Scoring The Player Quotes

I have always, essentially, been waiting. Waiting to become something else, waiting to be that person I always thought I was on the verge of becoming, waiting for that life I thought I would have. In my head, I was always one step away. In high school, I was biding my time until I could become the college version of myself, the one my mind could see so clearly. In college, the post-college “adult” person was always looming in front of me, smarter, stronger, more organized. Then the married person, then the person I’d become when we have kids. For twenty years, literally, I have waited to become the thin version of myself, because that’s when life will really begin. And through all that waiting, here I am. My life is passing, day by day, and I am waiting for it to start. I am waiting for that time, that person, that event when my life will finally begin. I love movies about “The Big Moment” – the game or the performance or the wedding day or the record deal, the stories that split time with that key event, and everything is reframed, before it and after it, because it has changed everything. I have always wanted this movie-worthy event, something that will change everything and grab me out of this waiting game into the whirlwind in front of me. I cry and cry at these movies, because I am still waiting for my own big moment. I had visions of life as an adventure, a thing to be celebrated and experienced, but all I was doing was going to work and coming home, and that wasn’t what it looked like in the movies. John Lennon once said, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.” For me, life is what was happening while I was busy waiting for my big moment. I was ready for it and believed that the rest of my life would fade into the background, and that my big moment would carry me through life like a lifeboat. The Big Moment, unfortunately, is an urban myth. Some people have them, in a sense, when they win the Heisman or become the next American Idol. But even that football player or that singer is living a life made up of more than that one moment. Life is a collection of a million, billion moments, tiny little moments and choices, like a handful of luminous, glowing pearl. It takes so much time, and so much work, and those beads and moments are so small, and so much less fabulous and dramatic than the movies. But this is what I’m finding, in glimpses and flashes: this is it. This is it, in the best possible way. That thing I’m waiting for, that adventure, that move-score-worthy experience unfolding gracefully. This is it. Normal, daily life ticking by on our streets and sidewalks, in our houses and apartments, in our beds and at our dinner tables, in our dreams and prayers and fights and secrets – this pedestrian life is the most precious thing any of use will ever experience.

Tennis is the only sport with love in the score, and that makes it the most romantic. I would be a player, but I wisely use the net to go fishing instead.

Never compare one student's test score to another's. Always measure a child's progress against her past performance. There will always be a better reader, mathematician, or baseball player. Our goal is to help each student become as special as she can be as an individual--not to be more special than the kid sitting next to her.

Whenever you keep score in love, you lose.

Stephen Covey, in his book The 8th Habit, decribes a poll of 23,000 employees drawn from a number of companies and industries. He reports the poll's findings: * Only 37 percent said they have a clear understanding of what their organization is trying to achieve and why * Only one in five was enthusiastic about their team's and their organization's goals * Only one in five said they had a clear "line of sight" between their tasks and their team's and organization's goals * Only 15 percent felt that their organization fully enables them to execute key goals * Only 20 percent fully trusted the organization they work for Then, Covey superimposes a very human metaphor over the statistics. He says, "If, say, a soccer team had these same scores, only 4 of the 11 players on the field would know which goal is theirs. Only 2 of the 11 would care. Only 2 of the 11 would know what position they play and know exactly what they are supposed to do. And all but 2 players would, in some way, be competing against their own team members rather than the opponent.

You have ten minutes,” he told me. “Ten minutes to think about what you did wrong and how bad you feel right now. Are you ready?” He’d actually clicked a button on his watch and timed me, and for those ten minutes I brooded and sulked and wallowed in humiliation. I remembered the errors I’d made on the field and corrected them in my head. I imagined punching every player on the opposing team square in the mouth. And then Dad told me my time was up. “There. It’s over now,” he said. “Now you look forward and figure out how you’re going to get better.

For being a shitty team player and having a craptastic attitude. Newsflash, you want to act like a jerk, do it at home to your parents who made you this way. Now, run.

Golf is the only sport where you can't tell how good a player might be by glancing at their physical form. I've seen some real slobs shoot scores so low the number is almost their age.

Vacate the bench of rest and play the game of the bests. Keep on marching; no more benching!

But, to Shepherd, life seemed to be laid out like a golf course, with a series of beginnings, hazards, and ends, and with a definite summing up—for comparison with others scores—after each hole.

You should want to win. I still remember when I was little. Girls would score a goal, and we would walk together, high-five, and walk back to our positions. Boys are running around, going "I'm Number One." It wasn't like that for young girls. With girls, if you miss the ball on a tackle and hit the other player, it's like, "Oh my God, I'm so sorry.

Fencing is different to sport like Tennis or Volleyball. In those sport, if scores are tied before the final point, it's called "Deuce". Which means "Two" because a player must be two points ahead to win... to compensate for the advantage of serving. But in fencing, there is no Deuce. Because there's no advantage. Both fencers start off equally. Equal footing. Equal opportunity. What separates them is just skill and the psychology of the match. The difference between winning and losing is just one point

He's probably the only player who doesn't play for 10 months and, if he scores a hat trick in his first game back, no one would be surprised.

From Playbook Sometimes a player's greatest challenge is coming to grips with his role on the team.-Scottie Pippen, six-time NBA champion with the Chicago Bulls.

[Since] a player controls every character, it is that player's intelligence that dictates the character's goals and actions, not an arbitrary number on a character sheet. Thus, in a sense, the player _is_ the character's "intelligence score"!

...leaning over the bright display among the back aisles of a forbidden arcade, rows of other players silent, unnoticed, closing time never announced, playing for nothing but the score itself, the row of numbers, a chance of entering her initials among those of other strangers for a brief time, no longer the time the world observed but game time, underground time, time that could take her nowhere outside its own tight and falsely deathless perimeter.

I spent a few more minutes puzzling over the timeline before turning my attention to the notebook’s first page, which contained a pencil drawing of an old-school coin-operated arcade game—one I didn’t recognize. Its control panel featured a single joystick and one unlabeled white button, and its cabinet was entirely black, with no side art or other markings anywhere on it, save for the game’s strange title, which was printed in all capital green letters across its jet black marquee: POLYBIUS. Below his drawing of the game, my father had made the following notations: No copyright or manufacturer info anywhere on game cabinet. Reportedly only seen for 1–2 weeks in July 1981 at MGP. Gameplay was similar to Tempest. Vector graphics. Ten levels? Higher levels caused players to have seizures, hallucinations, and nightmares. In some cases, subject committed murder and/or suicide. “Men in Black” would download scores from the game each night. Possible early military prototype created to train gamers for war? Created by same covert op behind Bradley Trainer?

As the 2018 World Cup Championship in Russia draws to a close, President Trump scores a hat-trick of diplomatic faux pas - first at the NATO summit, then on a UK visit, and finally with a spectacular own goal in Helsinki, thereby handing Vladimir Putin a golden propaganda trophy. For as long as this moron continues to queer the pitch by refusing to be a team player, America's Achilles' heel will go from bad to worse. It's high time somebody on his own side tackled him in his tracks.

Our culture teaches us to focus on personal uniqueness, but at a deeper level we barely exist as individual organisms. Our brains are built to help us function as members of a tribe. We are part of that tribe even when we are by ourselves, whether listening to music (that other people created), watching a basketball game on television (our own muscles tensing as the players run and jump), or preparing a spreadsheet for a sales meeting (anticipating the boss’s reactions). Most of our energy is devoted to connecting with others.

Every player in every game is subjected to a cold and ceaseless accounting; no ball is thrown and no base is gained without an instant responding judgment—ball or strike, hit or error, yea or nay—and an ensuing statistic. This encompassing neatness permits the baseball fan, aided by experience and memory, to extract from a box score the same joy, the same hallucinatory reality, that prickles the scalp of a musician when he glances at a page of his score of Don Giovanni and actually hears bassos and sopranos, woodwinds and violins.

Life is a game and everyone’s a player. Whether you believe it or not, the only thing that matters is the score.

Jill continues: “I scored a top-10 shortstop by getting rid of two players I had planned to drop and, oh yes, a blow job that I never ever planned to give.

Football Coaches do play football matches; their attitudes toward the game in times of tendencies of losing can cause a change in the scores of the games they monitor and mentor!

As soon as they saw Aech’s score increase, they would have used Fyndoro’s Tablet of Finding and learned that he was currently on Frobozz.

The only time I'll be caught dancing is in the end zone after scoring a touchdown.

Create the highest possible operating standards, develop the character of your players, develop the culture of your team and, as the title of Walsh’s book proclaims, The Score Takes Care of Itself.

Imagine if we taught baseball the way we teach science. Until they were twelve, children would read about baseball technique and history, and occasionally hear inspirational stories of the great baseball players. They would fill out quizzes about baseball rules. College undergraduates might be allowed, under strict supervision, to reproduce famous historic baseball plays. But only in the second or third year of graduate school, would they, at last, actually get to play a game. If we taught baseball this way, we might expect about the same degree of success in the Little League World Series that we currently see in our children’s science scores.

was a team player only until he was handed the ball. And then he simply had to run with it. The sort of man who could not hand it off, as he ought to, the sort of man who would risk the game to score a point. The wrong sort.

Coach wastes no time delivering one of his brief, post-game speeches. As usual, it sounds like he’s talking in point form. “We lost. It feels shitty. Don’t let it get to you. Just means we work harder during practice and bring it harder for the next game.” He nods at everyone, then stalks out the door. I’d think he was pissed at us, if not for the fact that his victory speeches more or less go the same way—“We won. It feels great. Don’t let it go to your head. We work just as hard during practice and we win more games.” If any of our freshman players are expecting Coach to deliver epic motivational speeches a la Kurt Russell in Miracle, they’re in for a grave disappointment.

the offensive player should know how to put her full focus on the ball, not the player with the ball, to always be alert for interceptions, shift quickly to offense after an interception, and move the ball into her team’s scoring zone.

A team never loses due to strong opposition or unfavorable conditions; a team loses due to own players failing to upgrade their game and continue running up & down the field thinking that their job is not to score or defend but to run behind the ball.

The Dead Father was slaying, in a grove of music and musicians. First he slew a harpist and then a performer upon the serpent and also a banger upon the rattle and also a blower of the Persian trumpet and one upon the Indian trumpet and one upon the Hebrew trumpet and one upon the Roman trumpet and one upon the Chinese trumpet of copper-covered wood. Also a blower upon the marrow trumpet and one upon the slide trumpet and one who wearing upon his head the skin of a cat performed upon the menacing murmurous cornu and three blowers on the hunting horn and several blowers of the conch shell and a player of the double aulos and flautists of all descriptions and a Panpiper and a fagotto player and two virtuosos of the quail whistle and a zampogna player whose fingering of the chanters was sweet to the ear and by-the-bye and during the rest period he slew four buzzers and a shawmist and one blower upon the water jar and a clavicytheriumist who was before he slew her a woman, and a stroker of the theorbo and countless nervous-fingered drummers as well as an archlutist, and then whanging his sword this way and that the Dead Father slew a cittern plucker and five lyresmiters and various mandolinists, and slew too a violist and a player of the kit and a picker of the psaltery and a beater of the dulcimer and a hurdy-gurdier and a player of the spike fiddle and sundry kettledrummers and a triangulist and two-score finger cymbal clinkers and a xylophone artist and two gongers and a player of the small semantron who fell with his iron hammer still in his hand and a trictrac specialist and a marimbist and a maracist and a falcon drummer and a sheng blower and a sansa pusher and a manipulator of the gilded ball. The Dead Father resting with his two hands on the hilt of his sword, which was planted in the red and steaming earth. My anger, he said proudly. Then the Dead Father sheathing his sword pulled from his trousers his ancient prick and pissed upon the dead artists, severally and together, to the best of his ability-four minutes, or one pint. Impressive, said Julie, had they not been pure cardboard. My dear, said Thomas, you deal too harshly with him. I have the greatest possible respect for him and for what he represents, said Julie, let us proceed.

She was the only girl he had ever loved. It ended abruptly when she ditched him for a football player. He carried the wounds for six years until he caught her and killed her. Only then had his pain suddenly vanished, his broken heart was healed. The score was even.

Archie Henderson has won no awards, written no books and never played any representative sport. He was an under-11 tournament-winning tennis player as a boy, but left the game when he discovered rugby where he was one of the worst flyhalves he can remember. This did not prevent him from having opinions on most things in sport. His moment of glory came in 1970 when he predicted—correctly as it turned out—that Griquas would beat the Blue Bulls (then still the meekly named Noord-Transvaal) in the Currie Cup final. It is something for which he has never been forgiven by the powers-that-be at Loftus. Archie has played cricket in South Africa and India and gave the bowling term military medium a new and more pacifist interpretation. His greatest ambition was to score a century on Llandudno beach before the tide came in.

In the first Test of the 1938 Ashes series, Eddie Paynter and Stan McCabe became the first players on opposing sides to score double-centuries in the same match. Bill Brown and Wally Hammond repeated the feat in the very next Test at Lord’s. How quickly the once-unprecedented accumulates its precedents.

Consider yourself and the cello. As you play the music moves out to the listener, and also enters the core of your own being, for somehow you are tuned to the cello. Well, I am persuaded that this is because you are a chord. I am a chord. Our DNA dictates our physicality-made up of billions of little notes-on a basic level. Add to that our geography, background et cetera, and you have your original score. Life is the layering of chords, but the underlying one that we are will never change. This brings us to string theory and love. Our personal chord resonates with the personal ones of others, and sometimes we encounter another person who is completely harmonious with us. It is a dominant, overwhelming attraction on the DNA level. However, such a person can appear to be our opposite-and that's where this 'opposites attract' notion comes from-because they have tuned their chord in a different way. In reality, we are attracted to the person we have chosen not to become, an alternative adjustment to a chord that is nearly the same as our own. The clashing portions of the chords sounding together advance the richness of it. So when you make love you aren't expressing emotions or showing affection, you are merging melodies. You are players in the same symphony.

Our facility is state of the art. There are half a dozen big cozy offices that Chad Jensen could’ve parked his ass in, but for some reason he chose this modest office tucked away near the laundry room. I knock on the door, only opening it when I hear Coach’s gruff, “Get in here.” The last player who waltzed in without knocking got a tongue-lashing that the rest of us could hear all the way from the showers. I like to think Coach uses the office to jack off and that’s why he insists on privacy. Logan hypothesizes that he has a secret office family that’s only allowed to venture out in the wee hours of the night. Logan is an idiot.

When scientists studied over three thousand games played by forty chess players, they discovered that at least two drugs could substantially boost players’ scores: modafinil, by an average of 15 percent, and Ritalin, by 13 percent. Even caffeine, the most commonly used cognitive enhancer, improved performance by an average of 9 percent!

Some hold the position that education is serious, but games are not; therefore games have no place in education. But an examination of our educational system shows that it is a game! Students (players) are given a series of assignments (goals) that must be handed in (accomplished) by certain due dates (time limits). They receive grades (scores) as feedback repeatedly as assignments (challenges) get harder and harder, until the end of the course when they are faced with a final exam (boss monster), which they can only pass (defeat) if they have mastered all the skills in the course (game). Students (players) who perform particularly well are listed on the honor roll (leader board).

You know, when I was a kid they had real football players. They wore leather helmets and didn’t have bi-weeks. What kind of a sissy athlete needs a week off in the middle of the season?” “When you were a kid, they kept score by chiseling X marks into stone.” I tossed a jersey to Grouper. Next week was a designated throwback week, when the team wore replica uniforms from years back. I’d ordered an extra for Grouper III. “Tell Guppy I signed it with a washable marker this time. Don’t want his mother getting another smelly-boy call from the school.” Grouper held it up and sighed nostalgically. “I remember this uniform. This was from the non-pussy-player period.” “Bite me, old man.

The unsurprising idea that luck often contributes to success has surprising consequences when we apply it to the first two days of a high-level golf tournament. To keep things simple, assume that on both days the average score of the competitors was at par 72. We focus on a player who did very well on the first day, closing with a score of 66. What can we

I was not going to feel sorry for myself. No, why should I? When my form came back, or when I picked up wickets, or when I got the big scores, or when I got player of the match, or hit six sixes, had I ever asked God, ‘why me?’ Of course not. Often in my career, I have been the man with silver in the fist. Have I ever asked God, ‘why me?’ No, never. So when the illness came I had no right to ask ‘why me?

Feelings of a Pimp They think I was a player because I was devoted to the game They thought I worked hard on my offense to break down these women’s defenses just to score They think it’s the body count that made me manipulate them into my arms to get between their legs They think I’m satisfied with a different woman in my bed every night When during the day, even my bed can feel the loneliness They think I love the easy women They think it’s for the cool points that my heart grew cold They think they have me figured out Another dog chasing after every female dog in the streets They think I’m happy with all the texting buddies, but no wife But they don’t know They don’t know how tired I am of this, how tired I am of myself How tired I am of living like this How tired I am of these games, but that’s the only way I can score with a chick They don’t know how after sleeping with these ladies, I wish I had more chemistry with at least one of them to cuddle, to give goodnight kisses and wake up beside They don’t know how loneliness consumes me With a phone filled with women’s numbers, I still feel unwanted and unworthy They don’t know these easy women make it easy for me to feel confident about myself; although it’s the wrong type of confidence I feel validated by them, I feel accomplished, I feel loved although I’m having sex with them, not making love They don’t know how tired I am of chasing fool’s gold Chasing fast women who would sleep with me in a heartbeat Leaving me with the empty feeling I felt before I started the chase The player in me is played out. I just want love, but that’s the only thing I can’t seem to find So, I keep pimping in hope of finding love Her insecurities were beautiful They opened the door for me as an opportunist She was the perfect candidate Oh so sweet, but oh so hurt How smart would I be if I didn’t capitalize? Some fellas get women drunk and have their way with them I was doing nothing wrong but pretending to be prince charming, just to get the same results I became what they needed emotionally I was the shoulder to cry on, the ear to listen to, the one person who understood I was a smooth criminal manipulating the innocent Did not feel an ounce of guilt because I was weak myself I was insecure I couldn’t help preying on vulnerable women In their weakness I found strength I was a coward, a “wannabe” player I was playing the wrong games, winning the wrong prizes The truth is, no strong man takes advantage of a woman’s vulnerability. It is a trait of the weak. Diary of a Weak Man

The team is greater than the individual” is just a cliché for people who don’t understand sports; for those who do, it’s a painful truth because it hurts to live in accordance with it. Submitting to a role you don’t want, doing a crap job in silence, playing on defense instead of getting to score goals and be the star. When you can accept the worst aspects of your teammates because you love the collective, that’s when you’re a team player.

There are a number of subjective and objective criteria that I use as a way to rank players. The subjective ones include their ability with both feet; their sense of balance; the disciplined fashion in which they take care of their fitness; their attitude towards training; the consistency between games and over multiple seasons; their demonstrated mastery in several different positions; and the way they add flair to any team for which they play. The objective ones that are impossible to dispute are: the number of goals they have scored; the games they have played for several of the best club teams in the world; the number of League championship and cup medals they have won, and their appearances in World Cups. When you employ this sort of measurement approach, it becomes far easier to define the very highest levels of performance. The people who are least confused about this are other players.

One of the ways Coach Wooden used to do that was to ask his players to acknowledge the skills and contributions of others. He told each player that if a teammate made a great pass or set a pick that allowed him to score, he should acknowledge the teammate on the way back down the court. One time a player asked, “Coach, if we do that, what if the teammate that made the assist isn’t looking?” Coach Wooden replied, “He will always be looking.” Coach knew that people look for and thrive on acknowledgment and appreciation.

The eccentric passion of Shankly was underlined for me by my England team-mate Roger Hunt's version of the classic tale of the Liverpool manager's pre-game talk before playing Manchester United. The story has probably been told a thousand times in and out of football, and each time you hear it there are different details, but when Roger told it the occasion was still fresh in his mind and I've always believed it to be the definitive account. It was later on the same day, as Roger and I travelled together to report for England duty, after we had played our bruising match at Anfield. Ian St John had scored the winner, then squared up to Denis Law, with Nobby finally sealing the mood of the afternoon by giving the Kop the 'V' sign. After settling down in our railway carriage, Roger said, 'You may have lost today, but you would have been pleased with yourself before the game. Shanks mentioned you in the team talk. When he says anything positive about the opposition, normally he never singles out players.' According to Roger, Shankly burst into the dressing room in his usual aggressive style and said, 'We're playing Manchester United this afternoon, and really it's an insult that we have to let them on to our field because we are superior to them in every department, but they are in the league so I suppose we have to play them. In goal Dunne is hopeless- he never knows where he is going. At right back Brennan is a straw- any wind will blow him over. Foulkes the centre half kicks the ball anywhere. On the left Tony Dunne is fast but he only has one foot. Crerand couldn't beat a tortoise. It's true David Herd has got a fantastic shot, but if Ronnie Yeats can point him in the right direction he's likely to score for us. So there you are, Manchester United, useless...' Apparently it was at this point the Liverpool winger Ian Callaghan, who was never known to whisper a single word on such occasions, asked, 'What about Best, Law and Charlton, boss?' Shankly paused, narrowed his eyes, and said, 'What are you saying to me, Callaghan? I hope you're not saying we cannot play three men.

Have Candace bring the ball up,” she said urgently. It was totally counterintuitive: Candace was our go-to player, on whom we counted when we needed a score. If Candace brought the ball up the court, that meant she’d have to pass it off. It meant someone else would take the last shot of the game. It meant that if we lost, everyone in the country would want to know why we hadn’t gone to the best player in the game. I nodded. It was a high-stakes decision. But I loved being the trigger puller. Loved it. I went into the huddle—and made the last critical call I would ever make in an NCAA Final Four. I looked at Lex, who would be our inbounder. “Get the ball in to Candace,” I said. I turned to Candace. “They will converge on you. Find the open player.” They all nodded and took their places. What happened next is a credit to the culture of a program in which players are taught to commit, to play all out, to attend to every detail no matter how seemingly unimportant, to never go through the motions, no matter how routine seeming, to finish with as much energy as they started with.

Some years ago I adjourned with a friend to a nearby schoolyard net for a recreational hit. On the way, we exchanged philosophies of cricket, and a few personal partialities. What, my friend asked, did I consider my favourite shot? 'Easy,' I replied ingenuously. 'Back-foot defensive stroke.' My friend did a double take and demanded a serious response. When I informed him he'd had one, he scoffed: 'You'll be telling me that Chris Tavaré's your favourite player next.' My guilty hesitation gave me away. 'You Poms!' he protested. 'You all stick together!

Lehigh caught on, but still couldn’t stop the drive. By the time Carlisle neared the Lehigh goal line, both teams were cracking up. As Carlisle bashed in for another score, lineman William Garlow entertained the defense with his running commentary. “Gentlemen, this hurts me as much as it does you, but I’m afraid the ball is over. We regret it, I am sure you regret it, and I hope nothing happening here will spoil what for us has been a very pleasant afternoon.” Fans in the stands, who couldn’t hear Garlow, had no idea why players who’d just surrendered a touchdown were doubled over with laughter.

There were seven people on a Quidditch team: three Chasers, whose job it was to score goals by putting the Quaffle (a red, soccer-sized ball) through one of the fifty-foot-high hoops at each end of the field; two Beaters, who were equipped with heavy bats to repel the Bludgers (two heavy black balls that zoomed around trying to attack the players); a Keeper, who defended the goalposts, and the Seeker, who had the hardest job of all, that of catching the Golden Snitch, a tiny, winged, walnut-sized ball, whose capture ended the game and earned the Seeker’s team an extra one hundred and fifty points.

Tavaré played 30 Tests for England between 1980 and 1984, adding a final cap five years later. He filled for much of that period the role of opening batsman, even though the bulk of his first-class career was spent at Nos. 3 and 4. He was, in that sense, a typical selection in a period of chronic English indecision and improvisation, filling a hole rather than commanding a place. But he tried—how he tried. Ranji once spoke of players who 'went grey in the service of the game'; Tavaré, slim, round-shouldered, with a feint moustache, looked careworn and world-weary from the moment he graduated to international cricket.

Can you spare me the veteran hockey player wisdom?" Lane leaned in again. "Sure. But let me tell you something, pipsqueak." At Lane's angry glare, Jared kissed him again. "You weren't on my team, and you weren't my captain, but you taught me how to love this game again. You showed me it was ok to think more of myself than I did and believe I could do more than throw my fists around. You gave me back something I didn't even realize that I'd lost." "You're saying it's my fault you made a sick glove save on me?" "It was pretty sick. Wasn't it?" Jared agreed, unable to help himself. But he smiled at Lane and kissed him.

Speaking of Vaughan, his claim in the Daily Telegraph last week that the story of a senior county pro being offered money to fix domestic matches was 'the tip of the iceberg' did not go down well with one former England captain contacted by the Top Spin. 'I played the game for almost 20 years,' he seethed, 'and I don't know a single player who has been offered money, either for information or to fix a game. To say it's the tip of the iceberg is absolute rubbish.' The fact that the player in question had just registered a mediocre Stableford score of 20 playing off a handicap of 14 had nothing to do, I was assured, with his foul mood.

Words pack power and these definitions are laden with values, often wildly idiosyncratic ones. Here’s an example, namely the ways I think about the word “competition”: (a) “competition”—your lab team races the Cambridge group to a discovery (exhilarating but embarrassing to admit to); (b) “competition”—playing pickup soccer (fine, as long as the best player shifts sides if the score becomes lopsided); (c) “competition”—your child’s teacher announces a prize for the best outlining-your-fingers Thanksgiving turkey drawing (silly and perhaps a red flag—if it keeps happening, maybe complain to the principal); (d) “competition”—whose deity is more worth killing for? (try to avoid).

Circuitry for self-confidence depends on a child’s ability to locate identity over observable behavior; this comes from growing up in a family that focuses more on what’s “inside” a child (enduring qualities, feelings, ideas) than what is “outside” (accomplishments, outcomes, labels). In regard to your child’s sports team, for example, inside stuff might be her effort in practice, her attitude when winning and losing, and her willingness to try new things; outside stuff might be her number of goals or home runs, or labels like “most valuable player.” When it comes to academics, inside stuff might be willingness to try a bonus math problem, spending time on studying, and showing enthusiasm about a subject; outside stuff might be a grade, a test score, or a label like “smartest kid in class.

The idea of Solution was that if you asked questions and didn’t keep mindlessly building widgets, your score would be lower, but you would find out you were working in a factory that supplied machine parts to the Third Reich. Once you had this information, you could potentially slow your output. You could make the bare number of parts required not to be detected by the Reich, or you could stop producing parts entirely. The player who did not ask questions, the Good German, would blithely get the highest score possible, but in the end, they’d find out what their factory was doing. Fraktur-style script blazed across the screen: Congratulations, Nazi! You have helped lead the Third Reich to Victory! You are a true Master of Efficiency. Cue MIDI Wagner. The idea of Solution was that if you won the game on points, you lost it morally.

The iPod, like the Walkman cassette player before it,C allows us to listen to our music wherever we want. Previously, recording technology had unlinked music from the concert hall, the café, and the saloon, but now music can always be carried with us. Michael Bull, who has written frequently about the impact of the Walkman and the iPod, points out that we often use these devices to “aestheticize urban space.”4 We carry our own soundtrack with us wherever we go, and the world around us is overlaid with our music. Our whole life becomes a movie, and we can alter the score for it over and over again: one minute it’s a tragedy and the next it’s an action film. Energetic, dreamy, or ominous and dark: everyone has their own private movie going on in their heads, and no two are the same. That said, the twentieth-century philosopher Theodor Adorno, ever the complainer, called this situation “accompanied solitude,” a situation where we might be alone, but we have the

When Benjamin Bloom studied his 120 world-class concert pianists, sculptors, swimmers, tennis players, mathematicians, and research neurologists, he found something fascinating. For most of them, their first teachers were incredibly warm and accepting. Not that they set low standards. Not at all, but they created an atmosphere of trust, not judgment. It was, “I’m going to teach you,” not “I’m going to judge your talent.” As you look at what Collins and Esquith demanded of their students—all their students—it’s almost shocking. When Collins expanded her school to include young children, she required that every four-year-old who started in September be reading by Christmas. And they all were. The three- and four-year-olds used a vocabulary book titled Vocabulary for the High School Student. The seven-year-olds were reading The Wall Street Journal. For older children, a discussion of Plato’s Republic led to discussions of de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Orwell’s Animal Farm, Machiavelli, and the Chicago city council. Her reading list for the late-grade-school children included The Complete Plays of Anton Chekhov, Physics Through Experiment, and The Canterbury Tales. Oh, and always Shakespeare. Even the boys who picked their teeth with switchblades, she says, loved Shakespeare and always begged for more. Yet Collins maintained an extremely nurturing atmosphere. A very strict and disciplined one, but a loving one. Realizing that her students were coming from teachers who made a career of telling them what was wrong with them, she quickly made known her complete commitment to them as her students and as people. Esquith bemoans the lowering of standards. Recently, he tells us, his school celebrated reading scores that were twenty points below the national average. Why? Because they were a point or two higher than the year before. “Maybe it’s important to look for the good and be optimistic,” he says, “but delusion is not the answer. Those who celebrate failure will not be around to help today’s students celebrate their jobs flipping burgers.… Someone has to tell children if they are behind, and lay out a plan of attack to help them catch up.” All of his fifth graders master a reading list that includes Of Mice and Men, Native Son, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, The Joy Luck Club, The Diary of Anne Frank, To Kill a Mockingbird, and A Separate Peace. Every one of his sixth graders passes an algebra final that would reduce most eighth and ninth graders to tears. But again, all is achieved in an atmosphere of affection and deep personal commitment to every student. “Challenge and nurture” describes DeLay’s approach, too. One of her former students expresses it this way: “That is part of Miss DeLay’s genius—to put people in the frame of mind where they can do their best.… Very few teachers can actually get you to your ultimate potential. Miss DeLay has that gift. She challenges you at the same time that you feel you are being nurtured.

were good friends. They’d maintained their friendship after Ted was out of the game. Both of them were avid fishermen, but they both had different ideas about it. They would hassle on technique, and neither would give in to the other.” Wallace Lawrimore vividly remembered the April 6, 1939, game in Florence between the Red Sox and the Reds. “Daddy carried two carloads of family to the game. We all went up to the dugout to tell Cronin we wanted some passes to get in. I got a program from that day, with all the players’ autographs.” The one ball field Florence had was deemed unsuitable for a major-league game because the fences were too short, so it was decided to build a field from scratch at the local fairgrounds. They laid down a coating of dirt for the infield and put up some circus-style bleachers for the 2,285 spectators who showed up, but when it came time for the game, gale-force winds blowing out toward left field drove the dirt everywhere, and conditions made the game virtually unplayable. It was called in the ninth inning, with the score tied 18–18, because they ran out of baseballs. Ted went 1–2 before leaving the game in the third inning after complaining of chills and a fever. Several days later, Gerry Moore of the Globe summed up spring training

An NBA clutch player can either improve his percentage success (which would indicate a sharpening of performance) or shoot more often with the same percentage (which suggests no improvement in skill but rather a change in the number of attempts). So we looked separately at whether the clutch players actually shot better or just more often. As it turned out, the clutch players did not improve their skill; they just tried many more times. Their field goal percentage did not increase in the last five minutes (meaning that their shots were no more accurate); neither was it the case that nonclutch players got worse. At this point you probably think that clutch players are guarded more heavily during the end of the game and this is why they don’t show the expected increase in performance. To see if this were indeed the case, we counted how many times they were fouled and also looked at their free throws. We found the same pattern: the heavily guarded clutch players were fouled more and got to shoot from the free-throw line more frequently, but their scoring percentage was unchanged. Certainly, clutch players are very good players, but our analysis showed that, contrary to common belief, their performance doesn’t improve in the last, most important part of the game.

DAY 137 Laser Tag “What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?” ROMANS 8:31 A few years ago my daughter was invited to a laser tag birthday party. She was little, and the laser tag vest and gun were huge, which made it hard for her to play. The first time through, she didn’t do well at all. She was an easy target for the more experienced players, and she got shot—a lot! She was pretty discouraged, but before the next round started, one of the dads handed me a vest and said, “Go get ’em, Dad.” I got the message. I followed close behind my daughter and picked off any kids foolish enough to come near her. By the end of the round, the kids knew that she was no longer an easy target. Her daddy was there, and he was not to be messed with. It was awesome. Her score that round vastly improved, bringing a big smile to her face. When we go into the arena alone, it’s easy to get picked on, singled out, and told that we are destined to fail. But when we go into battle with our heavenly Father’s protection and covering, everything changes. Not only do we have a chance to stay alive, we have a guaranteed win. PRAYER Thank you, Father, for fighting for me, keeping me safe, and helping me come through as a victor. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

BEYOND THE GAME In 2007 some of the Colorado Rockies’ best action took place off the field. The Rocks certainly boasted some game-related highlights in ’07: There was rookie shortstop Troy Tulowitzki turning the major league’s thirteenth unassisted triple play on April 29, and the team as a whole made an amazing late-season push to reach the playoffs. Colorado won 13 of its final 14 games to force a one-game wild card tiebreaker with San Diego, winning that game 9–8 after scoring three runs in the bottom of the thirteenth inning. Marching into the postseason, the Rockies won their first-ever playoff series, steamrolling the Phillies three games to none. But away from the cheering crowds and television cameras, Rockies players turned in a classic performance just ahead of their National League Division Series sweep. They voted to include Amanda Coolbaugh and her two young sons in Colorado’s postseason financial take. Who was Amanda Coolbaugh? She was the widow of former big-leaguer Mike Coolbaugh, a coach in the Rockies’ minor league organization who was killed by a screaming line drive while coaching first base on July 22. Colorado players voted a full playoff share—potentially worth hundreds of thousands of dollars—to the grieving young family. Widows and orphans hold a special place in God’s heart, too. Several times in the Old Testament, God reminded the ancient Jews of His concern for the powerless—and urged His people to follow suit: “Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow” (Isaiah 1:17). Some things go way beyond the game of baseball. Will you?

Cristiano Ronaldo scored 400 goals in the top five European leagues with an exquisite reflex. He scored the Catholic title on his chest during goal play. Cristiano Ronaldo scored his first goal in the first half of the Serie A match against Juventus at the Juventus Stadium on Tuesday. On the side, a fellow-shot ball was deflected, and the ball came suddenly into the defensive nerve of the goalkeeper. 저희는 7가지 철칙을 바탕으로 거래를 합니다. 고객들과 지키지못할약속은 하지않습니다 1.정품보장 2.총알배송 3.투명한 가격 4.편한 상담 5.끝내주는 서비스 6.고객님 정보 보호 7.깔끔한 거래 텔레【KC98K】카톡【ACD5】라인【SPR331】 정품구구정 팔팔정 비닉스 센트립 비아그라 시알리스 자이데나 엠빅스 센돔 카마그라젤 레비트라 등 많은 남성제품과 여성제품판매중입니다 위아래 카톡 텔레로 문의주세요 Ronaldo scored 400 goals in only English Premier League, Spanish Primera División and Serie A. Ronaldo is the first player to score 400 goals in five European leagues (English Premier League, Spanish Primera Liga, Serie A, German Bundesliga and French Ligue 1). Ronaldo scored 84 goals in Premier League Manchester United from 2003 to 2009 and Primera División scored 311 goals in 2009 from 2009. He has scored five goals in Serie A Juventus this season and has scored 400 goals. Ronaldo is in first place in the top five European leagues, but the gap with second place is not very large. Lionel Messi (31, Barcelona) of the century has scored 390 goals in Primera División FC Barcelona. Ronaldo is chasing 10 goals. Juventus scored a goal in the second half with Genoa. Juventus had 8 consecutive wins after the opening day, but it was their first draw. Cristiano Ronaldo was a goal-sergeant and turned his body into a distinctive air and painted a letter A, and he made a large Catholic letter on his chest just before.

The conditions for the evolution of cooperation tell what is necessary, but do not, by themselves, tell what strategies will be most successful. For this question, the tournament approach has offered striking evidence in favor of the robust success of the simplest of all discriminating strategies: TIT FOR TAT. By cooperating on the first move, and then doing whatever the other player did on the previous move, TIT FOR TAT managed to do well with a wide variety of more or less sophisticated decision rules. It not only won the first round of the Computer Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournament when facing entries submitted by professional game theorists, but it also won the second round which included over sixty entries designed by people who were able to take the results of the first round into account. It was also the winner in five of the six major variants of the second round (and second in the sixth variant). And most impressive, its success was not based only upon its ability to do well with strategies which scored poorly for themselves. This was shown by an ecological analysis of hypothetical future rounds of the tournament. In this simulation of hundreds of rounds of the tournament, TIT FOR TAT again was the most successful rule, indicating that it can do well with good and bad rules alike. TIT FOR TAT’s robust success is due to being nice, provocable, forgiving, and clear. Its niceness means that it is never the first to defect, and this property prevents it from getting into unnecessary trouble. Its retaliation discourages the other side from persisting whenever defection is tried. Its forgiveness helps restore mutual cooperation. And its clarity makes its behavioral pattern easy to recognize; and once recognized, it is easy to perceive that the best way of dealing with TIT FOR TAT is to cooperate with it.

Suddenly, Coach Spinks’s face mellowed. There was a dissociation of form and substance. His eyes glistened; his gaze became beatific. “Let us pray,” he said and all the heads on the team dropped floorward as though they were puppets strung to the same wire. “O sweet Jesus, we come again to ask your blessings and your forgiveness for our many trespasses against you and our fellow neighbor. We are playin’ West Charleston High School tonight, Lord, but there’s no need to tell you that since you knew about it two or three million years before I did. We ask, good Jesus, not that we beat West Charleston High but that we do our best before our God, our family, and our country. We do ask, Lord, if you see it befitting, that we score a point or two more than West Charleston even though I know that Coach Warners is a God-fearin’ man and a deacon in the Baptist Church besides. But you know as well as I, Lord, he’s one of the mouthiest so-and-so’s that ever wore socks. I’m also aware, dear Jesus, that their players are all clean cut boys and also pleasant to your sight. We don’t want to ask for anything special, Lord, but help my rebounders get off their feet. Help Pinkie and Jim Don control their tempers. Give Philip and Art a little more temper. And get Ben to quit throwin’ those big city behind-the-back passes. And, Lord, please help this high school if I got to make any substitutions. My scrubs is good boys but they’ve been havin’ a devil of a time puttin’ that ball into the hole. The real thing I want to ask, Lord, is that all these boys make the first team in that great game of life. If they make mistakes, Lord, blow the whistle because you’re the great referee. Call time out and bring them to center court for another jump ball. Don’t let them go out of bounds, Lord. If they bust a play, make ’em run wind-sprints and figure eights but stay with ’em, Lord. Coach ’em all the way to the championship of life. A-men.” “A-men,” the team echoed in relief.

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Chapter One Vivek Ranadivé “IT WAS REALLY RANDOM. I MEAN, MY FATHER HAD NEVER PLAYED BASKETBALL BEFORE.” 1. When Vivek Ranadivé decided to coach his daughter Anjali’s basketball team, he settled on two principles. The first was that he would never raise his voice. This was National Junior Basketball—the Little League of basketball. The team was made up mostly of twelve-year-olds, and twelve-year-olds, he knew from experience, did not respond well to shouting. He would conduct business on the basketball court, he decided, the same way he conducted business at his software firm. He would speak calmly and softly, and he would persuade the girls of the wisdom of his approach with appeals to reason and common sense. The second principle was more important. Ranadivé was puzzled by the way Americans play basketball. He is from Mumbai. He grew up with cricket and soccer. He would never forget the first time he saw a basketball game. He thought it was mindless. Team A would score and then immediately retreat to its own end of the court. Team B would pass the ball in from the sidelines and dribble it into Team A’s end, where Team A was patiently waiting. Then the process would reverse itself. A regulation basketball court is ninety-four feet long. Most of the time, a team would defend only about twenty-four feet of that, conceding the other seventy feet. Occasionally teams played a full-court press—that is, they contested their opponent’s attempt to advance the ball up the court. But they did it for only a few minutes at a time. It was as if there were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world about the way the game ought to be played, Ranadivé thought, and that conspiracy had the effect of widening the gap between good teams and weak teams. Good teams, after all, had players who were tall and could dribble and shoot well; they could crisply execute their carefully prepared plays in their opponent’s end. Why, then, did weak teams play in a way that made it easy for good teams to do the very things that they were so good at? Ranadivé looked at his girls. Morgan and Julia were serious basketball players. But Nicky, Angela, Dani, Holly, Annika, and his own daughter, Anjali, had never played the game before. They weren’t all that tall. They couldn’t shoot. They weren’t particularly adept at dribbling. They were not the sort who played pickup games at the playground every evening. Ranadivé lives in Menlo Park, in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley. His team was made up of, as Ranadivé put it, “little blond girls.” These were the daughters of nerds and computer programmers. They worked on science projects and read long and complicated books and dreamed about growing up to be marine biologists. Ranadivé knew that if they played the conventional way—if they let their opponents dribble the ball up the court without opposition—they would almost certainly lose to the girls for whom basketball was a passion. Ranadivé had come to America as a seventeen-year-old with fifty dollars in his pocket. He was not one to accept losing easily. His second principle, then, was that his team would play a real full-court press—every game, all the time. The team ended up at the national championships. “It was really random,” Anjali Ranadivé said. “I mean, my father had never played basketball before.” 2. Suppose you were to total up all the wars over the past two hundred years that occurred between very large and very small countries. Let’s say that one side has to be at least ten times larger in population and armed might

He said the stadium was the only place you could express yourself openly. When a player scores, you can cheer, ‘Hurray!’ because you’re happy, not because you’re forced. You can’t lie all the time!

Hotness isn’t just physical. It’s mental, a state of mind. It’s intelligence, confidence. It’s strength. And you, hala, got all that down. Your swagger is sexier than the most gorgeous woman naked.

Her brother could be downright intimidating. But never with her. And never with his wife and baby daughter.

Kim Matlock, sister to Alexander Bishop, Vice-President of Public Relations at Bishop Enterprises, didn’t have sex with someone she barely knew. Kim Matlock was better than that.

We have used the same model for analyzing the off spinners, the left-arm spinners and the fast bowlers too but it is only in this chapter that we will burden the readers with the details and logic of our model building. Our premise is that every aspect of bowling performance—wickets, strike rate (SR), bowling average, five wickets in an innings, 10 wickets in a match and the wickets taken in away matches—has a bearing on determining the overall value or effectiveness of the bowler. In order to arrive at a composite overall effectiveness index, we used the SR, bowling average, five wickets in an innings, 10 wickets in a match and the proportion of wickets taken away from home to create a relative index and converted each bowler’s performance in each of these factors into his individual index score. To calculate the index for a particular parameter, let us demonstrate with the example of Warne’s index for SR. His SR is 57.4. The cumulative SR of 38 players in our list is 2760.7 and so Warne’s SR Index is 57.4/2760.7 expressed as a percentage which is 2.7. A similar index for each parameter is calculated for each of the players. The aggregate of the index for the five parameters—SR, bowling average, five wickets/innings, 10 wickets/match and proportion of away wickets—of each player provides us a score for each bowler. And as you would have noted from the way we calculated the SR Index, the lower this score the better is the bowler’s rating; thus the one with the lowest score is best in class and the ranks would progressively go down as the individual index scores went up. Let us call this aggregated score as “Bowler Index Score.” But this “Bowler Index Score” does not recognize or give weightage to the number of wickets that a bowler had taken. The number of wickets reflects a bowler’s longevity at the highest level of the game. Since 38 bowlers in our list range from an extreme high of 708 wickets to an extreme low of 40 wickets, we decided to convert the wickets to their logarithmic value. (Log W for 100 wickets has a value of 2.0, for 200 wickets would have a value of 2.3 and for 400 would be 2.6 and so on.) In order to retain consistency in the convention of lowest figures indicating highest degree of effectiveness, we created an overall Effectiveness Index by dividing the Bowler Index Score by the Log value of the wickets taken. Thus, Effectiveness Index = Bowler Index Score/Log W.

At Bridgewater, every employee has a believability score on a range of dimensions. In sports, statistics for every player’s performance history are public. In baseball, before you sign a player, you can look up his batting average, home runs, and steals; assess his strengths and weaknesses; and adjust accordingly. Dalio wanted Bridgewater to work the same way, so he created baseball cards that display statistics on every employee’s performance, which can be accessed by anyone at the company. If you’re about to interact with a few Bridgewater colleagues for the first time, you can see their track records on seventy-seven different dimensions of values, skills, and abilities in the areas of higher-level thinking, practical thinking, maintaining high standards, determination, open-mindedness yet assertiveness, and organization and reliability.

Bring Back Our Baskets! That was the cry heard from Quidditch players across the nation last night as it became clear that the Department of Magical Games and Sports had decided to burn the baskets used for centuries for goal-scoring in Quidditch. ‘We’re not burning them, don’t exaggerate,’ said an irritable-looking Departmental representative last night when asked to comment. ‘Baskets, as you may have noticed, come in different sizes. We have found it impossible to standardise basket size so as to make goalposts throughout Britain equal. Surely you can see it’s a matter of fairness. I mean, there’s a team up near Barnton, they’ve got these minuscule little baskets attached to the opposing team’s posts, you couldn’t get a grape in them. And up their own end they’ve got these great wicker caves swinging around. It’s not on. We’ve settled on a fixed hoop size and that’s it. Everything nice and fair.’ At this point, the Departmental representative was forced to retreat under a hail of baskets thrown by the angry demonstrators assembled in the hall. Although the ensuing riot was later blamed on goblin agitators, there can be no doubt that Quidditch fans across Britain are tonight mourning the end of the game as we know it. ‘’T won’t be t’ same wi’out baskets,’ said one apple-cheeked old wizard sadly. ‘I remember when I were a lad, we used to set fire to ’em for a laugh during t’ match. You can’t do that with goal hoops. ’Alf t’ fun’s gone.’ Daily Prophet, 12 February 1883

The players who score the most runs are home run hitters, not those with consistent batting records. “It’s the same with trading. Consistency is something to strive for, but it’s not always optimal. Trading is a waiting game. You sit and wait and make a lot of money all at once. The profits tend to come in bunches. The secret is to go sideways between the home runs, not lose too much between them.”12

One of the early stage AI companies Google purchased is DeepMind, based in London. In 2015 researchers at DeepMind published a paper in Nature describing how they taught an AI to learn to play 1980s-era arcade video games, like Video Pinball. They did not teach it how to play the games, but how to learn to play the games—a profound difference. They simply turned their cloud-based AI loose on an Atari game such as Breakout, a variant of Pong, and it learned on its own how to keep increasing its score. A video of the AI’s progress is stunning. At first, the AI plays nearly randomly, but it gradually improves. After a half hour it misses only once every four times. By its 300th game, an hour into it, it never misses. It keeps learning so fast that in the second hour it figures out a loophole in the Breakout game that none of the millions of previous human players had discovered. This hack allowed it to win by tunneling around a wall in a way that even the game’s creators had never imagined. At the end of several hours of first playing a game, with no coaching from the DeepMind creators, the algorithms, called deep reinforcement machine learning, could beat humans in half of the 49 Atari video games they mastered.

there are four large screens on the scoreboard showing the score, replays of the game and fan participation. Throughout the game, the video screens showed highlights of games played in the past as well.

Some hold the position that education is serious, but games are not; therefore games have no place in education. But an examination of our educational system shows that it is a game! Students (players) are given a series of assignments (goals) that must be handed in (accomplished) by certain due dates (time limits). They receive grades (scores) as feedback repeatedly as assignments (challenges) get harder and harder, until the end of the course when they are faced with a final exam (boss monster), which they can only pass (defeat) if they have mastered all the skills in the course (game). Students (players) who perform particularly well are listed on the honor roll (leader board). Traditional educational methods often feature a real lack of surprises, a lack of projection, a lack of pleasures, a lack of community, and a bad interest curve.

I score a fantastic goal but it’s not enough? Maybe Duncan thinks I’m lucky to conjure a sublime moment in a dreadful display. Maybe there was a better pass onto Wayne in the build up. Told you, Bop. He’s not a team player. He’s a wildcard. Selfish.

The varied players—objects and events, currently present or recalled from memory—do not pluck the strings of any violins or cellos and do not press the keys of countless pianos, but the metaphor captures the situation. Objects and eventsdo “play,” in the sense that they, as distinct entities within the organism’s mind, can act on certain neural structures of the organism, “affect” their state, and change those other structures for a passing moment. Over the “playing time,” their actions result in a certain kind of music, the music of our thoughts and feelings and of the meanings that emerge from the inner narratives they help construct. The result may be subtle or not so. Sometimes it amounts to an operatic performance. You can attend it passively, or you can intervene, modify the score to a greater or smaller extent, and produce unpredicted results.

In the 2002-2003 season, Jordan would once again play in all 82 games and started 67 of them. He was the only Washington Wizard to do so that season. Despite turning 40 years old in that season, Jordan had averages of 20 points per game, 6.1 rebounds, 3.8 assists, and 1.5 steals. He scored 20 or more points in 42 games, passed the 30-point mark nine times, and the 40-point mark three times.

Why do the referees keep stopping the game?” Rey asked. “They’re calling fouls,” Lena said, not tearing her eyes from the players down on the court. The rest of us were clearly on a different level. She shouted the whole time, booing when the ref called a foul on us and cheering when our team made a shot. From our vantage point halfway up in the stands, we had a great view of the action. Even though the opposing team was obviously good, the score was tied. Thanks to Jesse, who was easily one of the top players.

In Saudi Arabia in 2010, there was “public outrage” when a Romanian soccer player kissed the tattoo of a cross he had on his arm after scoring a goal. In October of the next year, a Colombian soccer-player “was arrested by the Saudi moral police after customers in a Riyadh shopping mall expressed outrage over the sports player’s religious tattoos, which included the face of Jesus of Nazareth on his arm.”233

The system, as far as she was concerned, was not about the applicant at all. It was about the institution. It was about delivering to the trustees, and to a lesser extent the faculty, a United Nations of scholars, an Olympiad of athletes, a conservatory of artists and musicians, a Great Society of strivers, and a treasury of riches so idiosyncratic and ill defined that the Office of Admission would not know how to go about looking for them and could not hope to find them if they suddenly stopped turning up of their own accord. So get over yourself, Portia thought through her tight, achingly tight, smile, because Diana had now moved on to last year’s scholarship girl, the daughter of the school janitor, who had gone off to Harvard and was a lovely, lovely girl, of course, and certainly a wonderful little flute player, but had scored over one hundred points lower on the math SAT than the class salutatorian, who had been rejected not only by Harvard, but by Yale, Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth, Williams, Amherst, and—can you believe this?—NYU. And come on, everyone knew what that meant. And how—how?—could it be fair?

It was also possible to back out from the box scores the pace at which various college teams played—how often they went up and down the court. Adjusting a college player’s stats for his team’s pace of play was telling. Points and rebounds meant one thing when the team took 150 shots a game and something different when it took just 75. Just adjusting for pace gave you a clearer picture of what any given player had accomplished than the conventional view did.

happens everywhere all the time. Have you noticed, however, that great players and great companies don’t suddenly start hunching up, grimacing, and trying to “hit the ball harder” at a critical point? Rather, they’re in a mode, a zone in which they’re performing and depending on their “game,” which they’ve mastered over many months and years of intelligently directed hard work.

The fifth edition simplifies and rationalizes D&D in key ways. Breaking down a door is a great example: When Angela wanted to throw her weight around, Willi asked for her strength score—and figured it was high enough to get the job done. “The idea is if you are not rushed, and there’s really no danger, we simply look at it and say anyone with a strength of fifteen or above can open it,” Willi said. “If you are being chased by a horde of goblins and it’s important to get in the door in a rush, then I might make you roll. But generally, it’s the DM’s prerogative.” Compare that to the 3.5 edition rules, which are rather more complicated. First, the player may attempt to smash the door open with a Strength check. They roll a d20 and add their strength bonus. Then the DM checks a table5 that lists different kinds of doors (simple wooden, good wooden, strong wooden, stone, iron, wooden portcullis, iron portcullis) and determines the door’s breaking point. If the player scored higher than that number, they’re through. If not, they’ve got a long way to go. Next, the DM figures out the door’s armor class (10, plus a modifier based on its size, and minus 2 because it’s an inanimate object). Then the player has to fight the door like it’s an opposing monster. They attack, and if the attack roll is higher than the door’s AC, they do damage—but not before the DM goes back to his tables and figures out the door’s hardness. Hardness reduces damage, so if you hit for 9 points of damage against a stone door with a hardness of 8, you really only do 1 point of damage . . . and at that rate, you’ll have to hit the door another sixty times before you eventually smash the thing to pieces. Or, more likely, you toss the stupid rule book under the couch and go play video games instead.

As with war, suppressing reactive aggression and following rules are fundamental to most sports. Indeed, sports might have evolved as a way to teach impulse control along with skills useful for hunting and controlled proactive fighting. What is more unsportsmanlike than punching an opponent who scores a goal or, even worse, punching a teammate who scores instead of you? Professional tennis players aren’t even allowed to say rude things on court. Surely other hominins including Neanderthals engaged in play, but I hypothesize that sports evolved when humans became self-domesticated. As noted above, it is primarily among domesticated species that adults play, and among the many reasons humans in every culture play sports, one is to teach cooperation and learn to restrain reactive aggression. Regardless of whether you are trying to beat your opponent to a pulp in a cage or impress the judges of a synchronized swimming competition, to be a “good sport” you have to play by the rules, control your temper, and get along with others. Sports also foster habits like discipline and courage that are crucial for proactive aggression such as warfare. Perhaps the Battle of Waterloo really was won on the playing fields of Eton.

Suppose there was some group of people who selected beginning chess players for some chess program according to what seemed to be their “innate talent.” They would teach a group of youngsters how to play and then, after three or six months had passed, look to see who were the best. We know what would happen. On average, the kids with higher IQs would have an easier time in the beginning learning the moves and would be selected for further training and grooming; the others would not be offered a spot in the program. The end result would be a collection of chess players with much higher than average IQs. But we know that in the real world there are many grandmasters who don’t score particularly well on IQ tests—so we would have missed the contributions of all of those people who could become great chess players.

Russians by history were chess players. The surface game as in chess, was important, but not vital. The real game, for power, control - all the marbles - was the thing. Americans, as a people, did not care for chess. They preferred a ball game, and this was what the USSR would not play. With no greater game in mind, Western policy always fell into the trap of watching the current score, the needs of the day, and the passing scene, never the future. It put more store in ephemeral diplomatic gains than real, if hidden, shifts of power.

I know that they do. It's been a hard year for them. But sometimes, you need to get out and do things for yourself. It makes you a better mom." If only she knew that getting out and doing a certain hockey player was going to make me a mom. Again.

As a basketball coach, I love to watch the player who rotates to provide defensive help, sets the proper angled screen to free up the three-point shooter, and blocks out the other team’s leading rebounder. Unfortunately, the majority of fans watching the game (and everybody reading the box score in the paper) miss these crucial elements in the win. Statistics just can’t properly measure the impact a player has on the game.

Let me describe how that same thought applies to the world of education. I recently joined a federal committee on incentives and accountability in public education. This is one aspect of social and market norms that I would like to explore in the years to come. Our task is to reexamine the “No Child Left Behind” policy, and to help find ways to motivate students, teachers, administrators, and parents. My feeling so far is that standardized testing and performance-based salaries are likely to push education from social norms to market norms. The United States already spends more money per student than any other Western society. Would it be wise to add more money? The same consideration applies to testing: we are already testing very frequently, and more testing is unlikely to improve the quality of education. I suspect that one answer lies in the realm of social norms. As we learned in our experiments, cash will take you only so far—social norms are the forces that can make a difference in the long run. Instead of focusing the attention of the teachers, parents, and kids on test scores, salaries, and competition, it might be better to instill in all of us a sense of purpose, mission, and pride in education. To do this we certainly can't take the path of market norms. The Beatles proclaimed some time ago that you “Can't Buy Me Love” and this also applies to the love of learning—you can't buy it; and if you try, you might chase it away. So how can we improve the educational system? We should probably first rethink school curricula, and link them in more obvious ways to social goals (elimination of poverty and crime, elevation of human rights, etc.), technological goals (boosting energy conservation, space exploration, nanotechnology, etc.), and medical goals (cures for cancer, diabetes, obesity, etc.) that we care about as a society. This way the students, teachers, and parents might see the larger point in education and become more enthusiastic and motivated about it. We should also work hard on making education a goal in itself, and stop confusing the number of hours students spend in school with the quality of the education they get. Kids can get excited about many things (baseball, for example), and it is our challenge as a society to make them want to know as much about Nobel laureates as they now know about baseball players. I am not suggesting that igniting a social passion for education is simple; but if we succeed in doing so, the value could be immense.

Unlike basketball, baseball, or football, games that reset after each play, soccer unfolds fluidly and continuously. To understand how a goal was scored, you have to work back through the action - the sequences of passes and decisions, the movement of the players away from the action who reappear unexpectedly in empty space to create or waste opportunities - all the way back to the first touch. If that goal was scored by a young refugee from Liberia, off an assist from a boy from southern Sudan, who was set up by a player from Burundi or a Kurd from Iraq - on a field in Georgia, U.S.A., no less - understanding its origins would mean following the thread of causation back in time to events that long preceded the first whistle.

when India were set 360 to win the World Cup in 2003 against an outstanding Australian team that seemed to add a further 30 runs to the total by the way they caught, fielded and bowled. The dressing room in the break couldn’t have been the happiest place to be in. Until Sachin asked a simple question of them: ‘Can we score one boundary an over?’ It’s not easy but neither is it impossible. When he heard a few players say yes, he asked what the target would then reduce to… a boundary an over means 50 balls produce 200 runs and the objective shrinks to 160 from 250 balls. Very achievable.

Like many, I haven’t totally abandoned the idea that I will one day become a professional cricketer. And if I’m not dreaming about playing first grade, or gaining selection as an overage player in the newly formed Futures League, I’m dreaming about the coveted ‘triple C’: the Century, Circuit, Chop. To score a hundred during the day, get drunk with your mates all night, and then have sex with a woman later that evening — all within a 12-hour period — is to achieve the holy trinity of amateur sport. If I am honest, it’s the slim chance of nailing this mouth-watering trifecta that drives me to continue playing cricket. I have never done it, not yet, but I desperately want to.

He’s a freakn’ beast. Naomi watched in rapt fascination as player number forty-four scored yet another goal. Like an implacable freight train, he plowed through the opposition’s defense as if they didn’t exist, using his size, and surprising speed, to bowl them over. At the end of his shift, he went to sit his turn on the bench, but her fascination in the game didn’t waver. Her attention ended up snagged by player sixty-nine. Smaller in stature than the behemoth, he absorbed her just as completely with his feline grace as he twisted and moved around the floor. He almost danced as he ran, his stick held high and usually cradling the ball.

Destructive Abundance” is what I call the result of this imbalance. It is what happens when selfish pursuits are out of balance with selfless pursuits. When the levels of dopamine-incentivized behaviors overwhelm the social protections afforded by the other chemicals. When protecting the results is prioritized above protecting those who produce the results. Destructive Abundance happens when the players focus almost exclusively on the score and forget why they set out to play the game in the first place.

Winning and losing was suddenly elevated to be about things that had no score and no teams and no uniforms; just one player at a time dealing with his life, his own struggle, his own triumph and torment.