The World's Biggest Try-Baby

As someone who grew up in New England, a passive Patriots fan, I was surprised to learn that the rest of the country hated Tom Brady. Now, I was never naive enough to think that they liked Brady. I figured they didn’t think or care about him much at all; I figured they regarded him pretty much the way I regard Lebron James. Acknowledgment of talent; slight personal dislike that can probably be explained away as jealousy. But then - somewhere between 2008 and 2012 (significant years in both politics and Boston sports) - I found out that people in other parts of the country actively disliked Brady. Belichick too. They saw the Pats as the villians, the bad guys who need to be stopped. Camp MVP from Heavyweights; Globo Gym from Dodgeball; the nameless other team from The Bad News Bears. (Okay, they have a name. But I guarantee you no one, with the possible exception of my dad, knows it without looking it up.)

Yeah, Ben Stiller plays basically the same character in both movies.

For me, it was one of those moments of forced introspection that are occasionally thrust upon us in life, as in this brilliant Mitchell and Webb clip where a low-level Nazi begins to wonder, “Are we the baddies?”

But the great thing about sports is how arbitrary it all is. There is no real reason to support one NFL team over another; they don’t really symbolize anything. Being a Patriots fan isn’t actually morally reprehensible the way being a Nazi is. What is interesting to look at, though, is what the team, its coach, and its quarterback seem to represent or signify to all the people who have strong feelings about them. And I don’t think any of the usual explanations are satisfactory here - or at least not wholly satisfactory.

First, it’s not political. Now, I will admit this got a bit more complicated around Super Bowl LI, when the culture seemed to decide all at once that the Patriots were synonymous with Donald Trump. The red hat in Brady’s locker; the come-from-behind victory without ever having been an “underdog”; the support of white nationalists like Richard Spencer; the inability of America circa 2017 to have anything that wasn’t about Trump. A perfect storm, really. But the Brady-hate did not start there; if anything, it was that pre-existing resentment that allowed him to be so easily subsumed by the anti-Trump movement.

Nor do I think the Spygate or Deflategate scandals really have that much to do with it. They didn’t help the team’s national image by any means, and they may have changed your straight-laced, church-going Grandmother’s mind - but, as a culture, I think we tolerate (and even like) a certain amount of cheating in our sports. It keeps things exciting. And no one seems to hate all the baseball players who have been caught taking steroids - or, at least, they don’t hate them for taking steroids. A cheating scandal can amplify existing dislike, but doesn’t create hatred out of nothing. (I think this is basically true of all celebrity scandals, by the way, which is why there are people out there who still like Chris Brown.)

And it’s not just “they hate us because we win.” Because we don’t hate every team or individual who is successful; this isn’t The Fountainhead or "Harrison Bergeron" (or whatever piece of dystopian fiction happens to align with your politics and/or attention span). People didn’t hate Michael Jordan in the 90s or Wayne Gretzsky in the 80s; no one really seems to hate the Golden State Warriors that much today. Outside of sports, we don’t hate Lin-Manuel Miranda or Donald Glover or Kelly Clarkson. In some cases, we even root for people who are already successful; we say things like “good for them!”

But this explanation seems to get closer than any others. We don’t hate all “winners,” but we do hate a certain subset of them, which includes Tom Brady. And I think the group of winners that we really save our most virulent hatred for are the triers.

Because it’s a schoolyard-to-graveyard social truth: it’s not cool to try.

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Some other examples of triers who inspire antipathy:

• Elon Musk - ever since he launched a Tesla Roadster into space, he’s gotten a lot of backlash suggesting that his “billionaire superhero” shtick is contrived and disingenuous
• Taylor Swift - often called “fake” and accused of dong everything (including dating men) for the sake of cultivating a certain image and selling records (as if that wasn’t true of, like, most musicians)
• Bono - despite raising a lot of money for good causes, was famously depicted by South Park as an actual, anthropomorphic “piece of crap”
• Hillary Clinton - probably the most obvious example on the planet; literally lost an election to the worst candidate of all time because people found her “forced” and “unnatural”
• That kid from your middle school who studied for every test, participated in every single extracurricular activity, and always won the Spelling Bee

Now, none of these people are universally hated. But they are defined by their unlikeability. Even those who do like them have to start out their defenses with, “Now, I know he/she is annoying, but...” And then they will go on to spell out the person’s good qualities, which we will acknowledge rationally. But they will not penetrate the part of our brains that decide, instinctively and holistically, whether we like someone or not. Triers (or “tryhards,” a term I can’t quite bear to use outside of scare quotes) just aren’t likeable.

Honorable mention goes to this guy. But that might
be partially just because of The Social Network,
which I haven't seen.

Tom Brady, though, doesn’t just study; he also makes sure to get a good night’s sleep and eat a full, balanced breakfast on test day. His significance is that he has subjugated his entire life to the singular goal of being the best quarterback in the world. He doesn’t drink coffee; he doesn’t eat processed foods; he doesn’t seem to give much thought to anything besides football. (Which is why the aforementioned red hat isn’t important.) Tom Brady is the exact opposite of well-rounded; he is the ultimate in specialization.

So that is one reason why it wasn’t all that devastating to watch him and the Patriots lose to the Eagles in Super Bowl LII a couple of weeks ago. (The other reason, for me, is just that I have some positive associations with the Eagles: my eighth-grade crush used to wear an Eagles shirt sometimes; I'm a fan of pop-punk band The Wonder Years, who are from Philly and mention the team in some of their lyrics; also, Philadelphia is just one of my favorite cities that I have visited.) Or at least why it wouldn’t have been that exciting to watch them win. If Tom Brady hadn’t been sacked in those last two minutes, I think he would have led the team to yet another come-from-behind victory. And I would have been happy, yes, but not as thrilled as I could have been. Not nearly as thrilled as I was, for instance, when rookie Malcolm Butler intercepted that pass in Superbowl XLIX.

The narrative would have been, essentially: if you devote your entire life to being good at one specific thing, then you will, in fact, become very good at that one thing.

That’s probably true, but it’s not the sort of thing anyone wants to hear.

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I’ve always been kind of infatuated with characters who are natural, effortless geniuses, who are perceptive and quick-witted, who can walk into any new situation and handle it deftly. It’s how I like to imagine myself. Some examples: Rick from Rick and Morty; Raphael Barba from Law and Order: SVU; Lip Gallagher from Shameless; Patrick Jane from The Mentalist; Alexander Hamilton from Hamilton (sure, we pretend it’s a play about hard work and determination, but it’s really about genius); every fast-talking, name-dropping avatar of Aaron Sorkin on The West Wing. I’ve never gotten into any of the Sherlock Holmes shows (mostly because I can’t remember which one  is actually supposed to be good), but I assume the people who enjoy them get some similar sense of vicarious satisfaction from watching that brilliant detective solve each case.

The thing that binds all of these characters is that you never see them trying. You never see them sitting down and studying the law, or struggling to learn a new skill, or jotting down a clever one-liner to use at the next available opportunity. It all comes naturally to them; it flows organically out of the people they already are.

The West Wing's Ainsley Hayes - AKA who Tomi Lahren thinks she is.

When I first started working at a particular large, corporate-owned retail store that may or may not have gone bankrupt since, I was given a brochure that listed the company’s “expectations” for their employees. I still remember one of them: employees should be naturally friendly and outgoing without having to “force it.” Of course, that’s an absurd requirement, impossible to police. (And in practice, most people who worked there - myself included - didn’t even bother to “force it” most of the time.) But it does show that the company understood there is a difference between being a certain type of person and trying to be that sort of person. It manifests itself in small, subtle ways. Looks, gestures, words. But it does make a difference.

So sometimes we end up in the absurd position of trying to appear as though we aren’t trying. I mean, imagine your manager at that retail store was attempting to enforce that regulation, and you really needed the job. What else could you do but act the way you imagine someone who was naturally friendly would act? Or say you’re a high school freshman and you want to impress the older kids, but the only thing lamer than a freshman is a freshman who’s trying to impress them. You’d say something like, “I don’t care what you think of me” and try to make it seem like it was actually true. (That sentence, by the way, is one that I’m pretty sure can never be true. If it was true, you wouldn’t be saying it at all.) I remember getting into this exact discussion with a couple of friends right before we entered high school: we were trying to decide whether another friend’s dyeing her hair a crazy color would read as “cool freshman” or “freshman who is trying to be cool.” A very important difference when you’re fourteen.

I think we all know intuitively this is how it works. But we tell ourselves and each other (and, most of all, young people) that it’s not really. We say that what really matters are our actions, our behaviors - the things we can control. And sure, it might be nice if that was the case, but it’s not.

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It’s cool to know Spanish because you lived in Spain for a year, or because you used to work with a lot of Hispanic people. It’s not cool to know Spanish because you studied flashcards every night - or, God forbid, you used Rosetta Stone or Duolingo.

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People love to debate whether there is really such a thing as “natural talent” or if all success can be attributed to “hard work” and “determination.” I think this is more ideological than empirical. Neither side is going to be convinced by evidence. If you presented them with proof that the “other side” was right, they’d find some way of insisting that the study was flawed, or that’s not really what they mean by “success,” or there are other factors that must be considered. Some way of rejecting the research and holding onto what they already believe.

Fun fact: J. S. Mill worked so hard as a young man that
he had a nervous breakdown in his early twenties!

For what it’s worth, I do usually tend to find myself on the “natural talent” side when I get into these discussions (aligning myself with thinkers like John Stuart Mill and Aldous Huxley.) But that’s not really what I want to consider here. Let’s assume for a minute that the people who say success is all about “hard work” are right. Let’s assume that human beings are born as blank slates, that it really just takes Malcolm Gladwell’s ten-thousand hours of practice to get good at something. There are still important differences in the way you acquire all those hours of practice - and that has an impact on the end result.

Sam is born into a family of musicians. He’s surrounded by music his entire life. At three, he sits down and plucks curiously at the keys of the piano; at six, his mother teaches him solfege; at ten, he performs his favorite songs in a band with his siblings. Music is an integral part of his daily life. It is joyful, it is social, it is fun. He gets his ten-thousand hours gradually, without even realizing it. When he is an adult, he writes his own songs and can play them on both piano and guitar.

On the other hand, Nick is born into a family that has no interest in music. He is first exposed to it through school and decides that he wants to learn piano. At age eleven, he starts taking lessons. His teacher gives him exercises, scales, drills, and he practices them diligently every night. Even though they are tedious and boring, he works hard at them because they align with his long-term goal of becoming a better pianist. He gets his ten-thousand hours of practice deliberately, by trying. By the time he is an adult, Nick has mastered all the basics of piano and has begun to write his own music.

Who is going to be the better musician? Whose music would you rather listen to?

I think we want to believe that it will be Nick. We want to believe that his work ethic and grit will allow him to surpass someone like Sam with all his unfair advantages.That's the "right" answer. Tortoise and hare and all of that. But if it’s a question of whose album to download, I’m going with Sam every time. And not because he is innately more talented. Certainly not because he has practiced more. Actually, because he has practiced less and played more. Practice implies intention, trying, effort; playing is just what musicians do. The quality of Sam's musical experiences were fundamentally different than the ones Nick had and I have faith that the music he creates will reflect that. (By the way, these two fictional dudes are loosely based on two musicians I knew in high school; if we went to school together, have fun guessing who!) Nick may be a better pianist in a technical sense; he may be good the way Tom Brady is good at being a quarterback. But as both a musician and in our judgments of him as a person, he is hurt by the fact that he tries too hard.

Is any of this fair? Absolutely not. But is it true? I think so.