Bounce

"Bounce is fascinating. Matthew Syed was Britain’s number one table-tennis player for about 10 years and he’s now a top sports journalist on The Times. He writes extremely well. His thesis is that talent isn’t what matters, it’s all about hours and hours of training. The conventional view, and certainly my view before reading this book, is that some people are supremely gifted and therefore rise to the top of sport. But he says talent has got little, if anything, to do with success and it’s all to do with circumstances and the amount of practice they get. He gives example after example. To me the most fascinating example is of a Hungarian called Polgar in the 1960s who formed the same view. He advertised for a wife, found a wife and had three daughters. Then he thought: ‘What can I train them to do that has unquestionable standards and it’s not judged subjectively?’ He hit on chess . So, he set about making them interested in and practising chess and all three daughters became, successively, the best in the world – first female grandmaster, championships at the age of 14 and so on. But you see, you cannot make people do something like that. You have to get them passionately, passionately interested. Not according to this account. Polgar got his daughters interested to the point where all they wanted to do was play chess. In his own case, Syed explains how he became a top table-tennis player. His older brother liked playing table tennis, his parents bought a full-size table and put it in their garage. He then started playing hour after hour with his brother and, by chance, the primary school down the road had a coach who was one of Britain’s top table-tennis coaches. It ended up that half the top table-tennis players in Britain came from this one little street in Reading. Lots of parents, particularly parents who have failed at a sport, try to get their children to do it because they want to relive it through them. You see examples of that in motor-racing. You get these parents who take their child karting. Everybody knows now that that is eventually how you become a Formula One driver. Lewis Hamilton’s father made endless sacrifices to keep little Lewis running around on his kart. It’s that reliving. But it doesn’t work unless the child really wants to do it. With those Polgar sisters each was better than the last! And Syed also explains why a top grandmaster can play 20 very strong players simultaneously and win all 20 matches going from one board to the next. Apparently, when you’ve played enough games of chess, any combination of pieces on the board will be in one way or another familiar to you and you know what happens next instantly, rather than a normal person thinking: ‘Christ, what do I do now?’ But for me the significant thing is that this book has changed my thinking about the relationship between talent and practice. With difficulty. I think all one can say about me as an individual is that, given a degree of privacy, I now have the time to read the sort of books that fascinate me."