Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice. Matthew Syed

      

      Bounce

      How Champions Are Made

      Matthew Syed

       Copyright

      First published in Great Britain in 2010

      Fourth Estate

      A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.4thestate.co.uk

      Copyright © Matthew Syed 2010

      The right of Matthew Syed to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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      Source ISBN: 9780007350520

       Ebook Edition: 9780007350537

      Version: 2018-08-02

       For Dilys

      Table of Contents

       Cover Page

       Title Page

Copyright

       Dedication

PART I The Talent Myth

1 The Hidden Logic of Success

2 Miraculous Children?

       3 The Path to Excellence

       4 Mysterious Sparks and Life-Changing Mindsets

       PART II Paradoxes of the Mind

       5 The Placebo Effect

       6 The Curse of Choking and How to Avoid It

       7 Baseball Rituals, Pigeons, and Why Great Sportsmen Feel Miserable after Winning

       PART III Deep Reflections

       8 Optical Illusions and X-ray Vision

       9 Drugs in Sport, Schwarzenegger Mice, and the Future of Mankind

       10 Are Blacks Superior Runners?

       Notes

       Index

       Acknowledgements

       About the Publisher

PART I The Talent Myth

       1 The Hidden Logic of Success

      The Autobiographical Bias

      In January 1995, I became the British number-one table tennis player for the very first time which, I am sure you will agree, is a heck of an achievement. At twenty-four years of age, I suddenly found myself on the receiving end of regular invitations to speak to school audiences about my rise to international glory, and would often take my gold medals along to dazzle the youngsters.

      Table tennis is a pretty big sport in the UK, with 2.4 million participants, 30,000 paid-up members of the governing body, thousands of teams, and serious riches for those who excel. But what made me special? What had marked me out for sporting greatness? I came up with a number of attributes: speed, guile, gutsiness, mental strength, adaptability, agility, and reflexes.

      Sometimes I would marvel at the fact that I had these skills in such abundance that they were capable of elevating me – little me! – beyond hundreds of thousands of others aspiring to that precious top spot. And all this was doubly amazing, considering I had been born into a family in an ordinary suburb of an ordinary town in south-east England. There was no silver spoon. No advantages. No nepotism. Mine was a triumph of individuality; a personal odyssey of success, a triumph against the odds.

      This, of course, is the way that many who have reached the top in sport, or indeed in any other field, choose to tell their stories. We live in a culture that encourages this kind of soaring individualism. Hollywood is full of such narratives, often sugarcoated in that well-known American Dream sentimentality. But while these stories are inspirational, rousing, and compulsively entertaining, are they true? Here is my story in table tennis, retold with the bits that I chose to ignore the first time around, as they diminished the romance and the individuality of my triumph.

       1. Table

      In 1978 my parents, for reasons they are still unable to explain (neither of them plays table tennis), decided to buy a table tennis table – a super deluxe 1000 with gold lettering, since you ask – and to put it in our large garage. I don’t know the exact percentage, but you can imagine that there were not many youngsters of my age in my home town who possessed a full-size, tournament-specification table. Fewer still had a garage in which it could be housed full-time. This was my first bit of good fortune.

       2. My Brother

      My second piece of good fortune was having an older brother called Andrew who came to love table tennis as much as I. We would play for hours in the garage after school: duelling, battling, testing each other’s