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Chapter 1

Testing the Waters

“My mother came flying out of the stands and caught me right before I got to the dressing room. She told me to give it a shot and if, after a couple of weeks, I still hated it, I wouldn’t have to do it; but I couldn’t just walk away. So I went back to the pool, and the rest, as they say, is history.”

—GEORGE GROSS JR., WATER POLO PLAYER

To finish requires a start. At the first point on the arc of transition, “testing the waters,” you see exciting possibilities, engage with opportunities, and learn formative lessons that live on long after you’ve progressed to higher levels. These early experiences influence the climb to success and inform the multitude of challenges people often face once the spotlight fades and a career ends—and they are left questioning what comes next.

For athletes starting out, several variables may shape their young identities: a culture of high performance, family involvement, a desire for a better life, and the growing adoration of others for their benchmark achievements. Exposure to coaches, teachers, and mentors, and the weight of expectation—the athlete’s and that of others—also factor in.

All high performers have a story about how they started. As we explore this point on the arc more deeply, take time to reflect on who and what were a part of your own beginnings and how they shaped your journey to a personal best.

FAMILY AND CULTURAL INFLUENCES

At the earliest stage of an athlete’s development, parents, coaches, neighbours, and society play indelible roles. Long before their offspring attain athletic glory, parents of the young gymnast, runner, skater, or swimmer may have encouraged them to sign up at the local community centre for some fun activities with other children. Young athletes often learn that sports can be an enjoyable pathway for building skills and confidence before they’re old enough to truly absorb the future effects of the discipline instilled in them through training. The same is true for the young dancer, actor, chef, or computer programmer. When adults direct children toward activities, they hope that the young ones will find the endeavour engaging. However, many parents put their children in activities specifically to give them an advantage in life. Music can link the left and right sides of the brain; sports can provide early coordination, structure, and, for some, a scholarship. Math tutors can hone supplemental skills while providing confidence. The long-term effects of this desire to get our kids ahead in life are usually made with good intentions but are not without consequences—some positive and some negative.

The parents of Sarah Gairdner, an Olympian and multiple world champion in double mini-trampoline, got involved in her sport, but they didn’t control her experience. Sarah describes her father as the most positive person you could meet. Her mother spent hours at the gym with her. “Some parents would sit up in the stands and know every move,” she tells me. “My mom didn’t have a clue what I was doing! She just crossed her fingers and hoped that I wouldn’t get hurt!” Sarah’s mother and father took her lead about her involvement in sport: “‘Whatever you are comfortable with’ was what they would say to me,” Sarah says. Such encouraging, hands-off parental relationships can help young athletes develop an “I can do it!” attitude, and a comfortableness with trying and failing and trying again.

My parents weren’t particularly interested in sports, but they helped me find outlets for my need to move. They created opportunities for me. And this was in the mid-1970s, when exercise was not a part of the popular vocabulary the way it is now. Marnie McBean, a three-time Olympic gold medallist in rowing (1992, 1996), speaks about her parents similarly to the way I describe mine:

My parents aren’t athletic, but they were pretty amazing, particularly my mom. They were good at encouraging me to try new things. My mom told me to never say no to an opportunity because I didn’t know how to do it, whether it was guitar or figure skating or gymnastics or swimming. Whenever I showed any curiosity for something, they were willing to enrol me in lessons—the rule being that I had to see the full course of the lessons out, and then at the end we could discuss whether or not I would continue.

The encouragement of Marnie’s mother took hold in the sport of rowing. When Marnie asked about how to learn to row, her mom didn’t know the answers but made sure they found out. She also ensured Marnie was involved in all aspects of the sport, even in the high school fundraisers. “We were selling oranges and grapefruits, and she would let me sell them in her office, but she would also make me come in to her office and put up the poster.” Her mom insisted that Marnie make fundraising phone calls herself: “To this day, that lesson remains,” she says.

Sarah, Marnie, and I all found in our parents a secure base—a support system to encourage us, that was there in times of need, and that let us find our motivation to succeed.

Parents have a huge influence on a child’s life, even when they are not physically present. Stu Isaac, one of my coaches at Michigan, who now uses his expertise to develop aquatic and sports facilities, speaks about his father: “My dad died when I was twelve. He continued to be an influence on me for a long time. Not because he was there, but because I . . . held him up on a very high pedestal.” The death of Stu’s father was a pivotal event in Stu’s life as a swimmer: “A week and a half after my dad died, my mom was carting me to Albany, New York, for a swim meet. Life went on, and we made the best of it. And that was kind of a breakthrough, because that’s when I broke my first national age group record, just ten days after my dad had died. I think her ability to continue on even though it was a crushing blow was probably the single greatest lesson I learned from her.”

Although what motivates each child to pursue a specific endeavour is unique, the promise of fame and fortune is one factor that cannot be ignored. There are two-year-olds out there being moulded for “greatness.” Children learn early on that they want to be a part of the celebrations, awards, and adoration they see on TV and read about in the social media feeds of their favourite stars.

Many of us contribute to this growing enthusiasm. We cheer and scream, celebrate and complain, live and die according to the success or failure of “our” team, of “our” favourite athlete. We follow the Maple Leafs, Yankees, Lakers, Wolverines, Manchester United, and so on, with our friends and family. We might root for the same team our parents cheered for. The budding athlete who loves to practice tumbling routines on the carpet, play T-ball at the park, or hit a tennis ball against a concrete wall gets caught up in these early cultural influences.

Then there are the children who need to prove something or escape a life of boredom, poverty, or worse. Take Kansas Jayhawks basketball player Udoka Azubuike. His childhood in Nigeria was filled with “poverty, heartache, terrorism and fear,” as he told a writer for Bleacher Report. As a child, Azubuike witnessed robberies, shootings, kidnappings, and killings in broad daylight. “I just got away from it as fast as I could,” he says. “I saw so many terrible things, so much violence . . . I don’t like my mind to think back on it.”

As talented youngsters get stronger, faster, and more coordinated, people take notice of them. Azubuike was first spotted at a Basketball Without Borders camp. He said about leaving Nigeria and immigrating to Jacksonville, Florida, at the age of thirteen, “I didn’t think twice . . . I wanted to survive.”¹

For promising young athletes, first supporters include more than just parents and local coaches. Teachers, neighbours, and family friends may also play a role. In a few cases, well-known heroes of the sport encourage up-and-coming athletes and may help them navigate increasing social pressures. Toward the end of his stellar hockey career, Gordie Howe encouraged ten-year-old Wayne Gretzky, which years later Gretzky said felt like “winning the Stanley Cup for the first time.”²

Through participation, young athletes are on the receiving end of a wide range of emotions: happiness, sadness, surprise, disappointment, fear, anger, and disgust. Those first competitions, those first expectations and challenges, form the foundations of athletic identity. Sport can be a wonderful venue for early feelings of satisfaction, confidence, and belonging. Young athletes discover the importance of teamwork and of working together for a common goal. Parents, friends, and fans cheer them on, supporting and congratulating them every step and every score of the way:

“Way to go! Great game!”

“That’s a fantastic swim you had!”

“Wow, you rocked that!”

“What a catch!”

“I’m so proud of you!”

The praise and encouragement is positive, uplifting . . . and addictive.

Alongside meeting daily expectations set by others, such praise can create an unintended habit of people-pleasing as the athlete steps up to standards set by others. Our early environments can create subconscious behaviour patterns in our later lives. Constantly trying to satisfy authority figures is a never-ending game. It’s natural for children to want to please the people they love, respect, and learn from. This can quickly turn into a habit of performance for praise, but when the child does not perform, the praise might stop. For every star athlete there are many youngsters who never reach the heights that others hope for them and so may believe they have disappointed the adults in their lives.

THAT FIRST REAL BREAK (HOWEVER SMALL)

My first real break as an athlete came when I was ten years old. In fact, it wasn’t really a break, and I didn’t really consider myself an athlete in those days, but I did win the Bike Safety Rodeo Award, a prize sponsored by the London, Ontario, Optimist Club. That sense of excitement and accomplishment, the realization that other people were watching and supporting me, the idea that I was in charge of my own performance and result, the joy in feeling encouragement and celebration—all these things affected me back then, and the reverberations of them stay with me to this day.

When I received that award (the plaque is now in a box somewhere at my parents’ house), I felt profound satisfaction. It didn’t really matter that my two older sisters laughed at me. “Big deal!” their laughter implied. “That award is for nerds!” To me, the prize was so much more. It signalled that I was beginning to test myself, to find my unique strengths. My oldest sister was good at school and rode horses. My other sister was interested in music. And then there was my brother . . . the boy. This first award, my award, demonstrated that I, too, was special.

Not long after I won the award, a family friend encouraged me to start swimming. My long arms and legs and my big feet may be why people saw athletic potential in me. My parents had encouraged me to take a Red Cross swimming and water-safety course, and one of the instructors suggested I consider competitive swimming. In my naive enthusiasm, I went home and asked my parents to sign me up.

I didn’t realize I had to try out, and I didn’t understand the swimming hierarchy: there were big differences between the “A” pool group and the “D” pool group. I was thrilled when I was selected for the “C” group—I thought I had won the jackpot! I was now doing “competitive swimming” for forty-five minutes, three times a week. From that moment on, I’ve never looked back. I had found something I wanted to be good at.

This expanding encouragement was part of the pathway that eventually led me, at the age of fourteen, to leave my home and family in London, Ontario, for Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where I attended Pine Crest high school. I was excited by the adventure and the opportunity, but it also meant I would be swimming in uncharted waters. When I moved away from home, the only condition my parents set was that I commit to spending an entire school year in Florida. When I visited them at Christmas, I knew I had to return to the States for school at the end of the holiday.

Early involvement in sport shapes elite amateur and professional athletes. Your natural physical abilities, the capacity to train and work hard, the willingness to take instruction, and the success (and sometimes the money that results, in the massively successful spectator sports) are what you become known for and what society celebrates. But, just as with me, it all starts with a little sprinkle of support, a speck of personal pride, a commitment to try, and a bit of recognition by those who have influence.

THE GROWING COMMUNITY

At this early stage of development, members of the larger team—parents, coaches, and friends—form around you, influencing your trajectory. Your communities can be incredibly influential. Whether it is in sports, school, or the arts, we are all sculpted by those that surround us.

George Gross Jr. is one of the most successful water polo players Canada has ever produced. His parents and first teammates played a huge role in how he became a top-level athlete, but the path there was not direct. Perhaps influenced by his father, George Gross Sr.—a sports journalist who was inducted into various sports halls of fame and received the high honour of the Olympic Order—George Jr. started out playing in multiple disciplines (soccer, volleyball, basketball, tackle football), trying to become excellent at each. But the wisdom of his mother stayed with him. “One of the favourite sayings of my mother, which came to her from Hungary, where she grew up,” he says, “was ‘If you try to sit on too many chairs at once, you fall on the floor.’”

George’s mother encouraged him to be a swimmer, even though he was, in his words, “deathly afraid of the water” until he was nine years old. He was too small to play hockey, and his family couldn’t afford to buy him hockey skates, so swimming it was. His mother suggested that he go to a summer swim camp, where he learned how to get comfortable in deep water. That fall, she recommended he join a competitive swim club that family friends were sending their daughter to: “So I walked on the deck and the coach for my age group said, ‘Okay, everyone get in the water and warm up with a 300-yard swim,’” George says. “That was twelve lengths! I turned around and walked off the deck. Swimming twelve lengths? I couldn’t do it!” But with his mother’s encouragement, he stuck with it.

He made three new friends who were national record holders, and they needed a fourth person for the relay team. “So there I was,” he says. “I had barely learned how to swim and was winning and setting a Canadian national record as part of a relay team. All I had to do was get to the other end of the pool. That’s how my career in swimming got started.”

Talk about the importance of first teammates! Before he could even appreciate them, George had strong connections to sport and understood the importance of the team. And what if there hadn’t been a three-boy swim relay team looking for a fourth member? Would he have had his incredibly successful career in the pool, which included his Yale University team going undefeated for three years, the 1976 and 1984 Olympics, and then his distinguished career as a coach and administrator?³

For others, testing the waters truly begins when they break away from negative influence and forge forward with new plans. Sports can provide this shift. Andrew English, who eventually played for the University of British Columbia and the Toronto Argonauts and Hamilton Tiger Cats in the Canadian Football League, recalls that, in Grade 8, he sensed he was heading down the wrong path. “The best mark I had in school was a C- in gym. Everything else was awful,” he says. “I was into hanging out with the cool crowd and going to parties and that sort of thing. Then something clicked inside me: that I didn’t necessarily have to be that way. I had a couple of friends who kind of motivated me . . . I started to see where I was heading. And knew that I didn’t want that future.” For Andrew, by choosing sport, his attitude shifted, his view of his identity changed, and the regulation of his daily schedule helped focus his attention toward healthier options and opportunities.

THE ENVIRONMENT

We are all influenced by our environment. For athletes, the culture of sports can become the air we breathe; it’s there on the dusty soccer fields near our homes, it’s waiting for us on those cold early mornings at the local hockey rink. It’s part of our being. A child in Texas or Nebraska will likely be encouraged to play football. In many countries of Europe or South America, kids kick a soccer ball around as one of their first outdoor activities. In small-town Canada, there’s usually an ice rink not too far away. Skiing in Colorado. Swimming in Florida. Running track in Jamaica. Cricket in India. The list goes on.

In an autobiographical essay for The Players’ Tribune, Brazilian footballer Ronaldo reminisces about a World Cup tradition from his youth:

In Brazil, there’s this tradition every four years before the tournament starts. You go out and you paint the streets of your town. It’s sort of a competition to see who ends up with the most beautiful murals and pavements. So, for the 1982 World Cup, just like every other kid in my country, I went out and painted my street with the other children who lived beside me. Everyone in our town would take part, and then murals were everywhere . . . in all kinds of colors and designs—birds, the Brazilian flag, players on the national team.

Ronaldo says that, by the time he was five years old, “I already saw my life around football. I don’t know how to explain it, but I just connected with the sport right away. It was just there . . . inside me.” For Ronaldo, football is “like an addiction,” and “a football pitch is the most perfect thing in the world.”

In 2002, after Ronaldo won his second World Cup (the first was in 1994), he and his teammates stopped in various Brazilian cities on their way home. “Those were some of the best days of my life. Seeing all the people in our country, and all the happiness. Seeing murals everywhere. But now . . . with our faces on them.” Yes, football is part of Ronaldo’s soul.⁴ There is a child in Brazil who looked at those murals, experienced the celebrations, and is now engaging some of the nine practices at every opportunity to emulate his heroes. Ronaldo has played it forward.

Every one of the athletes I interviewed for this book speaks about the influence of the environment they grew up in on their career in sports. The Players’ Tribune and Bleacher Report are full of personal stories— both the struggles and the successes—of athletes on their way up or down the sports ladder. The story of Mikal Bridges, a standout NCAA basketball player for Villanova, is particularly inspiring. With his seven-foot-two-inch arm span, Mikal has been known by various nicknames, including Noodles, Inspector Go Go Gadget, String Bean, and Praying Mantis. His mother, Tyneeha Rivers, says her son always had “ridiculous, stupid-long arms.” One article explores how the environment Mikal grew up in with his mother influenced his approach to sport:

Tyneeha Rivers was a 19-year-old sophomore in college when she had Mikal. She raised her son as a single mother and refused to quit school, attending class at night and working in a company mail room by day . . . “I didn’t want Mikal to have to struggle like I did,” she says, beginning to cry . . . Some days she was so exhausted from mothering, studying and working that she wanted to collapse. But she persisted and graduated . . . So when people ask her about her son’s hustle, how hard he boxes out, she smiles. She doesn’t know any other way to operate, and neither does he.⁵

One reason for looking at the ascent to a personal best is to understand the effect that factors like early environments can have as you move toward a personal next. Your environment may stimulate your ambitions or fuel a desire to escape it; it can enhance self-worth or destroy potential.

EARLY COACHES

I don’t like getting wet! I know that’s a pretty strange thing for a swimmer to say. I’m fine with warm water—hot tubs and hot showers—but I never liked the cold water of the swimming pool. I still don’t. I don’t enjoy jumping in and feeling that frigid water swallow me up.

But my first coaches figured me out pretty quickly. They knew how to get me going, what my strengths were, and what I needed to work on. I’d stand around and talk to them about stuff—the weather, the latest movies, maybe some detail about yesterday’s results or tomorrow’s meet—until they realized that I was just trying to avoid the water, at which point they’d tell me to get my butt in there and start doing the workout! Once I was in the water (and feeling the blood pumping), I felt right at home.

Everyone needs coaches or mentors who know when to push and when to congratulate, when to encourage and when to get angry. The attitude that if you work at something, you can get better at it is one coaches look for and, wittingly or not, they give those who display such an attitude that little bit of extra attention. Under the influence of first coaches, athletes on the way up learn the character-building value of hard work and repetition, the importance of listening, and how to recover quickly from the inevitable losses and tough feedback.

FOR ANY HIGH PERFORMER, it is the influence of family and community, the environment, coaches, and society that help instill the nine practices that eventually make success possible. But once you’ve made the team and started to meet, and exceed, expectations and gain momentum, you begin to realize that increasing levels of achievement require a deeper commitment. This leads you to the next point on our journey along the arc of transition.

TIME OUT: A SELF-INTERVIEW

Take a time out to consider the influence that the early part of your career had on you. For these, and for the “time out” questions in each chapter, you may want to jot down your answers in a journal or share them with a trusted support person.

•Think about your own story of starting out. Who were your early supporters, champions, and influencers? Who acted as your secure base and encouraged you to seek challenges, take risks, and explore alternatives?

•Consider who was most influential on you. What is the most important lesson you still carry with you today that you learned from that person?

•Early expectations of others can create early success. Did you feel expectations, and how did these (positively or negatively) influence your trajectory?