EXTRA: Here’s Why You’re Not an Elite Athlete (Update)

0:00:10 Hey there. It’s Steven Dubner. The 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris are ending, and if you’re
0:00:16 like me, you have not been competing in them. Watching, maybe, but not competing, because
0:00:24 most of us are normal people, and world-class athletes are different. We made an episode
0:00:27 about this difference some years ago, and I thought it might be a good time to hear it
0:00:35 again as a bonus episode. We’ve updated facts and figures as necessary. As always, thanks for listening.
0:00:46 You cannot be afraid to fail. I had never been in an environment that was so emotionally charged.
0:00:50 That could be the reason you’re telling your second grade daughter that she’s moving next week.
0:00:54 The fight started, and I hit her as hard as I could, and she actually fell down.
0:00:57 I have an eight-year-old son. There’s no way I’d let him play tackle football.
0:00:59 I want to leave this sport being known as a bad mother.
0:01:14 Maybe you are an obsessive sports fan, or maybe a more casual fan, and you follow
0:01:19 just a couple sports or teams. Or maybe you pay no attention to sports, and you only see it when
0:01:25 the Olympics are on somebody else’s TV. Whichever the case, when you do see those athletes,
0:01:32 it’s easy to think of them as existing solely in that context. As a full-grown adult, wearing a
0:01:39 uniform, performing under extraordinary pressure, focused on a highly specialized task that has
0:01:46 zero to do with daily life, or at least your daily life. But is that who those people really are,
0:01:52 and how they get so good at this thing they do? When you see them on TV, all you’re seeing
0:01:59 is the outcome. But what are the inputs? We understand that elite athletes represent some
0:02:04 magical combination of talent and determination. But what about, say, luck?
0:02:10 Oh my gosh. Yes, absolutely. I think a ton of luck is involved.
0:02:16 That’s Sean Johnson, an American gymnast who’s won an Olympic gold medal and many other top honors.
0:02:22 It’s kind of like this miracle math kind of equation that has to equal the perfect answer.
0:02:27 I mean, you can’t get hurt, you have to be healthy, you can’t have the flu on the wrong day,
0:02:31 you have to find the right coach in the right city, you have to be a little afforded.
0:02:36 It’s all these random things. And when you get all the people who fit that equation,
0:02:42 you’re not left with many people. So I guess I was just the best of the very few who fit that
0:02:50 equation. Today on Freakonomics Radio, becoming an athlete. Time to step back and try to understand
0:02:55 how these people rose to such heights. How scientific is the process? How predictable?
0:03:00 We’ll look at a number of factors, including, of course, raw talent.
0:03:04 My parents are both super-study athletes. Yep, I think the gift is number one.
0:03:11 We’ll look at will and determination. I did a bunch of push-ups and sit-ups that night until
0:03:17 I was throwing up. And the mental aspect of this most physical pursuit.
0:03:25 I think the mind is as big of a separator for professional athletes as any physical tools.
0:03:29 We’ll hear stories of opportunities gained and lost.
0:03:38 In 1981, there was 18.7% African-American players in the major leagues. As of 2018, 7.8%.
0:03:42 And we’ll hear one story that’s almost too good to be true.
0:03:46 They said, “Hey, you are blowing up on Twitter. You’re blowing up on Instagram.
0:03:49 You’re everywhere and you just have no idea.”
0:04:10 This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything
0:04:12 with your host Stephen Dubner.
0:04:27 When you see an elite performer in any field, sports or music or surgery, whatever,
0:04:31 it’s natural to ask yourself a question. How would they get so good?
0:04:33 How much of that ability were they born with?
0:04:36 How much is attributable to hard work and practice?
0:04:40 This is a debate that has been going on probably forever.
0:04:45 Nature versus nurture, raw talent versus what’s called deliberate practice.
0:04:48 We’ve had that debate on this program in episode 244 called
0:04:51 How to Become Great at Just About Anything.
0:04:57 Too often, this debate ends up obscuring what strikes me as a pretty obvious fact.
0:05:02 To become great at anything, you need both talent and practice, lots of each.
0:05:06 But even that fact seems pretty narrow, don’t you think?
0:05:11 Because athletic success, like any success in life or any failure,
0:05:14 it’s what you might call multifactorial.
0:05:17 A lot of inputs, a lot of variables.
0:05:24 Imagine you’ve got two athletes with identical talent levels and identical training methods.
0:05:28 Do you really want to make a big bet that their athletic careers also end up identical?
0:05:35 As much as we might want to turn the pursuit of success into science, into a recipe,
0:05:40 real life is more nuanced than that. Also, more interesting.
0:05:49 So, I mean, Jay-Z sold drugs, grew up in Marcy projects to a single mother.
0:05:53 That’s Dominique Foxworth, who played six seasons in the NFL.
0:06:03 Now, he is a multi-millionaire married to Beyonce, the most amazing talent we have today.
0:06:09 So, why don’t we set it up so that all young men must sell drugs when they’re kids
0:06:14 and have only their mother and grow up in Marcy projects in Brooklyn, New York?
0:06:22 He had a great talent, and to be honest, there’s probably a great deal of luck.
0:06:26 He happened to not be there when one of his friends got arrested and his friend didn’t
0:06:31 snitch on him. That is a lot of luck. And I think the same thing is true for me.
0:06:35 Like, I can go through the course of my life and look at all the things that happened,
0:06:39 that were just happenstance that led me to these positions.
0:06:42 And I’m not going to say that it’s a model that should be followed.
0:06:48 I understand that there are occasional outliers, but trying to build around that seems crazy.
0:06:54 So, okay, we are not going to arrive at some perfect model for turning an ordinary person
0:06:59 into a world-class athlete, but we’ll do our best to describe some of the inputs
0:07:04 that seem to be strong contributors. Let’s start with physical ability.
0:07:09 It may not surprise you to learn that a lot of elite athletes exhibited a pretty high baseline
0:07:15 level of talent from an early age. Mark Tashara, for instance, a three-time Major League Baseball
0:07:19 All-Star. Yes. And most kids grow up being, you know,
0:07:22 if you’re an elite athlete, you’re going to be the best kid on your team.
0:07:26 I’ve played every sport as a kid. Was baseball your best sport from the outset?
0:07:30 Always was. And I actually enjoyed playing basketball more. I played backyard football.
0:07:36 I played soccer, tennis. But I was always good at baseball. So, I knew baseball was going to be,
0:07:41 you know, a sport for my future. Athletic talent is considered one of the more heritable traits
0:07:46 passed from parent to child. In Super Free Economics, one of the books I wrote with the economist
0:07:51 Steve Levitt, we performed a rough calculation showing that if a Major League Baseball player
0:07:58 has a son, that boy is about 800 times more likely than a random boy to also make the majors.
0:08:04 So, it may not surprise you that a lot of the athletes we’ve been interviewing for the series
0:08:10 came from athletic families. Here’s Kerry Walsh Jennings, who’s won three Olympic gold medals
0:08:15 in beach volleyball. Oh, man. Well, my life has literally been family and sports,
0:08:20 like from day one, I think, from birth. My parents are both super-study athletes. They
0:08:25 both come from very athletic families. My parents are both athletic.
0:08:27 And that is the Alpine skier, Michaela Schifrin,
0:08:34 who has won two Olympic gold medals and has more World Cup wins than any skier in history.
0:08:40 My mom is extremely athletic, and even now she’s had knee surgeries and hand surgeries
0:08:44 and neck surgeries and everything, but she’s still such an incredible athlete.
0:08:48 Well, I mean, my dad kind of did every sport when he was growing up.
0:08:51 And the gold medal gymnast, Sean Johnson.
0:08:57 He was a hockey player. He wrestled. He did BMX. He raced MotoX. I mean, everything.
0:09:03 Just how powerful is the sports gene? David Epstein is a science journalist and author
0:09:09 of a book called The Sports Gene. In it, he tells the story of a man named Donald Thomas.
0:09:15 Donald is about six-two lean Bahamian guy.
0:09:20 Thomas played basketball at a small college in Missouri, but he was far from an elite player
0:09:26 and the college program was far from elite. One day in the gym, he was bragging about how high
0:09:33 you could jump. And the best jumper on the track team, a guy named Carlos, overheard him and said,
0:09:37 you know, you’re talking all that trash. You wouldn’t even clear a bar of six foot six in a
0:09:43 real competition. And Donald says, yes, I would. So they go out to the track and Carlos sets the
0:09:49 high jump bar at six feet, six inches. Donald still wearing his basketball sneakers, runs up,
0:09:57 jumps, clears it easily. Carlos moves the bar higher and higher. Donald keeps clearing it.
0:10:01 We’re talking about the first high jumps of his life. He’s going over the bar backward,
0:10:06 of course, which he’d never done before. And Carlos gets the bar to seven feet and Donald
0:10:09 clears seven feet at which point Carlos is worried he’s going to hurt himself.
0:10:16 Donald Thomas soon moved on to Auburn University on track scholarship. And not long after that,
0:10:21 he competed in the World Track Championships. And this is Donald Thomas,
0:10:27 very much an unknown quantity, really. Thomas was jumping against much more experienced and
0:10:34 accomplished athletes. And he goes clear. Donald Thomas goes clear at two meters 35, the man that
0:10:42 started high jump only two years ago. But that is an incredible jump. And not only does he win,
0:10:48 but he records the highest center of mass jump ever in history. He doesn’t set the
0:10:52 world record because his form is so bad. He looks like he’s riding an invisible deck chair through
0:10:57 the air. It turned out that Donald Thomas had a physiological trait, an abnormally long Achilles
0:11:02 tendon that gave him a big advantage. So there aren’t that many Donald Thomas’s in terms of
0:11:07 winning the World Championships. But this happens at lower levels all the time, where somebody will
0:11:12 step in with no or very little background and win some kind of regional or state championship.
0:11:16 And then those are the people who end up training and going on to become champions.
0:11:21 David Epstein also writes about the success of talent transfer programs in the UK,
0:11:26 Australia, China, and elsewhere. Well, they’ll take people who maybe aren’t making a national team
0:11:29 or making it to the top in a certain sport and say, Hey, why don’t you go try this other stuff?
0:11:35 Some converted athletes have done remarkably well. The UK won several gold medals in rowing
0:11:41 and skeleton with athletes who began in other sports. In the 2002 Winter Olympics,
0:11:46 the Australian Elisa Camplin, a converted sailor, won gold in aerial skiing.
0:11:53 She wins the Olympic gold medal and was still so poor at skiing that when she was invited to
0:11:58 ski down the mountain to the gold medal winners press conference, she fell and like rolled down
0:12:01 the mountain on the winners flowers because she still didn’t know how to ski. I heard she learned
0:12:04 how to ski later like on vacation, but not by the time she’d won the Olympic gold medal.
0:12:07 Yep. I think the gift is number one.
0:12:13 Mark Tashara again. Because without the gift, you can’t take a kid that has zero athletic ability
0:12:17 and just happens to be a hard worker and he goes to the big leagues.
0:12:21 But talent on its own, as we all know, it only gets you so far.
0:12:24 You know, at any given time, there’s a thousand big leaguers out there,
0:12:30 but there’s probably 10,000 players, whether in college or amateur baseball or low professional
0:12:34 ranks that are good enough to someday make it. Talent wise, you’re saying.
0:12:41 Yes. There’s 10,000 talented players with a gift. It’s of those 10,000 players,
0:12:44 which are the ones that work hard enough, which are the ones that figure it out,
0:12:49 which are the ones that get it, that make the right decisions and train the right way and
0:12:53 eat the right way and do preparation for games. Those are the ones that make it.
0:12:58 The most talented player that I ever saw as an amateur was Corey Patterson.
0:13:03 And he had a decent big league career, but talent wise, I would kill for his talent.
0:13:07 Talent wise, there were a ton of guys that I thought had more talent than me,
0:13:09 but I thought I figured it out.
0:13:14 My brother was inherently more talented than I was.
0:13:19 That’s JJ Redick. He played 15 seasons in the NBA and recently became head coach
0:13:21 of the Los Angeles Lakers.
0:13:27 He could never shoot the basketball the way that I could, but he could hit a baseball a mile.
0:13:31 He had a cannon for an arm. My best friend from high school was the same weight.
0:13:37 You know, certain kids are just, everything sort of comes easy to them and it’s natural to them.
0:13:44 I have seen some of the most physically gifted and talented gymnasts I think our sport has ever seen.
0:13:45 Sean Johnson again.
0:13:51 But they just do not have the mental capability to get themselves to that elite level.
0:13:56 And it’s not a matter of training them or, you know, getting them to the right sports
0:13:59 psychologist or getting the right people around them. It’s just, it’s not there.
0:14:06 So I think you have to be born with some sort of innate ability to, you know,
0:14:15 push out all pain and emotion and push yourself past a boundary that 99% of the world operates within.
0:14:20 I remember being in an apartment we lived in in Indianapolis.
0:14:21 Dominique Foxworth again.
0:14:25 And I told my father I wanted to be a professional football player.
0:14:26 He was eight years old.
0:14:32 And he told me, all right, well, you set a goal, you should do something to get you closer to that goal every day.
0:14:38 And I took that to heart. So I did a bunch of push-ups and sit-ups that night until I was throwing up.
0:14:40 It’s like ridiculous.
0:14:44 What was it that gave Foxworth such an intense drive for football?
0:14:49 I was in love with the game in part because of how violent it was, honestly.
0:14:55 And like whatever warped sense of masculinity I had at that age that probably has not fully left me.
0:15:00 It was like basketball is for the soft kids, football is for the men and I want to play football.
0:15:03 I just, I trained my ass off.
0:15:03 I loved it.
0:15:07 And then when I got in the race, I just, I didn’t want to lose.
0:15:12 That’s Lance Armstrong, the seven-time Tour de France champion who was stripped of his titles
0:15:16 when it was proved that he, along with many cyclists of his era, had been doping.
0:15:21 I’d asked Armstrong what drove him when he was a kid.
0:15:27 As a 46-year-old and I look back on it and really, really far removed from that part of my life,
0:15:28 they’re probably things.
0:15:31 I mean, I didn’t have, I didn’t grow up on the street,
0:15:36 but I didn’t grow up behind a white picket fence with 2.3 brothers and sisters and an SUV
0:15:38 and a mom and a dad.
0:15:44 My mom and I were scrappers and I never met my biological father and I’m not making excuses here,
0:15:50 but I’m just trying to, you know, there was the only father figures in my life were my coaches.
0:15:52 Did you, I was going to ask, did you ride angry?
0:15:58 I don’t mean quite angry, but you were, you know, really cocky and confident.
0:15:59 All right, angry.
0:16:02 I didn’t walk around angry.
0:16:06 I just felt it served me best to be angry.
0:16:12 The anger part, and I also know that this happens in every locker room of every sport.
0:16:17 So let’s just say, right, let’s just use Texas football and Oklahoma football.
0:16:20 It’s the biggest rival where you have the week leading up to the game.
0:16:26 Those coaches every single day, guess what is posted on the board in the University of
0:16:28 Texas, Longhorns locker room meeting room.
0:16:31 It is articles and quotes from the other team.
0:16:33 We’re going to kick their ass.
0:16:34 That’s so-and-so player.
0:16:36 He’s, he’s mediocre in the coaches.
0:16:37 They love that.
0:16:41 Hey, Joey, did you see what number 82 said about you?
0:16:46 And so we, if I didn’t have that, if I didn’t have a rival speaking out
0:16:50 on the press saying, oh, I saw him strong last week, he looked average or he,
0:16:52 he looked like he’s passed his best.
0:16:55 If I didn’t have that, which I did plenty of times, then I’d make it up.
0:16:57 I’d go read some article.
0:17:01 I’d say that mother, can you believe that he said that?
0:17:03 And the next day I’d go out and train.
0:17:05 And I mean, it would be the only thing on my mind.
0:17:11 Now it sounds a little toxic, but it made me ride harder, made me train harder, made me hustle.
0:17:15 You know, I think my insecurity drives me really, really hard.
0:17:18 You know, Kerry Walsh Jennings again.
0:17:22 At every kind of leveling up, you know, from eighth grade to high school,
0:17:25 high school to college, college to the Olympic team, there was a moment,
0:17:28 there were many moments of insecurity and the transition.
0:17:31 Many moments of, oh, SHIT, can I do this?
0:17:32 Am I good enough?
0:17:34 Oh, it’s exhausting.
0:17:38 It’s really exhausting.
0:17:40 I want to leave this sport being known as a bad mother.
0:17:48 So yes, most of the athletes we’ve heard from were extraordinarily driven and talented,
0:17:52 but of course, they’ve also had to work incredibly hard at perfecting their craft.
0:17:54 Most of them, at least.
0:17:57 Remember Donald Thomas, our high jumping friend?
0:17:59 And he goes clear.
0:18:03 Donald Thomas goes clear at two meters 35.
0:18:06 David Epstein interviewed Thomas’s college track coaches.
0:18:11 They said they would usually find him like outside, you know, shooting free throws
0:18:13 when he was supposed to be inside learning how to high jump.
0:18:18 Most athletes, however, do train incredibly hard, in part because they’re not allowed not to,
0:18:21 by their coaches, their teams, maybe their parents.
0:18:23 But of course, they also push themselves.
0:18:26 I think it’s about how much you want it, how much you love it,
0:18:29 and how much you’re willing to sacrifice for it.
0:18:33 Mike McGlinchey is an offensive lineman on the NFL’s Denver Broncos.
0:18:35 I was never the best athlete on my team.
0:18:40 I’m still not the best athlete on my team here, but I’ve always wanted it more.
0:18:42 I’ve always worked harder than everybody else.
0:18:46 And just attention to detail and the things that you need to know how to self-correct.
0:18:47 You need to know how to learn.
0:18:53 Knowing how to learn is particularly valuable when the skills you’re trying to learn are unusual.
0:19:00 Playing offensive line is one of the more unnatural human movements on earth in sport,
0:19:01 I think.
0:19:04 You’re required to move other large men out of the way.
0:19:07 And when you’re trying to stop them in past protection,
0:19:08 you’re completely moving backwards.
0:19:11 So it’s a really, really different thing to have to learn how to do.
0:19:13 And until your body can feel it,
0:19:17 until you can watch it on film and self-diagnose right when things happen,
0:19:19 that’s where the separation comes in.
0:19:21 Swimming is like pretty difficult.
0:19:28 That’s Simone Manuel, who won two gold and two silver medals at the 2016 Olympics.
0:19:33 Because you’re in the water, which is like totally defying gravity,
0:19:36 you have to work out every day.
0:19:39 Because if you’re out the water for one day, even when I take my day off on Sunday,
0:19:42 when I come back Monday morning, I feel terrible.
0:19:49 And you have to kind of practice all of those aspects of the sport on a regular basis.
0:19:51 Or else you’re not going to improve.
0:19:57 There’s also the fact that the training opportunities in some sports are inherently constrained.
0:20:00 Ski racing is a really unique sport in many ways.
0:20:01 McKill’s shifrin.
0:20:06 When you think about it, the actual time that I spend or any racer spends
0:20:11 on the hill actually skiing during a day of training,
0:20:16 let’s say you get one course length is about 60 seconds long,
0:20:19 and you get seven runs in one training session.
0:20:24 And that takes about somewhere between three to five hours,
0:20:26 depending on how long the chairlift takes.
0:20:30 So you’re adding up about seven minutes total of practice in your sport
0:20:32 for the entire training session,
0:20:38 which is comparative to say three to five hours of somebody playing tennis in a single session,
0:20:42 which makes me feel like the deliberate practice component is that much more essential.
0:20:46 You know, there’s skiers out there, teammates of mine in the past,
0:20:52 who spend their time from the top of the chairlift to the top of the race course.
0:20:56 It could be half of a trail length that they’re skiing down,
0:20:59 and they’re just kind of like flailing about and doing whatever.
0:21:02 And I was like doing drills to the top of the course,
0:21:05 trying to make use of every square inch of space on the mountain.
0:21:10 Every time I’m deliberately practicing skiing and my technique and everything,
0:21:13 then I’m kind of getting a one-up on everybody else who’s not.
0:21:20 Because it’s so demanding to master the skill set that accompanies each sport,
0:21:23 whether it’s skiing or swimming or football,
0:21:27 you can imagine an aspiring athlete would want to spend as much time as possible on
0:21:32 that skill set and not waste time on, say, other sports.
0:21:35 This has become a huge debate in youth sports.
0:21:40 At what age should an athlete stop playing other sports and commit to theirs?
0:21:44 And once they do commit, is it definitively better to spend most of your time
0:21:46 in deliberate structured practice?
0:21:50 Or what about a more free-flowing, unstructured environment,
0:21:52 what’s sometimes called deliberate play?
0:21:59 You know, I totally agree with this notion that there’s something to be gained from less structure.
0:22:03 That, again, is JJ Redick, now coach of the LA Lakers.
0:22:06 As an example, he brings up his former teammate Jamal Crawford.
0:22:11 Jamal is one of the best ball handlers in NBA history.
0:22:13 He’s had a fantastic career.
0:22:16 Jamal will tell you he’s really never done a drill.
0:22:21 He’s never done a ball handling drill, but he has incredible ball handling skills.
0:22:28 And he’s done that through just playing pickup or taking a basketball around his neighborhood
0:22:34 when he was growing up and literally putting moves on bystanders as he passed them in the street.
0:22:40 Redick’s own view on unstructured versus structured practice evolved over time.
0:22:42 I had a teammate in Orlando.
0:22:43 His name was Anthony Johnson.
0:22:45 I played with him for two years.
0:22:45 He was much older.
0:22:48 This was early in my career.
0:22:52 And about five years after we’d stopped playing together, I met up with him for lunch
0:22:56 and I was telling him about all the workouts I was doing that summer.
0:23:01 And he said to me, “Dude, don’t worry about being the best workout guy.
0:23:03 Worry about being the best player.”
0:23:06 And it kind of annoyed me when he said that.
0:23:12 But I’ve thought about him saying that probably 50 times over the last five years.
0:23:14 For me, part of it is I want structure.
0:23:16 I feel like I thrive in structure.
0:23:17 I like having a plan.
0:23:20 I like going to a gym and saying this is what I’m going to work on today.
0:23:24 But then the other part of it is it’s sport, right?
0:23:26 There’s something organic about it.
0:23:29 There’s something that has to flow naturally.
0:23:32 And if your point of reference is only structure,
0:23:37 well, the game is not really structured, right?
0:23:40 You’re constantly reacting to things as they happen.
0:23:41 There’s nine other players.
0:23:42 There’s one ball.
0:23:48 And so I think that’s actually been incredible advice for me over the last five years of my career.
0:23:55 JJ Redick grew up in rural Virginia and his practice environment then was pretty unstructured.
0:24:01 My dad put up a hoop and it was just for me being in that backyard
0:24:07 and shooting a basketball and seeing it go through the net became just an obsession.
0:24:12 And it’s something that I wanted to do over and over again and repeat over and over again.
0:24:18 When we spoke with Redick, he was trying to reconnect with that unstructured practice environment.
0:24:25 You get a safe place to work on your weaknesses and improve those weaknesses.
0:24:31 Look, if I go into a gym and I’ve got 30 people in the gym watching,
0:24:36 it’s a little nerve wracking to work on your weaknesses in front of people
0:24:40 in a structured setting, but alone, away from any lights.
0:24:45 You know, it’s a more calming experience and you can gain confidence from doing that.
0:24:53 So what does the research say about the relative benefits of structured versus unstructured practice
0:24:57 or what you might call deliberate practice versus deliberate play?
0:25:02 One study of 22 young Brazilian basketball players tried to answer this question.
0:25:07 The researchers put half the players in organized games with referees and coaches.
0:25:10 The other half played in unstructured games.
0:25:14 After 18 sessions, the researchers measured the change
0:25:17 in the player’s tactical intelligence and creativity.
0:25:23 The kids in the unstructured practice showed significant gains on both dimensions.
0:25:27 The kids who played in the structured games showed no improvement.
0:25:31 It’s just one small study, but it would seem to offer some evidence,
0:25:35 at least on the youth level, that less structure can be beneficial.
0:25:40 And how about specialization? A lot of young athletes, and especially their parents,
0:25:46 seem to think the best move is to pick your sport early and focus solely on that sport.
0:25:48 Man, it drives me nutty.
0:25:49 Kerry Walsh Jennings.
0:25:54 It’s just, I think it’s such a flawed place to come from, specialization in anything.
0:25:59 Let alone when you’re a child and you’re eight years old, you do not need to pick your sport
0:26:02 that you’re going to maybe get a college scholarship for.
0:26:07 You know, and play 365, 24/7, which is mentally and spiritually and physically.
0:26:09 Just, it’ll crush you.
0:26:11 So I have a major problem with the way things are right now.
0:26:17 I absolutely know that I am a great athlete because I did everything growing up,
0:26:19 and I wanted to be a great athlete.
0:26:23 Yeah, I was never that child that turned 10 years old and said,
0:26:29 “Oh my gosh, I need to give up everything and everyone and just commit my life to the Olympics.”
0:26:31 The gymnast, Sean Johnson.
0:26:35 I had this, you know, blue collar family, all American, Midwest,
0:26:38 just kind of parents that wanted me to be normal.
0:26:42 And they pushed me to be in so many sports and so many activities and
0:26:49 tried the oboe and clarinet and piano practice and mock trial and all these things that kind
0:26:51 of distracted me from this Olympic dream.
0:26:56 But it always gave me this perspective of I love everything, but I love gymnastics more.
0:27:00 And so whenever I was at gymnastics practice, I focused more than
0:27:05 any other activity and gave more effort there because I knew that was my favorite.
0:27:09 There is some research to back up these stories from Johnson and Walsh Jennings.
0:27:15 So, for example, after the last World Cup, a group of German scientists
0:27:21 published a study where they attract the development of soccer players in Germany.
0:27:25 That’s David Epstein, and he’s talking about the 2014 World Cup,
0:27:30 and found that the athletes who went on to the national team, which by the way won that World Cup,
0:27:34 had played more different sports when they were younger,
0:27:39 spent more time in self-structured or unstructured soccer play when they were younger,
0:27:43 but not more time in deliberately structured soccer training.
0:27:48 Only by age 22 did they start playing fewer sports and spending more time in structured
0:27:51 soccer than athletes who plateaued at lower levels.
0:27:56 So this sort of less structured development turns out to be completely characteristic
0:27:57 of athletes who go on to become elite.
0:28:04 Okay, but what if you are a young athlete or the parent of one,
0:28:09 and your ultimate goal isn’t to become an elite professional athlete,
0:28:15 but rather to get into an elite university, like one of the top 10 schools in the country?
0:28:19 You know, I’ve actually been thinking about that exact problem.
0:28:22 That’s Steve Levitt, my Freakonomics friend and co-author.
0:28:24 He’s an economist at the University of Chicago.
0:28:34 By my calculation, about 0.4% of kids, so about one in 250 kids,
0:28:36 will make it to one of those top 10 schools.
0:28:38 So it’s a hard, hard goal to do it.
0:28:41 And I can’t say I thought about the universe of things you could do,
0:28:46 but I thought about sports, and I stumbled onto something that was pretty surprising to me.
0:28:52 So the answer, I think, is you want your kid to be a fencer.
0:28:57 Okay, now you might say that sounds crazy, like this college fencing even existed.
0:29:02 And the answer is there turned out to be exactly 46 schools that have fencing.
0:29:07 But the correlation between quality of school and having a fencing team is incredibly high.
0:29:11 So for instance, among the top 10 ranked schools in the country,
0:29:17 nine of those 10 have a fencing team. The only exception being my own University of Chicago.
0:29:21 And each fencing team has quite a few slots to fill.
0:29:24 There’s three different blades. There’s at bay, there’s saber, and there’s foil.
0:29:26 And there’s male and there’s female fencing.
0:29:32 And given that relatively few kids in the US are serious youth fencers.
0:29:38 So it’s something like 6 or 7% of the kids who ever try to be fencers
0:29:41 end up being college fencers. Now, I’m not saying they get scholarships,
0:29:45 but they’re likely to be admitted to college based on their fencing.
0:29:50 How much does Levitt think fencing increases your chances from that 0.4% baseline?
0:29:55 So fencing seems to raise that number, holding everything else constant,
0:29:58 something like 15 bold.
0:30:01 We should say here that college admissions being what they are,
0:30:05 fencing doesn’t necessarily increase your chances all that much.
0:30:09 Your grades would still need to be very, very good to get into those top schools.
0:30:16 That said, as an admissions sweetener, how does Levitt think fencing compares to other sports?
0:30:19 My God, if you want to go to an Ivy League school,
0:30:22 forget about soccer and basketball and football.
0:30:28 There’s something like 300,000 kids playing high school soccer.
0:30:32 And presumably any of those kids would love to be college soccer players.
0:30:37 But the chance of having soccer be your vehicle to get to college as opposed to fencing
0:30:40 turns out to be about 75 or 80 times harder.
0:30:43 So how many of your kids have you turned into fencers, Levitt?
0:30:45 Exactly one. And so far, so good.
0:30:49 I couldn’t say I really turned him into a fencer.
0:30:53 He’s strangely enough gravitated towards fencing when he was about nine years old.
0:30:57 And he fenses at a really good club in Chicago.
0:31:00 And I don’t know, his grades aren’t that good.
0:31:05 So he knows, and I know, and everyone else knows,
0:31:08 if he’s going to go to an Ivy League school, it’s going to be because of fencing.
0:31:15 Coming up after the break, the story of an athlete who did go to an Ivy League school,
0:31:20 but when it came time to go pro, that apparently counted against him.
0:31:25 If he had played at Kentucky or Duke, he would have been a top pick in the draft.
0:31:26 The problem was he played at Harvard.
0:31:31 Also, what’s at risk when youth sports become professionalized?
0:31:33 It just scares me because it’s become so much of a business
0:31:36 of itself and less about true, true, true development.
0:31:40 I’m Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio.
0:31:43 And you are listening to a bonus episode, an update from our archive
0:31:57 called Here’s Why You Are Not an Elite Athlete. We’ll be right back.
0:31:59 [Music]
0:32:03 As we’ve been hearing, there are a lot of inputs that go into the production
0:32:08 of an elite athlete. Talent, drive, the right kind of practice,
0:32:12 maybe a pair or two to get you to the rink or the gym or the track at 5 a.m.
0:32:17 And as Sean Johnson told us earlier, you might need some luck.
0:32:21 I mean, you can’t get hurt. You can’t have the flu on the wrong day.
0:32:24 You have to find the right coach in the right city.
0:32:27 I was incredibly lucky to end up with my coaches.
0:32:28 So how’d that happen?
0:32:31 It was kind of this freak occurrence.
0:32:33 My coach was Chinese, born and raised Chinese.
0:32:36 When he was three years old, he was taken away from his family
0:32:39 and raised to be an Olympic gymnast.
0:32:45 And he kind of had this crazy career that I would say almost traumatized him.
0:32:49 He lost his childhood. He kind of lost his family, this crazy career.
0:32:56 So when he was 21 years old, he actually left China, came to the United States,
0:32:59 opened a gym in West Des Moines, Iowa, of all places,
0:33:06 and had this dream, this American dream, to raise an Olympian or Olympians
0:33:10 that were also children and had a balance in life and were, you know, fun-loving
0:33:13 and had a true childhood.
0:33:15 Johnson had started her training at a different gym.
0:33:18 And I loved it. It was awesome.
0:33:22 But Chao, my coach that took me to the Olympics,
0:33:25 opened up a gym about five minutes from my parents’ house.
0:33:29 And my parents ended up switching me because it saved gas money.
0:33:34 And I was really, really blessed to fall under his guidance and his coaching.
0:33:40 I mean, I was a very, very fortunate child within the gymnastics community
0:33:45 to have very loving, very, very protective people around me.
0:33:53 And he, I mean, given today’s society, I can thankfully say that he kept me safe.
0:33:55 And I am forever grateful for that.
0:34:01 Chao Johnson’s good luck created good opportunities,
0:34:05 which she worked hard to parlay into an Olympic gold medal.
0:34:08 But what about the young athletes who don’t get the right opportunities,
0:34:14 whether through bad luck or through something much more concrete, like lack of money?
0:34:20 In 2022, the youth sports industry was worth more than $35 billion.
0:34:24 It’s expected to hit nearly $70 billion by the end of the decade.
0:34:28 And a lot of youth sports involve some sort of pay-to-play model.
0:34:31 Pay-to-play is something that just scares me
0:34:36 because it’s become so much of a business of itself and less about true, true, true development.
0:34:38 That’s Brandon McCarthy.
0:34:43 He was a pitcher in Major League Baseball, seven teams over 13 seasons.
0:34:45 It’s a tournament in California this weekend.
0:34:47 The next weekend you go to Nevada and after that it’s Texas.
0:34:52 I don’t understand how two working parents could ever afford to put their kids through that
0:34:54 and then take the time to travel with them.
0:35:00 The theme of economics the last 10 or 15 years has been income inequality
0:35:03 and connected to that, the rich getting richer.
0:35:05 It sounds like what you’re saying with youth sports is
0:35:09 that’s being mirrored all the way down the line, yes?
0:35:10 I would think so.
0:35:14 I mean, there’s two players on your team and one player at the age 13 level
0:35:17 can make all the tournaments in the summer and one can only make two of the tournaments.
0:35:21 Well, how much playing time is the player whose family can afford
0:35:23 for him to go on those trips and then the coach doesn’t favor him and play him.
0:35:26 I think there’s that trickle-down effect from there
0:35:30 and there’s less access to top coaching, lessons, equipment, you name it.
0:35:33 Over time it’s starting to bear itself out as some income inequality
0:35:36 just creates better baseball players and worse baseball players.
0:35:42 Or in one noteworthy instance, a huge drop in baseball players.
0:35:47 In 1981, there was 18.7 percent African American players in the major leagues
0:35:51 as of 2018, 7.8 percent.
0:35:54 So the question is, why the decline?
0:35:59 David Canton is a history professor and director of African American studies
0:36:00 at the University of Florida.
0:36:04 The huge drop of black players in baseball, he argues,
0:36:09 has a number of historical causes, including the relative rise
0:36:11 of black football and basketball players.
0:36:15 But he puts most of the blame on deeper structural issues.
0:36:16 So I look at these factors.
0:36:21 Deindustrialization, mass incarceration and suburbanization.
0:36:24 So with deindustrialization, lack of tax base,
0:36:29 we know there’s no funds to what construct and maintain ball fields.
0:36:33 So you see the rapid decline of the physical space in the Bronx,
0:36:37 in Chicago, in these other urban areas, which leads to what?
0:36:38 Lack of participation.
0:36:42 Suburbanization, Canton says, had a similar effect,
0:36:46 drawing resources away from cities with large African American populations.
0:36:52 What’s left in the city’s abandoned fields, lack of resources, decrease in tax base.
0:36:55 And then there’s incarceration, Canton says,
0:37:00 which has a disproportionately high impact on African Americans.
0:37:05 So I can imagine 1980, if you were 18 year old black man in LA,
0:37:11 Chicago, New York, all of a sudden you’re getting locked up for nonviolent offenses.
0:37:14 So I’m going to assume that you played baseball.
0:37:18 I’m arguing that those men, if you did a survey and go to prison today,
0:37:23 federal state, I bet you a nice percentage of these guys played baseball.
0:37:25 Now some were not old enough to have children.
0:37:29 And the one that did weren’t there to teach their son to play baseball.
0:37:34 To volunteer in little league because they were in jail for nonviolent offenses.
0:37:36 Add it all up, David Canton says.
0:37:40 And this explains the huge decline of African Americans in baseball,
0:37:45 which, by the way, has been countered by a huge rise in players from Latin America.
0:37:53 That said, major league baseball is well aware of and concerned by the drop off in African American players.
0:38:00 So we have a league called the RBI League, which is reviving baseball in the inner cities.
0:38:02 That’s Kim Aang.
0:38:05 When we interviewed her, she was major league baseball’s
0:38:08 senior vice president of international baseball development.
0:38:12 A few years later, she became general manager of the Florida Marlins,
0:38:15 the first female GM in league history.
0:38:23 So we’ve seen academies develop in Kansas City, in Philadelphia, New Orleans.
0:38:25 Washington, DC.
0:38:32 And these academies are really providing opportunity for young kids, you know,
0:38:35 particularly of color, to come and train with us.
0:38:37 Free of charge, of course.
0:38:40 And you really hone their skills.
0:38:44 So the RBI program, people like CeCe Sabathe de Yankees, he went through it.
0:38:49 They do have some success stories, but most of those players are not successful.
0:38:53 The reality is, is that baseball is for people with resources.
0:38:57 Most major league players with African American come from middle class backgrounds.
0:39:02 They have the resource for travel baseball, which is expensive, personal training.
0:39:06 And I think there’s a cultural thing, that if you’re middle class African American,
0:39:09 you are comfortable being in predominantly white spaces.
0:39:14 And we don’t want to talk about that, because as we know, everybody’s a good person.
0:39:17 But we know racism, privilege are systems.
0:39:19 So let me give you an example.
0:39:24 If you play AAU basketball, you’re the white guy, trust me, your space is African American.
0:39:29 So from March to July, you are going to be a black guy’s all summer.
0:39:32 Your parents are going to be a black family’s all summer.
0:39:34 Let’s switch to the baseball.
0:39:37 If you’re a black middle class kid who grew up in the suburbs,
0:39:42 you are comfortable being the only black in the all white space all summer.
0:39:45 So they’re the ones that are more likely to be in the major leagues.
0:39:53 You could argue that sports are among the most meritocratic endeavors that humans do.
0:39:58 After all, when you’re measuring outcomes with a stopwatch or a yardstick,
0:40:03 by whether the ball goes in the net or doesn’t, you’d think that an athlete’s background,
0:40:06 where they come from, what they look like, that it wouldn’t matter much.
0:40:07 But sometimes it does.
0:40:13 Professional sports teams in particular often have very conservative mindset.
0:40:17 They tend to go looking for players who look a lot like their previous players,
0:40:22 which means they might overlook someone who absolutely should not have been overlooked.
0:40:36 In 2012, the New York Knicks went on a 9-3 winning streak,
0:40:39 sparked by an obscure young point guard named Jeremy Lin.
0:40:56 During this 12-game stretch, Lin averaged 22.5 points and 8.7 assists.
0:40:59 If you don’t know basketball numbers, well, those are good ones.
0:41:05 Lin’s success was so dramatic, so unpredicted, that it produced a movement.
0:41:09 Lin’s sanity continues here at Madison Square Garden.
0:41:13 Lin grew up in California to parents who’d immigrated from Taiwan.
0:41:16 Even though he put up great numbers in high school,
0:41:19 he received no athletic scholarship offers to college.
0:41:22 He wound up playing at Harvard while studying economics.
0:41:25 Once again, he put up great basketball numbers.
0:41:30 But when it came time for the NBA draft, Jeremy Lin’s name was not called.
0:41:34 The Golden State Warriors signed him as an undrafted free agent,
0:41:39 making him the first American of Taiwanese or Chinese descent to play in the NBA.
0:41:42 But he barely played, and three times that year,
0:41:44 the Warriors sent him down to their minor league club.
0:41:48 During the NBA’s offseason, he played a few games in China,
0:41:52 then the Knicks signed him, and Lin’s sanity broke out.
0:42:03 Lin played nine years in the NBA, and he now plays in Taiwan.
0:42:08 His final contract in the NBA was a three-year deal worth more than $38 million.
0:42:13 How could someone worth nearly $13 million a year
0:42:17 have been assigned a value of essentially zero?
0:42:21 Let’s ask one of the people who did take an early look at Jeremy Lin.
0:42:24 Darryl Morey, general manager of the Houston Rockets.
0:42:26 Morey, after we interviewed him,
0:42:31 moved on to become president of basketball operations for the Philadelphia 76ers.
0:42:36 At the time we spoke, the Houston Rockets were one of the winningest teams in basketball,
0:42:40 and Morey had just been named NBA executive of the year.
0:42:43 Morey was also one of the first executives in basketball
0:42:47 to make extensive use of analytics to help choose players.
0:42:52 So I asked him why Jeremy Lin’s college numbers had not lit up his model.
0:42:55 Well, one thing that was tough about Jeremy,
0:42:59 because he did actually produce in college at a level that looked, you know,
0:43:06 insanely well, meaning if he had played at, say, Kentucky or Duke or whatever,
0:43:08 for sure he would have been a top pick in the draft.
0:43:09 I have no doubt of that.
0:43:13 The problem was he played at Harvard, and actually,
0:43:18 most of the models that are used from an analytics perspective to forecast draft picks,
0:43:20 they’re built on people who are drafted.
0:43:23 And Jeremy didn’t look like anyone who was drafted.
0:43:27 The number of Ivy League players that have become NBA players is extremely small.
0:43:31 So one of the things you have to be careful about with analytics is when to not use things.
0:43:38 And I incorrectly chose to not wait his time in the Ivy League high enough,
0:43:40 and he ended up going undrafted.
0:43:46 Morey and the Rockets did, however, bring Lin into training camp as an undrafted rookie.
0:43:49 He actually did look quite good in our training camp,
0:43:52 but unfortunately, at that time, we had four point guards.
0:43:56 And so, yeah, I then incorrectly let him go.
0:43:58 What about his being Asian?
0:44:02 How much did that just, you know, the fact that he did not, quote,
0:44:08 look like what most basketball people think a good basketball player looks like,
0:44:11 and how much that may have actually obscured the real data?
0:44:14 It’s sort of an unknowable question.
0:44:19 But the founders of behavioral science, you know, a lot of their research was on,
0:44:23 yeah, how people mostly unconsciously, sometimes overtly,
0:44:27 put people into, you know, basically buckets or categories,
0:44:29 and then use those for making decisions.
0:44:32 And often those heuristics really serve you well in life.
0:44:36 I E, I’ve categorized that animal is dangerous,
0:44:39 and so I’m going to avoid them so they don’t eat me, right?
0:44:41 But many times they don’t serve you well.
0:44:44 And what you’re asking is a question that’s impossible to answer.
0:44:48 It’s basically how did Jeremy’s heritage change,
0:44:52 how he was viewed by NBA talent evaluators?
0:44:53 I don’t know. And how much was it Ivy League?
0:44:56 How much it was, yeah, nobody knows.
0:44:58 The reality was it happened to him, not just in the NBA.
0:44:59 It happened to him consistently.
0:45:02 He was a top player in high school.
0:45:06 He then got literally almost no interest from college head coaches,
0:45:09 but he should have been recruited by the Dukes and the Kentucky’s.
0:45:12 And then again, he was overlooked in the NBA.
0:45:13 No one can really know why,
0:45:17 but there’s obviously a bunch of factors that probably played a role.
0:45:23 The more you talk to athletes and the people around them,
0:45:26 the more you realize that the path to elite status
0:45:29 isn’t nearly as predictable as you might imagine.
0:45:32 There are cognitive biases involved.
0:45:34 There’s personality and politics.
0:45:35 And remember, luck.
0:45:39 Plainly, there’s no guarantee that a given athlete
0:45:42 will get the right opportunity to make it to the top.
0:45:46 But if you do, well, if you do get the opportunity,
0:45:49 that’s when the real challenge begins.
0:45:53 Now you’ve got to work even harder, devote yourself even more completely,
0:45:56 and that comes with a cost.
0:45:58 It’s the flip side of opportunity.
0:46:02 And it’s what economists call, yes, opportunity cost.
0:46:06 Meaning for every hour you spend on your sport,
0:46:08 you surrender an hour of something else.
0:46:11 For every opportunity the sport gives you,
0:46:14 there’s another opportunity you have to sacrifice.
0:46:16 So fighting takes up a lot of time.
0:46:21 And, you know, fighters, they have to diet pretty hard.
0:46:25 Lauren Murphy is a professional mixed martial arts fighter
0:46:27 in the flyweight division of the UFC.
0:46:29 They have to work out all the time.
0:46:30 They also need to rest.
0:46:31 A lot of us work.
0:46:33 So there’s just not a lot of time in the day.
0:46:38 And a lot of times the first thing that kind of gets taken off the plate
0:46:39 is time with family.
0:46:43 And so I remember missing a couple Thanksgiving dinners,
0:46:46 you know, not being able to drive out to my sister’s house for Christmas.
0:46:48 And I remember my family kind of being like, what the hell?
0:46:52 Why, you know, why are you suddenly neglecting us so much?
0:46:55 And I didn’t really have a good answer for them at the time.
0:46:57 I just thought this is something that I want to do
0:46:59 and I want to be really good at it while I do it.
0:47:01 And so I need to, you know, make these sacrifices now
0:47:03 so I can have a good performance later.
0:47:06 In high school, you know, by the time I was a sophomore
0:47:08 and I knew I had a chance, I started preparing.
0:47:10 The former baseball all-star, Mark Tashara.
0:47:14 I didn’t go to my high school homecoming for three straight years
0:47:16 because I was playing fall baseball.
0:47:18 You know, I didn’t do a lot of stuff in the summertime.
0:47:20 I played 70 games every summer.
0:47:22 My friends are going to concerts.
0:47:24 My friends are, you know, having a good time at the beach
0:47:25 and all these kind of things.
0:47:30 So for me, I sacrificed from the time I was, I don’t know,
0:47:36 probably in high school is when I started to forgo other opportunities.
0:47:38 That, again, is Dominique Foxworth,
0:47:41 who overdid his push-ups and sit-ups at age eight
0:47:43 in order to make the NFL.
0:47:45 Then in college, I wanted to be a computer science major
0:47:47 at University of Maryland.
0:47:49 And my academic advisor was like,
0:47:53 “Though that course load is going to make it very difficult
0:47:55 for you to make it to our practices, their labs,
0:47:56 and blah, blah, blah, blah.”
0:47:58 So I was like, “Nope, not going to do that.”
0:48:00 So instead you did, was it American Studies?
0:48:02 Yeah, I did American Studies.
0:48:03 And journalism, right?
0:48:04 Right.
0:48:06 Which just shows how easy what I do is that you could do it
0:48:08 and another major while playing football.
0:48:14 No, I enjoyed those and it was good, but it wasn’t what I wanted to do.
0:48:17 And then the summers when people were getting internships
0:48:20 or whatever, I was working out and getting ready for football.
0:48:23 And I say all that to say, once I got to the league,
0:48:25 then I got drafted and I was in the third round.
0:48:27 So that’s, it’s money, it’s good money,
0:48:28 but it’s not life-changing money.
0:48:31 It doesn’t make up for all the things that you’ve given up
0:48:32 through the course of your life.
0:48:38 You shouldn’t feel too sorry for Foxworth.
0:48:41 He played long enough to enter a free agency.
0:48:44 His final NFL contract paid him about $27 million.
0:48:47 But now, out of football for a few years,
0:48:51 he’s still feeling the after-effects of his single-mindedness.
0:48:56 So like my whole life since I was a kid, I had a very clear goal
0:48:58 and I worked towards that goal.
0:49:02 And I made lots of decisions that would get me closer to that goal
0:49:05 but get me further away from other important and interesting things,
0:49:09 including friends and including family.
0:49:11 And then I was like, all right, I’m done playing.
0:49:14 So I will be in this state of transition.
0:49:18 His transition included getting an NBA from Harvard
0:49:20 and working at the NBA Players Union.
0:49:23 He’s now doing some writing and sports casting.
0:49:26 I mean, I think it’s a feeling of loneliness, honestly, which,
0:49:30 and it’s not like I have three kids and my wife
0:49:32 and I’m not like alone, obviously.
0:49:34 And I love them and I have fun with them.
0:49:37 And but throughout my life,
0:49:42 I have been almost myopically focused on a goal,
0:49:45 which being focused on that goal, I gave me purpose.
0:49:49 And I’m sure I’m going to butcher the Nietzsche quote,
0:49:53 but it’s something to the effect of when a man has a why,
0:49:56 he can bear almost anyhow.
0:50:01 And like I was, I didn’t, I don’t drink now.
0:50:02 I never drank in my life.
0:50:03 I never smoke weed.
0:50:07 Like I was singularly focused on doing everything.
0:50:08 Every decision I made was like, all right,
0:50:09 I’m going to get close to this goal.
0:50:12 And I, the people I was close with in high school,
0:50:14 like those aren’t my friends anymore.
0:50:18 People I was close with in college, like not really my friends anymore.
0:50:21 And then at 35, I’m in D.C.
0:50:25 where my wife has a bunch of family and friends,
0:50:27 friends that she’s been close with since they were in the second grade.
0:50:31 And like, and I’m like, I don’t really have that.
0:50:33 And like I was making these choices,
0:50:38 which I thought were choices to get me what you wanted.
0:50:38 Right.
0:50:42 And I didn’t realize at the time that I was
0:50:46 foregoing like long lasting relationships.
0:50:48 And while you’re a professional athlete,
0:50:50 you walk around with this skepticism, frankly,
0:50:52 of all new people in your life.
0:50:57 So even if there were like the potential of some great friendships,
0:50:59 like I wasn’t open to them.
0:51:01 Yeah, I’d go to these places, people like, oh, you’re a football player.
0:51:04 And I’d pretend and be nice to them because that’s what you do.
0:51:09 And they’d pretend or whatever it’d be into me because that’s what you do.
0:51:09 And then you move on.
0:51:12 And and then you’re 35 and you’re like, hey,
0:51:16 you haven’t talked to your best friend from high school in 10 years.
0:51:19 So I mean, I feel like I’m in a perpetual state of transition,
0:51:23 which is interesting and uncomfortable at the same time.
0:51:31 Coming up after the break, how far does it set you back if you pursue the athletic dream
0:51:32 and don’t make it?
0:51:39 The person who plays baseball is making about 40% less on average 10 years after they enter
0:51:43 the game than the person who decides not to play baseball and who just wanted a regular career.
0:51:45 I’m Stephen Dubner.
0:51:47 This is Free Economics Radio.
0:51:55 We’ll be right back.
0:52:05 It’s one thing if all the sacrifices, all the opportunities foregone, translate into
0:52:11 a successful athletic career as it did for Dominique Foxworth and Mark Tashara and Lauren Murphy.
0:52:16 But what about the athletes who make the sacrifices but don’t make the big time?
0:52:18 Just look at the numbers.
0:52:22 At any given time, there are only about 1700 players in the NFL.
0:52:26 In Major League Baseball, there are fewer than a thousand.
0:52:32 Roughly 80% of the athletes drafted by a Major League Baseball team never make it past the
0:52:33 minor leagues.
0:52:36 One of those 80% was Justin Humphries.
0:52:40 You get a phone call that says how does it feel to be the next member of the Houston
0:52:43 Astros and you just get, you get, it’s a dream come true.
0:52:45 So I ended up signing.
0:52:49 He started playing Minor League Baseball at 18, which meant skipping college.
0:52:52 Although he did start taking some courses later on.
0:52:58 In 2009, he retired at age 27 without ever making the majors.
0:53:04 He enrolled at Columbia University and took a sociology class with a professor named Sudhir
0:53:04 Venkatesh.
0:53:07 So I was sitting there in this classroom.
0:53:11 I started thinking about all the issues that I had seen in independent baseball and affiliated
0:53:15 baseball, guys living check to check, struggling with whether they should go back to school,
0:53:17 family life, issues at home.
0:53:21 And I thought if I could use some of the things that we were learning in class,
0:53:25 talk to some of these guys and find out whether the stories and things that I was seeing and
0:53:27 hearing would be reflected in the numbers.
0:53:31 We followed a sample of the draft class of 2001.
0:53:34 And so that’s about, you know, it’s 10 years.
0:53:36 And that is Sudhir Venkatesh.
0:53:40 And so we thought that would help us to understand what happens to these folks.
0:53:44 I think one of the most curious things that we find is how much 10 years matter.
0:53:48 So if you take two people who grew up in the same circumstances, let’s say one played baseball
0:53:54 and one didn’t, the person who plays baseball is making about 40% less on average.
0:53:59 10 years after they enter the game, then the person who decides not to play baseball
0:54:00 and who just wanted a regular career.
0:54:01 All right.
0:54:05 So what kind of background is typical for these players you’re tracking?
0:54:11 The average player probably looks like an upper middle class kid who comes out of college
0:54:12 or comes out of high school.
0:54:16 And when you follow an upper middle class kid for about seven to 10 years,
0:54:19 they’re probably going to make higher than the median average income.
0:54:23 They’re probably going to live in a neighborhood that’s relatively safe.
0:54:24 They’re going to have a career.
0:54:29 Now, when you take the counterpart among the pool that was drafted, that median kid,
0:54:37 that kid looks like he’s making about 20 to $24,000 a year, which is not a lot of money.
0:54:41 He’s working probably five to seven months playing baseball and then struggling to find
0:54:43 part-time work in the off season.
0:54:45 Might be coaching.
0:54:46 Might be doing some training.
0:54:47 Might be working on a construction site.
0:54:49 Might be working in fast food.
0:54:56 Well, when you’re 25, playing an independent ball, making less than $2,000 a month,
0:55:01 living off your parents because you can’t financially sustain yourself like that,
0:55:04 at some point you have to say, look, I’ve got with no degree,
0:55:07 I had less than an associate’s degree at that point.
0:55:11 So at some point you have to tell yourself, I can’t do this to myself.
0:55:13 I can’t do this to my parents.
0:55:17 And I can’t continue when I know there’s untapped potential to do other things.
0:55:25 Knowing when to quit anything is hard, especially if it means abandoning a lifelong dream.
0:55:31 Quitting an athletic dream is especially hard because baked into the ethos of sport is the idea
0:55:35 that you should never quit, never give up, never back down.
0:55:36 But think about it.
0:55:41 If you had been playing in the minor leagues or some equivalent for a decade,
0:55:44 would you really think your moment was ever going to come?
0:55:48 Would you really think there was any chance at all?
0:55:53 Before you answer, I’d like to introduce you to someone named Andre Ingram.
0:55:55 Hey, Steve, how you doing, man?
0:55:56 Sorry I’m late.
0:55:58 No, no, no worries.
0:56:00 Let’s talk a little bit about your background.
0:56:03 I believe you grew up in Richmond, Virginia, where you still live.
0:56:03 Is that right?
0:56:04 That’s correct.
0:56:09 I’m curious, is your family the same Ingram family of the gospel group, the Ingramettes?
0:56:10 That’s very good.
0:56:11 Yep, that’s exactly correct.
0:56:13 That’s on my father’s side.
0:56:14 And then tell me about you.
0:56:15 Are you musical?
0:56:16 Are you talented?
0:56:20 No, so my brother and I are the athletes.
0:56:25 And it’s funny because everyone else in our family is musically gifted in some way.
0:56:26 My brother and I, we got none of that.
0:56:29 So yeah, we just, we got the athletics.
0:56:36 Ingram was a good basketball player in high school and then played his college ball at
0:56:40 American University, a solid basketball program, but hardly elite.
0:56:43 It had produced only one NBA player in its history.
0:56:48 Ingram was a three-point shot specialist and he left American as its fifth leading all-time
0:56:49 score.
0:56:52 But that was not enough to get drafted into the NBA.
0:56:57 So he entered the NBA’s minor league, which at the time was called the D-League,
0:57:02 the D standing for development, since changed its name and a sponsorship deal to the G-League,
0:57:04 with the G standing for Gatorade.
0:57:09 Anyway, Andre Ingram entered the D-League with the hopes of being called up to the NBA.
0:57:12 He wound up staying for 10 years.
0:57:19 It pays so poorly, around $40,000 a season, that most young players just give it a year or two
0:57:23 before going to play pro in Europe or elsewhere.
0:57:26 Ingram tried Australia briefly, didn’t like it.
0:57:32 Plus, he wanted to stay nearby, just in case the NBA finally came calling.
0:57:36 There were many times where I was, you know, ready to just the turn the other way and do
0:57:41 something else and, you know, wife and kids, family, you know, the D-League or G-League is not
0:57:44 paying you much, like, you know, you need to do something else.
0:57:48 Like, I came to that point so many times and, you know, something kept me going every time.
0:57:50 But he did keep going.
0:57:53 He was playing for a D-League team called the South Bay Lakers,
0:57:55 who were owned by the Los Angeles Lakers.
0:57:59 Ingram led the G-League in three-point shooting percentage.
0:58:05 But still, he was 32 years old by now and still in the G-League.
0:58:07 For extra money, he tutored kids in math.
0:58:12 At the end of the season, he was called in for his regular exit interview.
0:58:15 So, you know, I’m thinking, all right, this is, you know, the same old thing.
0:58:19 But then we get upstairs, we get in this big conference room and
0:58:24 not only is the GM and head coach there, our president is there.
0:58:25 And I’m like, okay, this is a bit different.
0:58:28 I’ve done this before and usually our president’s not here.
0:58:32 The president he’s talking about was the president of basketball operations,
0:58:38 not for the South Bay Lakers, but for the Los Angeles Lakers, Magic Johnson.
0:58:42 So, you know, Hart is kind of racing at that moment and then they tell me the news.
0:58:46 The news was that the L.A. Lakers, with just two games left in their season,
0:58:49 were calling Andre Ingram up to play.
0:58:53 He would make his NBA debut at age 32.
0:58:56 But just everything that I was feeling is exactly what you thought,
0:59:00 or anybody would think knowing my story, knowing my situation.
0:59:05 I just didn’t let it out like my wife and my mom did when I told them to lose.
0:59:05 They let it out.
0:59:09 They just let it be raw and, you know, the real emotion that, you know, people love to see.
0:59:13 I was a little bit more subdued, but was feeling it all inside.
0:59:17 And so, you know, immediately after that, though, my first thought goes to,
0:59:20 okay, who do we play again tomorrow?
0:59:22 They were playing the Houston Rockets.
0:59:27 Late in the first quarter, Ingram finally got his chance to play in the NBA.
0:59:32 Eleven years, 384 games after his professional career begins,
0:59:35 Andre Ingram getting called up by the Lakers.
0:59:38 You know, I think before I got there, in the night before,
0:59:42 was when all the emotions were running wild and I’m not sure how to feel.
0:59:45 And you’re so excited, yet nervous and all these other things.
0:59:47 But when it came time for the actual game,
0:59:52 it really turned into basketball very quickly for me and made things a whole lot easier.
0:59:54 How easy was it?
1:00:08 Ingram scored 19 points that night, including four three-point shots.
1:00:11 It was one of the best debuts in Lakers history.
1:00:15 It was one of the most amazing debuts ever, the 32-year-old rookie.
1:00:23 The crowd began chanting MVP, MVP.
1:00:34 So we had no idea the reach of this until my brother and my niece had called and told me.
1:00:36 They said, hey, you are blowing up on Twitter.
1:00:38 You’re blowing up on Instagram.
1:00:41 You know, you’re everywhere and you just have no idea.
1:00:45 So I know that you’re a great three-point shooter, historically great.
1:00:50 So, but forgive me for saying this, your shot looks a little bit ugly,
1:00:52 if I’m being honest with you, Andre.
1:00:55 You know, it’s a little off balance and I know it works,
1:00:57 but I’m really curious to ask you.
1:00:59 I don’t mean just to insult you.
1:01:00 It’s an insult with a question.
1:01:01 No, I get it.
1:01:05 Do you think that maybe is part of what’s kept teams in the past
1:01:07 from giving you a shot at the NBA?
1:01:11 And I asked this thinking about the story about Jeremy Lin,
1:01:15 who so many teams overlooked and they later admitted they overlooked him
1:01:19 because he was an Asian guy and he didn’t fit the template of what,
1:01:20 you know, an NBA player was.
1:01:23 And I’m curious if whether you think that your untraditional shot
1:01:28 may have hurt you in some way, even if just like perception wise.
1:01:30 You know what, I mean, it’s a good question.
1:01:32 I don’t think so.
1:01:34 I would say the gray hair probably has more to do with it.
1:01:38 But if I had to guess, maybe the awkwardness of the shot
1:01:42 or not so much the awkwardness of it, but the release point of it,
1:01:46 because it’s a bit lower than most guys, I’m already not the tallest guy.
1:01:49 So maybe there is worry about, well, hey,
1:01:51 this shot is going to get blocked in our league.
1:01:53 The guys are too athletic for him to get that off.
1:01:55 So maybe that was a thought, to be honest with you.
1:01:56 All right.
1:01:58 So here’s the big question.
1:01:59 What’s your future?
1:02:00 Yeah.
1:02:04 So right now my agent is in talks with, you know, different teams.
1:02:06 We’re trying to get into a training camp right now.
1:02:07 That’s the goal.
1:02:10 And, you know, hopefully there’ll be some new soon of where I’ll be,
1:02:12 but nowhere yet.
1:02:15 So what happens if, you know, you don’t get in a training camp,
1:02:19 you don’t get to play for an NBA team?
1:02:20 What do you do this coming season?
1:02:21 Yeah.
1:02:24 Well, it could definitely be the G-League again.
1:02:28 You know, and it could be another season of it.
1:02:31 I mean, the job for me is simple, you know, just stay ready.
1:02:35 But the goal is, and we will be continuing to play that that much.
1:02:36 I can tell you.
1:02:41 It’s interesting, you know, as a sports fan, I’ve been, you know,
1:02:45 my whole life seen people trying to squeeze meaning out of sports
1:02:47 beyond the game itself.
1:02:50 And a lot of times it feels kind of forced,
1:02:52 but it strikes me that your story was really different.
1:02:55 What is the lesson that we maybe should take from your story?
1:02:58 What I would like for people to get out of it the most is that
1:03:01 it wasn’t just that, you know, I stuck with it all the way through
1:03:03 and was happy about it all the time.
1:03:04 I definitely had doubts.
1:03:06 I had, you know, disbelief.
1:03:07 I had discouragement.
1:03:10 You know, you don’t get to something or any dream
1:03:11 or anything worth having.
1:03:13 Just, you know, Scott free.
1:03:16 I think that part about it is the realest part.
1:03:23 Andre Ingram never had the NBA career he hoped for.
1:03:28 After those final two games of the 2018 season,
1:03:29 he went back to the G-League.
1:03:33 He was called up for another short spell with the Lakers.
1:03:35 The next season, but that was it for the NBA.
1:03:38 He did make his mark in the G-League.
1:03:41 He holds league records for most games played
1:03:43 and most three pointers.
1:03:47 And in 2020, he was elected president of the G-League’s
1:03:48 brand new players union.
1:03:52 He last played professionally in 2022
1:03:54 and then stepped away to care for his mother,
1:03:56 who had been diagnosed with cancer.
1:04:01 But now Ingram says he’s hoping to come back to the G-League.
1:04:05 To play us out today, here is his family’s gospel group,
1:04:08 Maggie Ingram and the Ingramettes,
1:04:11 with a song called Work Until I Die.
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1:04:32 This episode was produced by Anders Kelto,
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1:04:36 and updated by Teo Jacobs.
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