Champions – Winners and Game Changers

Champions – the word resurrects and resonates POWER. The intent of this blog is look at how difficult it is to interpret what champions are made of and what could be inside their head, which separates them from the ordinary. The field am taking on in this blog in is international sport – an area of keen interest to me.

Let’s start with the latest headline to hit the sport’s fraternity – Tennis and Wimbledon. By the time this blog hits your mailbox, am certain you would have read about the remarkable win, Roger Federer had last night in the Wimbledon men’s finals beating Roddick. The win catapults him back to world No. 1 which he had for a consecutive 250 weeks plus – phenomenal for any individual. But that alone does not make him great, but to win 15 single’s men’s grand slams, making him the only one to achieve this feat makes him the greatest. This feat was achieved in front some of the best tennis stars the game has ever witnessed, for the likes of Sampras, Borg, Laver, Becker, Edberg and others, and in front of superstars of other sports like, Sachin Tendulkar, Micheal Ballack – the German football captain and Chelsea Midfielder and of course Sir Alex Ferguson of Manchester United.

So what makes Federer the champion? Books have been written trying to decipher what’s inside a champion’s mind, millions of analyses have gone into find the functioning of the brain, of a champion, but none have arrived with a true cut answer – we know how infinite and miraculous the human brain can be. Let me relate to a book I had read called ‘BLINK’, by Malcolm Gladwell, where the author through significant different researches tries to find an answer to the question we are talking about. He talks about how successful ‘SNAP’ judgements, made by human beings are, in comparison to the one’s we logically arrive at. Let me illustrate this with an example from a lay man’s life – do we logically probe ourselves before we propose to guy or a gal, its instinctive and that what blink is all about. To put the same into perspective, with respect to last night’s match, Roddick flinched twice – leading 6-2 in the second set tie breaker, allowing Federer to win the set and last game of the match. Both time Federer blinked to be successful. The second set win nearly demoralised Roddick out of the match. He was nearly mentally disintegrated by Federer’s play. Mental disintegration – a term very synonymous with the Australian cricket team and Steve Waugh.

Commentators and analysts often speak about the champion’s self belief in his abilities and self confidence. Let me throw something at you, totally out of the box, for you to chew – I believe, self belief in one’s own abilities, comes from not succumbing to one’s fear of failures, which is a direct relationship of being in the present and not relating to past events of one’s life. We have often heard commentators state a player being “In the Zone” – what does that mean? In pure terms, one being with oneself in that very moment of life as life happens, and not even contemplating a nano second about the past or the future.

Now let’s look at self confidence. It’s totally the reverse of what you just read. Self confidence arises from the fact that you had done a good job of the same event in the past. Putting it into perspective, Federer’s confidence arises from the number of wins he has had under his belt in the past years and hours of practise he has put in. It’s so paradoxical that, even ontology can be given a run. But to look deeper, we can argue that self confidence come from looking at the abilities that you have versus the task you have to render. If you look carefully, I have not used the word capability, as, this word arises from the comparison of your abilities to either your own past, or with a friend, a peer, a relative etc. So capability becomes an evil and does not allow you to be in the present or be in your zone, but be in the zone you are comparing yourself with.

So when we can’t decipher on how a champion illustrates his self belief or confidence or for, matter of fact, we can’t decipher the ideal meaning of self belief and self confidence how are we going to look into the functioning of a champion’s brain.

The struggle into this investigation continues and champions keep arising every moment.

The next blog will look at how these champions become game changers.