Across last weekend’s TV viewing we dipped into rugby’s Champions Cup, the Australian Open in tennis and American Footballs NFL playoffs. They all splashed some truly exceptional athletic performances on to our screens.
It prompted me to ask myself the question: “What drives these great sporting champions?”
After winning a record 24 major singles titles including an unprecedented 10 Australian Men’s Open titles, every January Novak Djokovic still strives to find an excuse to make himself the outsider. Like the Irish desire to always be the underdog, Djokovic searches for a reason to create an adversity that he must overcome.
Who will win the Leinster Schools Rugby Senior Cup?
Then the Australian TV tennis commentator Tony Jones recorded a few sentences of on screen banter in front of a group of Djokovic’s Serbian flag-waving supporters. Djokovic is a national treasure to the Serbian people and they support their hero with a passion that, to the uneducated viewer, far outweighs the importance of a game of tennis.
Jones made a few juvenile, yet seemingly relatively harmless attempts at sarcasm with the crowd. Djokovic later heard them and interpreted them as a deep slur.
Adversity created.
Subsequently, Djokovic refused to speak to anyone associated with the broadcaster Jones works for until he and his Serbian supporters received an apology.
Jones’s poor attempt at humour was elevated with astonishing speed into an international incident that had the Serbian ambassador to Australia and the Australian prime minister sucked into this tea cup-sized drama.
Djokovic promptly received his apology.
To borrow the words of Hemingway, it is as if Djokovic needed the confrontation “to burn the fat away from his soul” and allow his true warrior spirit to emerge.
Under such scrutiny, weaker spirits may have crumbled. Not Djokovic. His next match was the quarter-final against one of tennis’s rising stars, Spain’s Carlos Alcaraz. Despite twitching a hamstring in the first set, Djokovic’s mental power shone through and he triumphed.
Then there is Andy Reid. The long-serving NFL coach of the Kansas City Chiefs joined an elite club with his 300th career win when his team eliminated the Houston Texans from the playoffs last weekend. The Chiefs star quarterback, Patrick Mahomes, the highest-paid player in the NFL, continues to drive his team closer to a third consecutive Super Bowl win. His seemingly telepathic relationship with his Chiefs team-mate, Travis Kelce, empowered the tight end to execute a “best-on-ground” performance of outstanding quality.
Reid, Mahomes and Kelce are hugely wealthy, with the status of all-time greatness within the NFL already assured. They are living a life beyond the dreams of most, amassing huge material success and fame. Yet they continue to compete in a brutally physical sport with unimaginable intensity, powered by extraordinary work ethics.
Last May, Antoine Dupont, the genius French scrumhalf, delivered the most exceptional display I have ever witnessed in a Champions Cup final. Dupont dominated the match, displaying the most complete array of skills I have seen from any player.
He then captained Toulouse to win last season’s Top 14 championship. A few weeks later, playing in the final of the Rugby Sevens at the Paris Olympics, he scored three tries inside five minutes. Almost single-handedly he won France their gold medal.
Last weekend Dupont delivered another superhuman display as he drove his beloved Toulouse to amass an incredible 80 points against Leicester. With an Olympic gold and multiple major rugby trophies already won, with fame and fortune already secured, Dupont continues to redefine excellence in rugby.
While contemplating the performances of these champions, serendipitously, I was sent a passage on Stoic philosophy.
Titled “The obstacle is the way”, it began by quoting Marcus Aurelius. “The impediment to action advances the action. What stands in the way becomes the way. Challengers are not barriers. They are opportunities.”
“Most people avoid difficulty because it is uncomfortable, but the Stoics believed that adversity is what shapes people and shapes us. The thing you are running from is the exact thing that will help you grow. Lean into it. Use it. The obstacle is not your enemy. It is your greatest ally.
“Will you embrace it?”
There is no doubt that Djokovic, Reid, Mahomes, Kelce and Dupont have more than embraced every obstacle. Some, like Djokovic, create their own adversity to force themselves to overcome it. To them, he obstacle is the way.
We often forget that many of our 21st-century sports were conceived inside the Victorian era’s Corinthian code of fair play, which was deeply influenced by Stoic philosophy. The “Corinthian spirit” became entwined within the education system of English private schools in the mid-1800s.
The obstacles and adversity associated with sports such as rugby inspired the educators of the period to take the classroom “outdoors on to the playing fields” where the Corinthian Stoic virtue of “adversity is what shapes people” was experienced by the students through sport.
The Stoice influence within education led to the birth of the modern Olympics and the formal coding of many modern-day sports, including rugby, tennis, soccer and, in its own way, even the GAA.
All of these sports were amateur but the desire to compete and win burned as fiercely then as it does today.
Money and fame are not the primary drivers inside the truly great champions of the past nor in Djokovic, Reid, Mahomes, Kelce. Champions are addicted to overcoming the challenges and adversities with which their sport confronts them.
Two hundred years on from its inception, at its core rugby remains powered by the Stoic concepts that: “What stands in the way becomes the way. Challengers are not barriers. They are opportunities.”
Next weekend when the whistle blows to start this season’s Six Nations the teams that thrive will lean into their competitiveness and seize the opportunity to overcome the adversity that their opponents’ skills and tactics provide.
The obstacle will be the way.
