It may even make sense if you are the organizer of the event. It makes very little sense to someone who is actually participating, someone who has just taken annual leave in order to train day in and day out for events exactly like this one.
While Schindler’s list (‘the list is life) made sense in the madness of war, a list for a cycling event is less easy to justify.
If we’re going to think logically about our example, we can also pose this question: what if your name is on a list but you are not present? Isn’t that another version of being present but one’s name not being present? I mean, just how useful then, is the list, as an absolute token of How Things Stand. For example, my brother’s name was on the list, and he was probably 2 km away in his townhouse, applying paint to a canvas and happily remembering his Friday night movie date, while his license lay tucked away in some drawer. What is the point of that? What if most of the names on the list aren’t represented by real, present people? Now it becomes obvious that the list is meant to add credence to reality, the list is meant to backup firsthand reality, not prevent it from taking place. What good is a marriage license without two people willing and able to actually pitch up and get married, and be married? It’s worthless. Reality starts not with paperwork, but with reality itself. We human beings seem to be getting mixed up with that part.
Where thinking becomes useful, is looking at the mainframe, the mission, the guiding paradigm. In this case, you have a cycling event which is intended to measure and test the performances of the best cyclists in the state. Simple as that. In the same way that a car on the road ought to have a license, so should cyclists in these circumstances. A license is there to protect the driver and fellow road users. It’s given when it is clear that the car and its user are roadworthy. It’s a way to organize road users in a way that’s meant to help them. If you are caught driving without a license, you can be fined. You are not asked to remove your vehicle from the road, because it’s assumed that you can pretty much use the road without perfect administration behind you. In the case of this cycle race though, the thinking didn’t progress very far. Without a license you weren’t allowed on the road. To the organizers it seemed worthwhile to simply ban unlicensed riders, whatever their status, in order to get the desired result in future (100% use of licenses). As you can immediately see, no out of the box thinking, in fact, it’s fair to suggest that no thinking occurred of any kind. Meanwhile, the actual premise is lost. The highest priority is not to:
1) present a race to test the best local riders
and then:
2) make sure all competitors are licensed either on the day or immediately (but retrospectively) after.
No, the highest priority is:
1) Riders must be licensed.
They don’t have to ride, they must just be licensed. Great.
Thus it’s possible to hold an event in a scenario where no riders are licensed, meaning in reality there is no event actually taking place (but in terms of paper, there theoretically is). Should paper then predicate what happens? So if there is no paper or printer available in my chosen Italian town where I want to get married, does that mean I don’t/can’t? Surely it can be arranged post event?
So I wonder, if I was Lance Armstrong, pitching up out of the blue (without a license), if these officials would have been similarly intransigent. Sorry Lance, you can’t ride, see it’s only licensed riders. Oh you didn’t know. Too bad. You can sit and watch if you like.
It’s a very fair question. It’s based on the preference of written rules, and thought codes, over individuals. It may seem justified when dealing with the invisible person in the populace. It’s very, very difficult to justify when you have a finicky little rule preventing a force of nature, with a passion for cycling, someone who took a lot of trouble to show up. It’s easy to justify of course if you don’t think, don’t care and of course, suffer from a failure to use your own imagination.
Imagine my case then: Wilbur and I were at the cycle shop on Friday night until around 8pm swapping my triathlon bars for regular bars and having my rear wheel aligned. The point of the image is merely to demonstrate that people’s lives are involved beyond black and white names on a list. There is life beyond the confines of an a4 sheet of paper. Life is what’s urgent and important, not the piece of paper attempting to render it.
Another example of ridiculous psychology is in the case of South Africa’s World Champion swimmer, Roeland Schoeman. He recently competed at a world championship and won at least one gold medal. The cost to get him to Melbourne was around R50 000. A sponsor who had undertaken to assist him reneged on their commitment, and now Schoeman is stuck in Melbourne and unable to return to South Africa to compete in National Trials. Swimming South Africa are now moving to cut off their stipends to Schoeman (around R10 000 a month), and to basically disqualify him, not because he will not return to South Africa, but because he cannot. Naturally their move merely aggravates his situation.
Once again, the overall picture isn’t even glanced at. Here you have the world’s fastest swimmer, trying to get around, and his attempts to simply participate are being sabotaged by the fineprint. In the end, it really is about a lack of empathy and a lack of real support not only for the sport, but for the sportsman. Ryk Neethling in contrast is able to attend events willy nilly, but his sponsorships are less based on his performance (he is not a world champion in anything) than on good looks.
The fact that Swimming South Africa can even imagine, even suggest cutting the funding of their best swimmer (and the world’s best) not because of his failure to attend events, but because of their failure to support him (in contrast a foreign Middle Eastern country offered a multimillion dollar sponsorship deal), is so lamentably insane, all officials associated with this decision ought to be sacked with immediate effect.
The job of sports officials and any other person serving on a council, or a committee, or some or other body, is to serve its constituents.
But we already know that once people find themselves in a position of authority (however humble that authority may actually be), they find that very quickly their internal focus shifts from the original values that promised to espouse and to promote, to promoting themselves as authority figures, to having their say, with a say above those they are meant to help and represent. Thus you’ll find people who are older and fatter, giving instructions to a young and enthusiastic populace, and in that, I feel, is a kind of voyeurism. By expropriating power, by in fact denying someone who is ready, a chance in the sun, to perform, perhaps for them there is a kind of satisfaction. Perhaps it is based on a sense of: I am too old, and in any case not good enough. You who are not, need to feel what that’s like.
There may be some justice in that, if a particular twisted kind of justice. These sort of people, who are in authority, who quote bible verses or minutes of some meeting, or some rulebook, who do all these things without pausing a moment to actually absorb what is happening around them, or contemplate the sense of their actions, they ought to be immediately rooted out and ejected from their positions. People who do not swim should not sit on any kind of committee representing swimmers. People who do not cycle (and have never cycled) should not have any involvement in the lives of cyclists. Presidents who have not been to war should not be allowed to send his countrymen to war.
It should be made very clear that those who serve, serve. And that policy stems from constituents, not from those merely in positions to implement them. These same people who do nothing but paperwork, who stand up and oppose, should be prevented from contaminating the hearts and minds of people who love what they are doing. Words on a piece of paper ought not to be the most important thing on any given day. Human beings, for which those words were made, ought to have the sense to know that.
How do people deal with unscripted reality?
The perfect sporting example of this is a cricket umpire suddenly facing a bowler and fielders screaming “HOWZAAAAAAT.” Infuriated audiences for many years watched slow motion replays that showed just how defective some of these decisions were. How long did it take cricket boards worldwide to concede that any unclear decision would be logically and far easily settled using television as a third umpire? An obscenely long time. Since then the same logic has been applied to other sports like rugby (but not, tennis or soccer).
When the uncertainty factor is high, the last thing people want to do is think. Thinking about real issues scares us. When we’re usually thinking whatever it is we like to think about it is commonly a fairly meaningless jumble. We mostly avoid thinking that involves clear concentration, and careful and precise evaluation. Because at the end of it we have to make choices. Yet exactly what is required when facing unscripted reality is this: thinking out of the box.
Here’s a firsthand example:
This Saturday morning I arrived at the registration tables for a cycle race. Not just any fun ride, but a Provincial Event. As a result of plenty of botched communications, and a failure to follow up on my part, I was told that if my name didn’t appear on a list I would not be able to ride. I asked: “Is it absolutely impossible that I can ride my bicycle in today’s race?” The woman whose job it was to find names on a list kept insisting I fall in line, and then proceeded to ignore me in favor of people not in line, proffering their licenses. The lawyer in me stormed, somewhat reluctantly, into action. I pointed out that I had called the event’s organizer, I had spoken to numerous heads of state in my club, and although promises were made and intentions were declared, my registration was left undone. Deaf ears.
Then, after indicating that I had just returned from a 10 day, 850km cycle tour, in part to prepare for this event, an impromptu meeting was held on my behalf. It was decided that since someone else had also been turned away, I should be turned away too, since no exceptions should be made. It occurred to me only a few moments later, with time to the start of my event fast running out, that unlike the other gentleman who had completely forgotten, I had made attempts to register and ultimately assumed backroom work had been done on my behalf. The problem was, everyone else had made similar assumptions. In the end, I didn’t ride. While the riders gathered for the 100km race, I got into my car and drove home with my bicycle in the back.
The point of the above is you have a problem with an unclear solution. If you want to hide in the paperwork you can confidently proclaim that without a license, in this case, without a name on a list, you cannot participate. That may make sense, especially if your job is to work with and administer pieces of paper. It may also make sense if your job is to write rules for cycle races. It may even make sense if you are the organizer of the event. It makes very little sense to someone who is actually participating, someone who has just taken annual leave in order to train day in and day out for events exactly like this one.
While Schindler’s list (‘the list is life) made sense in the madness of war, a list for a cycling event is less easy to justify.
If we’re going to think logically about our example, we can also pose this question: what if your name is on a list but you are not present? Isn’t that another version of being present but one’s name not being present? I mean, just how useful then, is the list, as an absolute token of How Things Stand. For example, my brother’s name was on the list, and he was probably 2 km away in his townhouse, applying paint to a canvas and happily remembering his Friday night movie date, while his license lay tucked away in some drawer. What is the point of that? What if most of the names on the list aren’t represented by real, present people? Now it becomes obvious that the list is meant to add credence to reality, the list is meant to backup firsthand reality, not prevent it from taking place. What good is a marriage license without two people willing and able to actually pitch up and get married, and be married? It’s worthless. Reality starts not with paperwork, but with reality itself. We human beings seem to be getting mixed up with that part.
Where thinking becomes useful, is looking at the mainframe, the mission, the guiding paradigm. In this case, you have a cycling event which is intended to measure and test the performances of the best cyclists in the state. Simple as that. In the same way that a car on the road ought to have a license, so should cyclists in these circumstances. A license is there to protect the driver and fellow road users. It’s given when it is clear that the car and its user are roadworthy. It’s a way to organize road users in a way that’s meant to help them. If you are caught driving without a license, you can be fined. You are not asked to remove your vehicle from the road, because it’s assumed that you can pretty much use the road without perfect administration behind you. In the case of this cycle race though, the thinking didn’t progress very far. Without a license you weren’t allowed on the road. To the organizers it seemed worthwhile to simply ban unlicensed riders, whatever their status, in order to get the desired result in future (100% use of licenses). As you can immediately see, no out of the box thinking, in fact, it’s fair to suggest that no thinking occurred of any kind. Meanwhile, the actual premise is lost. The highest priority is not to:
1) present a race to test the best local riders
and then:
2) make sure all competitors are licensed either on the day or immediately (but retrospectively) after.
No, the highest priority is:
1) Riders must be licensed.
They don’t have to ride, they must just be licensed. Great.
Thus it’s possible to hold an event in a scenario where no riders are licensed, meaning in reality there is no event actually taking place (but in terms of paper, there theoretically is). Should paper then predicate what happens? So if there is no paper or printer available in my chosen Italian town where I want to get married, does that mean I don’t/can’t? Surely it can be arranged post event?
So I wonder, if I was Lance Armstrong, pitching up out of the blue (without a license), if these officials would have been similarly intransigent. Sorry Lance, you can’t ride, see it’s only licensed riders. Oh you didn’t know. Too bad. You can sit and watch if you like.
It’s a very fair question. It’s based on the preference of written rules, and thought codes, over individuals. It may seem justified when dealing with the invisible person in the populace. It’s very, very difficult to justify when you have a finicky little rule preventing a force of nature, with a passion for cycling, someone who took a lot of trouble to show up. It’s easy to justify of course if you don’t think, don’t care and of course, suffer from a failure to use your own imagination.
Imagine my case then: Wilbur and I were at the cycle shop on Friday night until around 8pm swapping my triathlon bars for regular bars and having my rear wheel aligned. The point of the image is merely to demonstrate that people’s lives are involved beyond black and white names on a list. There is life beyond the confines of an a4 sheet of paper. Life is what’s urgent and important, not the piece of paper attempting to render it.
Another example of ridiculous psychology is in the case of South Africa’s World Champion swimmer, Roeland Schoeman. He recently competed at a world championship and won at least one gold medal. The cost to get him to Melbourne was around R50 000. A sponsor who had undertaken to assist him reneged on their commitment, and now Schoeman is stuck in Melbourne and unable to return to South Africa to compete in National Trials. Swimming South Africa are now moving to cut off their stipends to Schoeman (around R10 000 a month), and to basically disqualify him, not because he will not return to South Africa, but because he cannot. Naturally their move merely aggravates his situation.
Once again, the overall picture isn’t even glanced at. Here you have the world’s fastest swimmer, trying to get around, and his attempts to simply participate are being sabotaged by the fineprint. In the end, it really is about a lack of empathy and a lack of real support not only for the sport, but for the sportsman. Ryk Neethling in contrast is able to attend events willy nilly, but his sponsorships are less based on his performance (he is not a world champion in anything) than on good looks.
The fact that Swimming South Africa can even imagine, even suggest cutting the funding of their best swimmer (and the world’s best) not because of his failure to attend events, but because of their failure to support him (in contrast a foreign Middle Eastern country offered a multimillion dollar sponsorship deal), is so lamentably insane, all officials associated with this decision ought to be sacked with immediate effect.
The job of sports officials and any other person serving on a council, or a committee, or some or other body, is to serve its constituents.
But we already know that once people find themselves in a position of authority (however humble that authority may actually be), they find that very quickly their internal focus shifts from the original values that promised to espouse and to promote, to promoting themselves as authority figures, to having their say, with a say above those they are meant to help and represent. Thus you’ll find people who are older and fatter, giving instructions to a young and enthusiastic populace, and in that, I feel, is a kind of voyeurism. By expropriating power, by in fact denying someone who is ready, a chance in the sun, to perform, perhaps for them there is a kind of satisfaction. Perhaps it is based on a sense of: I am too old, and in any case not good enough. You who are not, need to feel what that’s like.
There may be some justice in that, if a particular twisted kind of justice. These sort of people, who are in authority, who quote bible verses or minutes of some meeting, or some rulebook, who do all these things without pausing a moment to actually absorb what is happening around them, or contemplate the sense of their actions, they ought to be immediately rooted out and ejected from their positions. People who do not swim should not sit on any kind of committee representing swimmers. People who do not cycle (and have never cycled) should not have any involvement in the lives of cyclists. Presidents who have not been to war should not be allowed to send his countrymen to war.
It should be made very clear that those who serve, serve. And that policy stems from constituents, not from those merely in positions to implement them. These same people who do nothing but paperwork, who stand up and oppose, should be prevented from contaminating the hearts and minds of people who love what they are doing. Words on a piece of paper ought not to be the most important thing on any given day. Human beings, for which those words were made, ought to have the sense to know that.
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