Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Sally Jenkins:

What coaches know about discipline that I think a lot of other leaders don’t is that you really have to foster it. You have to ask people to adopt it themselves. And every great coach from Phil Jackson did this, Pat Summit did it, Mike Krzyzewski did it.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Sally Jenkins. She’s a sports columnist and feature writer at the Washington Post who has, on five separate occasions, been named the nation’s top sports columnist by the Associated Press Editors. Sally’s beat may be sports, but her work is equally applicable off the field. It has to do with themes like leadership, culture, and preparation. And it draws on her deep knowledge of history and politics, and that’s what her new book is about. It’s called The Right Call: What Sports Teach Us About Work and Life. Sally joins me to discuss the book, how top athletes like Peyton Manning have learned from their worst moments and what to make of the recently announced merger between the PGA and the Saudi-backed rival LIV Golf Tour. That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

 

QUESTION AND ANSWER:

Now let’s get to your questions. This question comes in a tweet from Chris, “#ASkPreet. Can you explain why the Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhardt is issuing rulings when I understand Judge Cannon has the case? I do see his jurisdiction as the Southern District of Florida.”

So that’s a good question. It’s a little confusing to lay people why there are two judges on a case. So the judge that’s responsible for the matter, the case, the trial and all important decisions is Judge Eileen Cannon. She’s a federal district court judge, meaning she was nominated by the president of the United States, in this case, Donald Trump when he was president. She was confirmed by the Senate and she has life tenure as all federal district court judges do.

There’s another kind of judge also that’s assigned to every matter, criminal or civil, and that’s the magistrate judge. The magistrate judges are not appointed by the president. They’re basically, depending on the district, appointed through some procedure and methodology that the judges themselves, the district judges themselves adopt and they serve for terms of years. In the Southern District for example, they serve for a term of 10 years and they handle all sorts of matters relating to criminal and civil cases often matters relating to discovery. They will handle search warrants. They will handle sometimes simple court procedures, like arraignments as you saw when Donald Trump was arraigned on the indictment in the Southern District of Florida. And the district court judge who’s the main responsible arbiter of a case can refer other matters to the magistrate judge.

You should note however, that anything the magistrate judge does, any decision made by the judge in this case or any other case can be appealed directly to the district court judge. So it’s for a matter of convenience, it’s for streamlining the process and sometimes it depends on the availability of the district court judge. But to be clear, judge Cannon is the one in charge.

This question comes in a tweet from 307GIO. “How likely is a bench trial? Does the prosecution have to agree to a bench trial? #AskPreet.”

Well, that’s a great question. As you may know, the Sixth Amendment in our constitution guarantees everyone a right to a trial by jury in a significant criminal case, not for misdemeanors, but for felonies and the like. Like any right, like the right against self-incrimination, a defendant can waive the right to a jury and decide, “I’d rather have the judge instead be the jury.” Why? Well, the defendant might think and the defendant’s lawyer might think that you have a favorable judge. They might think it’ll be a quicker trial, it’ll be a simpler trial, it’ll be a cheaper trial. They might think that they’re being tried in an unfavorable jurisdiction and the jury pool might not be great, and they find the judge to be fair and honorable and they would get a better shake at a fair and just trial in front of the judge.

In some cases, the defendant might decide, “Well, the facts aren’t really in dispute. And what’s really an issue here is a narrow legal question. We might as well have the judge decide both the legal question and the facts.” I oversaw a trial like that when I was an assistant US attorney. The thing to remember though is even if there’s a trial by judge, in other words, a bench trial, the same standards have to be followed, guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The standard doesn’t change, the burden of proof doesn’t change. Only who the trier of fact is, the identity of that party changes, and it’s the judge.

Now, there’s some peculiarities in a bench trial and a defendant has to weigh these things in a decision to waive a jury trial. And that is normal jurors, lay jurors are not told a lot about the case. They’re not told about evidence that is not otherwise admissible. They’re not told about the criminal record or background of the defendant. Those things are inadmissible because they tend to be prejudicial. The judge, however, is supposed to engage in a sort of mental gymnastics and put those things aside. And as a general matter, we trust that judges know how to put aside facts and arguments that are prejudicial and not probative and just decide things in the way that a jury would.

Now, the second part of your question is interesting. “Does the prosecution have to agree to a bench trial?” Well, we always took the position that a bench trial must be agreed to by the defense, the prosecution, and of course the judge. Just because you have the right to waive a jury trial doesn’t mean you have the right to insist on and demand a bench trial. Now, that’s the legal position. In practice, if you think about it for a minute, you might realize that in almost every case, and certainly in every case when I was US attorney, when a request for a bench trial was made and a waiver of the jury trial was made, we agreed to the bench trial because the feeling was it might be considered insulting to the particular judge if from time to time the government objected. Because the inference might be, and you don’t want that inference, that the government didn’t think that particular judge would be fair and honorable and just in the overseeing of the trial. So prosecution can object. In practice, they tend not to.

Now in the case of Eileen Cannon and President Trump’s unprecedented criminal case in the Southern District of Florida, I think there are various reasons why, depending on what the rulings end up being as we go forward, maybe he’ll think about wanting a bench trial, but you never know how that’s going to turn out. I think ultimately if something like this were a bench trial rather than a jury trial, it would cause people to wonder about the fairness of the trial given the limited rulings that Judge Eileen Cannon has made so far earlier in the case with respect to the special master. I think as a general matter, Americans understand and believe that the jury system works, that juries are smart and deliberate and fair, and ultimate justice in this case I think will most likely be done if there’s trial by jury.

This question comes in an email from Kristen. “I’m a big fan of the show even though I’m not a lawyer. I’m studying to be a social worker though and we often discuss ethics. This week, Preet talked about how one of Trump’s lawyers is a friend and someone who he worked with and has great respect for. I think it was Todd Blanche. I was hoping you could discuss the ethics of someone they respect making a decision such as agreeing to be Trump’s lawyer. It can’t be an easy decision to make. What would the process look like?”

So Kristen, thanks for your question. And you’re correct, it was Todd Blanche who was a colleague of mine at the Southern District of New York for a number of years, worked with me and worked for me. I guess these decisions about who to represent and in what capacity, those are personal decisions that every lawyer has to make for himself or herself. There are lots of different considerations depending on your personality, depending on your ethics, depending on your aesthetics, depending on whether you want to get paid or not, as is a real question when it comes to Donald Trump. There are criminal defense lawyers, for example, who will represent every kind of person charged with any kind of crime, but will carve out a category of crime that they will not represent someone for.

A famous criminal defense lawyer in New York who would represent someone in any matter would drew the line at representing someone who had been credibly accused of acts of terrorism or material support of terrorism. There’s some people who will do white collar cases, will not do violence cases. There’s some people who will do all manner of cases but will not represent the mob or someone alleged to be in the mob. These are personal, aesthetic, ethical decisions that lawyers make on their own.

Now, I’m back in the practice of law. As I think about the representation of individuals, it seems to me there are a few considerations that are important. One, if I have a doubt or a concern, a real doubt or concern, that a client is not being truthful with me or will not be truthful with me, I can’t represent that person. If I have a client who have a concern is not going to listen to me, separate from being truthful but is not going to listen to me and it’s going to defy my counsel and my advice, I can’t represent that client either. And by the way, you’ve seen examples of that in public settings with President Trump and others where people have walked away from clients who just don’t listen. If you’re going to hire a lawyer, you should listen to your lawyer.

Another reason I may not be able to ethically represent someone who has been charged as an individual is if they start asking me or plan to ask me to do things that I think are unethical, to make baseless claims that I can’t make with a straight face under the facts and the law of the particular case. Obviously, there’s lots of people who do that anyway. Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, who by the way is fighting for his law license and against disbarment even as I’m recording this. And of course for some people, if they’re not going to get paid, they don’t want to represent that person either.

Now, I respect Todd Blanche, I’ve known him for a long time. There’s an additional problem I think that’s related to the ones I just mentioned in a decision to represent Donald Trump, and that is not in every case, but in many, many, many instances, lawyers with good reputations were sullied by their association with Donald Trump, either because they made baseless claims or because they were not paid or because they were attacked and vilified by Donald Trump later when he was unsatisfied. People are generally speaking, and I didn’t speak to Todd about this and he didn’t ask me and I wouldn’t have expected him to ask me, but by and large people who associate themselves with Donald Trump as lawyers in a civil matter, in a criminal matter, or as a government lawyer end up worse off when they’re finished than when they began.

By the way, I’ll also mention firms and individual lawyers might have differences of opinion about the propriety of a representation. And I don’t know what the details are here, but I will note that Todd Blanche had to leave his law firm in order to take on the representation of President Trump, both in the Manhattan DA’s case and in the case that we’ve been talking about in the Southern District of Florida.

I’ll say one more thing as a general matter. As a general matter, if someone who has been the president of the United States of America, the commander-in-chief, is in legal trouble during or after the presidency and puts a call-out for lawyers, there would be a long line of distinguished, honorable, smart, probably famous lawyers wanting to take on that representation because it’s a big deal, the stakes are high and you’ll gain in prominence and probably expand your practice by an order of magnitude after taking on that representation. That was true of people who represented Bill Clinton. That was true of other lawyers who represented people in high office. For all the reasons I said earlier, those considerations are a little bit different when it comes to Donald Trump. And the line is not long. So at the end of the day, I don’t know what all of Todd Blanche’s reasons are. Maybe he uniquely has developed a relationship of trust with Donald Trump and some discipline and some control. But I don’t know, and we’ll see.

I’ll be right back with my conversation with Sally Jenkins.

 

THE INTERVIEW:

In 2020, Sally Jenkins was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The committee cited, “Columns that marshal a broad knowledge of history and culture to remind the sports world of its responsibility to uphold basic values of equity, fairness, and tolerance.”

Sally Jenkins, welcome back to the show.

Sally Jenkins:

Thank you for having me.

Preet Bharara:

I can’t believe it’s been half a decade. That’s an error on my part. It’s great to welcome you back. Congratulations on your new book, The Right Call: What Sports Teach Us About Work and Life. Lots been going on. I enjoyed the book a lot. As I was saying before we started recording, I made a lot of notes about the book and there’s a lot of material I want to get to. First, we get right to the point. A theme of your book, and other people have made the same point, but I wonder how you explain this, a theme of your book is that champions are made not born. Why do people think the reverse is true?

Sally Jenkins:

Because the champions make it look so easy. They can make it almost nonchalant. I mean, that’s why kids try to imitate that nonchalance. There’s so much dirty, tedious work and sweat behind the ability to make something look easy. What I really wanted to do with the book was explain to people what the method is behind what looks like inspiration or intuition. All of the things that you see great athletes do on the field of play are actually micro decisions, when to take the shot, how to take the shot, which way to move. There’s a world of calculation behind all of that stuff that you never see. You just see the end move, the right action in the moment. So I just wanted to drill down, dig down into what goes into that moment.

Preet Bharara:

So what I like about the book, among other things, is what’s encapsulated in the subtitle, what sports teach us about work and life. I thought a lot about my own career and other people’s careers outside of professional athleticism, but my question is, most people are not going to be, whether they’re in sports or not, are not going to be as great as Tom Brady or Michael Phelps or any number of other monumental athletes who you mentioned in the book. So maybe this is a dumb question, but why focus on the best of the best, the greatest athletes of all time rather than focus on folks who are just sort of excellent and that mere mortals have a reasonable expectation of aspiring to?

Sally Jenkins:

Because the best of the best started out just like you and me. One of my favorite statistics at every Superbowl is to look at the number of players on a Superbowl day roster. There’s 53 players on an NFL team right? Every year, about half of those guys were cut or traded at one point or not even drafted coming out of college. The Tampa Bay Buccaneer Superbowl team with Tom Brady had 27 guys on the roster that were rated 2-stars or less in high school. So it’s a fallacy that the best of the best are somehow beyond our reach really. They start out with as many flaws as you or me.

Really I think one of the reasons I wanted to write the book was because I’ve known for years now, it’s been a very nagging thought that there’s something much deeper going on the field than just physical greatness, right? It’s a form of performance under pressure. It’s a form of acquired skill that’s actually applicable in other areas, and they’re not just there to us and entertain us. So when you say, “Well, what can the rest of us take away or why focus on the superstars?” The superstars are very clear in their methods. That’s one reason why I focused on them, because they actually are really, really intentional and they explain their methods better than most people. But the second reason I wanted to focus on them is because the $64,000 question in everything we watch in sports is, “What’s in it for you and me?” Right? What’s exportable from what they do? So that’s really what I was trying to get at when I tell stories about how bad Tom Brady’s feet were as a teenager, right?

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. I think you refer to him as a platypus.

Sally Jenkins:

Yeah. I mean, he had really bad feet. I mean, he’s not talented at all, really. I mean, he has a good long arm with accuracy, but he worked like hell for the mechanics to deliver the ball as accurately as he did. The astonishing thing about the guy is that he got faster in his 40s than he was in his 20s, if you look at his times in the 40-yard dash. And he got more RPMs on the ball in his 40s than he had in his 20s.

Preet Bharara:

I just want to be clear. The emphasis on intentionality and culture and discipline and practice and all that, I totally agree with, I totally get work matters, and we’ll talk about some of the aspects of it. But you’re not really saying that like, I, Preet Bharara, with no athletic skill at all and didn’t have it when I was a child either, if I had played differently or acted differently that I could have become either Tom Brady or Michael Phelps?

Sally Jenkins:

I think you would’ve found your skill if you had-

Preet Bharara:

Well, I did. As a lawyer.

Sally Jenkins:

Yes. Right? I mean, some of it, it’s natural interest, right? Some of it is natural inclination. But what athletes do is they work at the stuff that they aren’t good at. Everybody mistakes what they do. Athletes get really, really good at the things they sucked at. And the rest of us run around our lousy backhand our whole lives. They work on their weaknesses much more than the rest of us. So I stink at math, right? I mean, it’s been an albatross, right? I’m innumerate. I’ve never particularly worked hard at it. I’ve avoided it my whole life. Athletes go right at it. Athletes and coaches, they go right straight at their biggest weaknesses. And that’s one thing that separates them between you and me, not God’s fortunate kiss of talent.

Preet Bharara:

To the athletes who have some flaws, work harder at it. Is that part of what you’re saying?

Sally Jenkins:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

The analogy that I was thinking of throughout the book is, and I hope people will not be offended if I talk about my musical idol this way, Bruce Springsteen does not have the most beautiful voice in the history of recording artists. He has limitations to his voice. He’s my number one favorite musician. He moves me every time he performs. I’ve been to a million of his concerts. And I’ve often thought that something about the imperfect quality of his voice made him work harder at the songwriting. And Bob Dylan’s another one that comes to mind. Some of these people, they’re not pro athletes, but does any of that jive with what you’re learning with athletes?

Sally Jenkins:

Yeah. Well, it’s Bono’s line. “I can’t sing, but I’ve got soul.”

Preet Bharara:

Right.

Sally Jenkins:

Right? Yeah. I mean, look, aspiration has obviously underlies all of these people. They found something that they happen to be good at. Chris Everett. I mean, let’s look at Chris Everett, okay? She’s 5’6 and 125 pounds, had no overt speed, no overt talent. She had the greatest mind I’ve ever seen in any athlete. She had the greatest will and the greatest mind, and that was an acquired trait. She acquired it slowly but surely from the age of about 15 years on until… She was a much better tennis player at 35 than she was at 17 when she won her first Grand Slam. I mean, I think that these people find something that speaks to them. They invest in it more deeply than a lot of us do because that one thing that they find makes them feel better about themselves.

Chris Everett always described it as a need. She said, “I had a need to win. I needed to play tennis. I needed to be great at something.” And so I think that Pat Summit was the one who told me that most people are afraid to win because they’re afraid to go all in is what she said. They’re afraid to say, “That’s the best I can do.” And so they default. They choose something that is comfortable, right? They choose a profession that is safe. They choose a profession that will make money. They choose a profession that will make them comfortable or provide a good living for their family. Are they choosing the thing that inspires them the most? Not always. Athletes do. They choose the thing that electrifies them, and that’s what gives them such a big headstart.

Preet Bharara:

I want to talk more about Pat Summit. Will you remind listeners who she was?

Sally Jenkins:

Pat Summit was the University of Tennessee Women’s Basketball coach. She won more games than any coach in history, man or woman at NCA Division 1 level and eight national championships over three different decades. I wrote three books with her. So I got to kind of sit in the back of the film room and follow her around and watch how a really great one did it. Larry Brown, the great Larry Brown always said, “Pat coaches basketball. She doesn’t coach women’s basketball. She just coaches basketball.”

Preet Bharara:

Right. Right. This concept of being afraid to lose, everyone understands. And everyone understands that professional athletes and other competitive people generally don’t want to lose. But the concept that you just introduced that I think was first mentioned to you by your father, and then Pat Summit years later was able to explain it to you about fear of success. How does that play out in people’s regular lives outside of the athletic environment?

Sally Jenkins:

Well, again, I mean, I think we all tend to spend a lot of time focusing on what we’re good at or most comfortable at. Athletes know comfort’s not the only thing worth seeking. They learn that. Somewhere along the line, they pick it up. Peyton Manning. Let’s Look at Peyton Manning. All time, great Hall of Famer. He was the son of a Heisman Trophy winner in Archie Manning. You could certainly argue that Peyton Manning was born with more advantages than most people. He was. But everybody forgets that by Peyton Manning’s third year in the NFL, his one loss record was 32 and 32, and he had led the league in interceptions, I think two of his first three seasons.

It took a coach named Tony Dungy and a great quarterback’s coach named Jim Caldwell to correct some real deficits in Peyton’s game and in his on-field judgment. He wanted to be great, but he didn’t quite know how and was making a lot of mistakes out there. And so I think that I just can’t stress enough that people like Peyton overcome more than the rest of us realize. And I think in a way, this book is my way of saying to all these people I’ve been covering, I understand it now. I think I finally get it.

Preet Bharara:

I mean, part of the way I understand it, and the way you describe it, is there are people who are unwilling to utilize every ounce of their fiber and energy and mind and heart and soul to try to achieve something because if they do that… And that’s required for success obviously. But if they do that and they’re still found wanting, that’s a kind of different failure that people don’t want to bear. Does that make sense?

Sally Jenkins:

Yeah. Failure’s really, really painful, right? So one of the things that’s interesting that I came across in doing the book was a study that showed that Olympic caliber swimmers who failed to make their Olympic team, they underwent MRI scans after the race. They showed evidence in their brain scans of emotional disturbance on a par with profound depression or profound emotional upset. Not surprising, but the level of it in their brain scans was surprising.

What was also surprising in that study was that they did some interventions with these swimmers, the people who were conducting the study, and they sat down and they watched the losing races with each swimmer with a coach, and they unpacked what they’d done wrong in the race. And by the time they got finished, then they underwent a second set of brain scans. And by the time the study was finished, they realized that the swimmers who had processed their failure with the evaluative eye of a coach, the brain activity was lit up again in the areas that made them want to get back in. It showed motivation. They wanted to get back in the pool and try again. And the conclusion of the study was that unprocessed failure results in a loss of resilience. I think that this is where the rest of us can get a little… We’re too easily destroyed is one thing I’ve learned from watching all these athletes. We’re too easily knocked backwards. These people keep on going. They push through.

Preet Bharara:

The example in my own life, and maybe this does not fit, but I’ve been thinking a lot about some of the lessons and points in your book as it relates to me and other people that I know, so I went into law school not with the intention of being a pro athlete as we discussed it. My interest was the law. I’m very ambitious, even when I was young. I went into law school at Columbia thinking I’m going to be number one in my class. That was an ambition you could have. But at some point for various reasons, including I think this fear of success as you’re describing, I didn’t give it every single ounce of my energy. And in part, I think it’s because if I’m honest with myself now, if I did give it every ounce of my energy and I didn’t come up with my goal, that would’ve been hard to bear.

So what I did was, this is peculiar and I don’t think I’ve talked about this much, I tried to raise a degree of difficulty in the classes that I took. So there are some classes that I didn’t study for the final until the night before. In some cases, I’ll confess, I didn’t go to a single class. I didn’t go to single corporations class. I didn’t go to a single one of some other classes as well and I still managed to do quite well. I was not at the top of my class, but I did quite well. Some part of this was telling myself… I apologize if this is a little bit of a therapy session for me, Sally.

Sally Jenkins:

I’m enjoying hearing it.

Preet Bharara:

But I think I told myself, “Well, I’ve created such a high degree of difficulty by not giving it all my energy, and in some cases giving it much less than energy that it deserved and the task deserved that I have now accomplished in some way the goal of being really, really good without spending a lot of energy and just sort of relying on some sort of idea of natural talent that I had at the law.” Does that make any sense to you at all?

Sally Jenkins:

Yeah, sure. Well, I mean, writers are as vulnerable to that sort of thing as anything because we all think of creative writing or any kind of writing as inspiration driven, right? And the fact of the matter is that it’s carpentry. It’s pounding nails into a board, three quarters of it. There’s a certain amount of it that’s sitting, waiting for something to come into your mind out of the ether. But it’s really fractional. And that’s all I’m trying to tell people like you, is that inspiration is a fractional part of the deal, right? Once you realize that and you realize that application and commitment with what I call an embarrassed intensity, once you decide just to see where that takes you, I mean, you really surprise yourself just like these athletes have.

I mean, so Peyton Manning, one of the things that his coaches and he did was they looked at every tape of every interception he ever threw, every one. Then they looked at another tape that most people wouldn’t ever get to, which Peyton calls kind of the buried tape, which was a tape of every ball he threw that should have been intercepted but he just got a little lucky. The receiver bailed him out, or the defender dropped the ball. They took the commonalities out of those failures and they said, “Okay, what do we have to work on?” And they realized that his feet were not good under pressure. When defensive linemen were diving at his feet, his feet got very, very bad, kind of jack hammery, and it was costing him accuracy and really disturbing his decision making. And so they designed this drill where they threw really heavy sandbags at his feet in practice all the time. They made him uncomfortable in practice.

That’s the sort of thing that I think we can take… You have to find a way to throw the sandbags at your own feet is what I’m saying, right? And it doesn’t mean burning the candle at both ends or just wearing yourself out, but it does mean saying, “Okay, where are my incompetencies? Where are my unconscious incompetencies? How can I look for them a little more thoroughly and how can I apply myself to fixing them a little bit more consistently?” Right?

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

Sally Jenkins:

So I’m operating on the assumption that everybody wants to be better, right? I think inherently we all want to do a good job.

Preet Bharara:

I don’t know if everyone does. I mean, aren’t there people who are inherently lazy and are not ambitious?

Sally Jenkins:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Or is that not true?

Sally Jenkins:

Yeah, no, that’s true. That is true. That’s certainly true. I don’t mean to suggest for a minute that there aren’t people who don’t spend more energy taking shortcuts. You know those guys. You arrested some of them. I mean…

Preet Bharara:

Look, you make another point. You spend a long time, there’s a long chapter on Tom Brady, and it’s fascinating. Some of the story is known, some of it is not as well known. But there are downsides and trade-offs to becoming competitively excellent and a goat in any field. And in Tom Brady’s case, it affects family life. So there are trade-offs here. Some people might not want to go down that road, and there are not unreasonable reasons not to do that. That’s the triple negative. Sorry.

Sally Jenkins:

Yeah, no, it’s absolutely the case. I mean, look, some of the greats… I mean, Chris Everett told me once the qualities that make a champion, a lot of them are negative. There’s certainly an acquired narcissism in some ways to some of these people. You have to be really, really careful of that. Athletes are especially ephemeral, and so they spend a lot of time telling themselves, “Well, I’ve only got a few years to do this. Everyone and everything else is going to have to take a backseat.” Yeah, that comes with a price. No question. My argument is that you can excel and have a balanced life. You can borrow from these people. You don’t have to take everything. And you can’t take everything because a lot of it’s just not applicable. But you can be better. You can be a better decider. Mainly, I think a lot of us are not real methodical in our decision making processes. I think we drift.

Preet Bharara:

Well, [inaudible 00:30:00]. You say on page 2 of the book, I was about to quote this to you, “Most people are uncomfortable making decisions.”

Sally Jenkins:

Yeah, we drift.

Preet Bharara:

And you say on page 3, “Sport demands decision making with a special intensity.” You have no choice but to constantly be making decisions, which in other walks of life people tend to want to avoid.

Sally Jenkins:

Yes. The thing I admire the most about athletes and coaches is that they decide to be actors. They decide to participate in their own fate, right? They don’t let the current just push them through life. They put their auras in the water.

Preet Bharara:

Whether they’re rowers or not.

Sally Jenkins:

Yes. Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

You were speaking a few minutes ago about processing failure. You cite to this amazing and super interesting study in your book in which you described two researchers from the University of Pennsylvania back in 2009, analyzed more than 45,000 college basketball games and 18,000 NBA contests, and found that trailing slightly at halftime actually led to an increase in winning percentage. You write, “NBA teams that trailed by small margins won at about a 6% higher rate. Why would this be? They respond to reversals with intelligent adjustments. Simply put, champions are good losers.” Can you elaborate on that?

Sally Jenkins:

Yeah. So they have the minds of engineers in some ways, athletes and coaches. They understand that you have to stress something to improve it. And every great coach I’ve ever known actually hated the prospect of going undefeated. It really scared them. Like Pat Summit never wanted to go 39 and 0. It was never a goal.

Preet Bharara:

38 and 1 was okay?

Sally Jenkins:

Yeah, actually preferable to her. My hand to God, I had this exact verbatim conversation with her. I called her up one day before the season started and I said, “How’s it looking, Pat?” And she said, “Well, I’ll tell you.” She said, “If we lose one game, we have a really good chance. And if we lose two games, I guarantee you we’ll win the championship.”

Preet Bharara:

That’s so interesting.

Sally Jenkins:

She wanted to lose one or two games because she would be more perceptive and sharper at examining the team’s weaknesses. She knew her kids would be more receptive and more self examining. If you can cure a couple weaknesses over the course of a season, everyone who’s been scouting you for one thing goes into the tournament thinking they can attack you here. And if you can parry that and it’s not a weakness anymore, it’s actually a really good psychological advantage when you’re in championship mode. So she hated going undefeated, hated it.

Preet Bharara:

Well, some athletes like streaks and they’re famous streaks in all sports, notably in baseball. What have you learned in your time sports writing about the psychology of a streak?

Sally Jenkins:

One thing I’ve learned is they’re terribly… The stories about how superstitious athletes and coaches are would blow your mind. I mean, these are people who are really in command of their fates and in commands of their bodies and their minds.

Preet Bharara:

And empirical. Everything is empirical.

Sally Jenkins:

And empirical. And yet Deion Sanders would dress… He had a ritualistic dressing routine where he would dress from the toes up, like socks and then up to his shoulder pads. It was a superstition. I literally saw Pat Summit stick her arm into a toilet at the Atlanta airport to get a lucky penny out of the bottom of a toilet. And then she had to scrub down like a surgeon afterwards. I mean, just because they’re chasing championships and they just are not going to leave any little stone unturned, right? I mean, there was literally one postseason where Pat Summit and her staff didn’t shave their legs for two weeks. I mean, they get really nutty about this stuff because they’re not going to tempt fate.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with Sally Jenkins after this.

The other thing about studying pro athletes, this is I thought a very smart point that I hadn’t really thought about too deeply, although I make a reference to this in my own book, you write that most formal studies of leadership suffer from a fundamental weakness. You can’t watch a CEO in live action. Now, I make the same point about how judges, once they take the bench, they don’t go and watch their peers. They can read their peers’ decisions and maybe their opinion writing can improve. But once they take the bench as a general matter, you stop learning from the other people who are in your profession. In professional sports, maybe you’re not the practices, but the decisions they make, the choices they make, the things that they do are eminently observable. There’s no place to hide, right?

Sally Jenkins:

Right. That’s why I argue in the book that we understudy and underuse them because it’s not a reality TV show. I mean, this is real live action, under pressure decision making, and it’s really worth studying. When you think about the sort of sideways influence that great sports organizations have had, I mean, you can look at places like NASA where they now train astronauts like athletes, right? Because they’ve understood at NASA that the cognitive function and physical conditioning really go hand in hand. And we learn that from athletes, right? That’s a very athletic viewpoint.

So performance under pressure, again, we get to watch these people in real time making real decisions, making real calls, and trying to find the right action in the moment. Maybe the most surprising thing I learned in reporting the book that really bore out was something that Frank Reich said to me, he’s the NFL coach in Carolina, and he said, “Too many people think that performance under pressure is about getting yourself to rise to some extraordinary level.” He said, “No, performance under pressure is really about being so well practiced and so well conditioned that you’re just being yourself in the moment and bringing out your ordinary performance.” And that’s a critical, critical distinction, right?

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. I think you’ve said this about a number of athletes in the book, and the one in particular was most poignant. I forget which it was, but you asked someone, “In the moment, are you thinking?” Maybe it was Michael Phelps.

Sally Jenkins:

Yeah, it was Phelps.

Preet Bharara:

And the answer is kind of surprising that-

Sally Jenkins:

No.

Preet Bharara:

… “No, in the moment you’re not thinking.” And how can that be helpful?

Sally Jenkins:

It’s helpful because it’s a state of alertness that is… So there’s conscious thought, which is, let’s say you’re playing the piano and you’re consciously reading every note at the piano. Well, if you’ve internalized the music, which is… And Phelps was trained by a musician, by a classically trained pianist, Bob Bowman, his coach was not only a great swimmer and great swimming coach, but also had trained in classical music. When you internalize music deeply enough, when you’ve practiced it enough and memorized the music, now you’re not playing from that part of your brain. You’re playing from a more subconscious place. You’re playing from an internalized place that is subconscious, and that is actually your most efficient operating place. The messaging system between your brain and your body has gotten just super, super efficient, right? The mail is going flying back and forth in a really, really efficient way.

Preet Bharara:

But it’s not the same thing. I think it’s an important distinction that you make in the book, and I want to clarify it. That’s not the same thing as instinct?

Sally Jenkins:

No, it’s because it’s married to method, right? It took 800 million practice laps for Phelps to internalize that piece of music. And the great, great story in the book is the story of the greatest race of his life was the 100m butterfly against Michael Cavic. Phelps is coming down the stretch and it’s neck and neck, fingertip to fingertip. Phelps has to make a decision in the last few meters of the race. Normally, you glide into the wall. And Phelps had to make a choice. His timing was just slightly off. He could feel it. He was aware of it and alert to it. And finally, he makes a conscious conditioned decision to what they call chop the wall, which is take one last half stroke, which can actually cost you time because the backlash of the water against the wall could actually slow you down. So he has to make this split second calculation, and he decides to chop the wall. And you can see underneath the water filming, there was a camera under the water. You can see Cavic gliding and you can see Phelps heaving.

Speaker 3:

It’s very close. Very close. Cavic and Phelps! Cavic and Phelps! Who wins? It’s Michael Phelps! Phelps does it!

Speaker 4:

By 100th of a second.

Sally Jenkins:

It was the right call. And he could only have made it because he had been so well tuned in the water by his coach.

Preet Bharara:

You talk about, and your book is organized along the lines of, seven elements that are worth studying in professional athletes and what distinguishes them from, I guess, non-professional athletes. I want to talk about a few of them. One is discipline. And you say… That’s a word that’s used a lot and it’s used a lot in desk job occupations as well as professional sports. You say discipline is not enforcement or punishment. And if it’s not those things, then what is it? And you say discipline is the voluntary regulating of behavior that drives repetitive excellence. What does that mean?

Sally Jenkins:

It means that it’s probably the most misunderstood and misapplied term by most leaders, I think most coaches and most business people. I talked to Bob Iger, the chairman of Disney for the book, and we agreed on this. He said, “You have to be really, really careful how you use the word and how you apply it to your people.”

Preet Bharara:

Right. Because people’s eyes glaze over when you start talking about discipline. No?

Sally Jenkins:

Yeah. Well, their eyes glaze over when you use any of these words, any of these seven terms, right? Because they’re abstractions and they’re buzzwords. And what I wanted to do was unpack each one of them and say, “What does this really mean? What does discipline really mean? What really is conditioning?” Conditioning is the operating condition of something. Discipline, it’s not something you can impose. The only adult people who take orders well live in barracks, right? And even there, the ultimate goal of discipline in the army is to make the unit self-regulating. So what coaches know about discipline that I think a lot of other leaders don’t is that you really have to foster it. You have to ask people to adopt it themselves.

Every great coach from Phil Jackson did this. Pat Summit did it. Mike Krzyzewski did it. They fostered participant leaders, right? People on the team who were kind of the enforcers of the ethic for everyone else. And that way Steve Kerr with the Golden State Warriors is not going to… Like, how is Steve Kerr supposed to walk into the Golden State Warrior’s locker room and say to a bunch of seven foot tall guys, “Hey, man, put your cell phones down”? That’s not going to happen. It’s not going to go over well, right? It’s not going to work. So the people who lead these really, really strong personalities in professional locker rooms or in collegiate locker rooms have come to understand that you have to persuade people to adopt a code of discipline. These are our standards.

Preet Bharara:

You cite to one head coach. You write in your book, “Who observed that rule books turned people into petty bureaucrats, diverted from the real work of leading.” And that the first thing is not to have too many rules.

Sally Jenkins:

Mm-hmm. That’s Mike Krzyzewski. He kept it real simple. Mike Krzyzewski at Duke, he had basically one rule for Duke basketball, which is, “If you do something to hurt yourself, you hurt the entire team. If you’re rude in a restaurant, it means that everybody thinks Duke basketball players are rude in restaurants.” He basically thought that one pretty good broad rule where everybody takes care of each other and each other’s reputations cured a lot of the problems before they ever began. I mean, that was his approach. Pat Summit had very, very few rules. I mean, she was renowned as this fierce disciplinarian. She actually had one hard and fast rule, which was, you had to go to class. You could not cut class. If you cut class, you didn’t play. And the reason she had the rule-

Preet Bharara:

I wouldn’t have played then.

Sally Jenkins:

Yeah, right. I know. Exactly. I mean, her kids went to class more than their peers. Not only that, she had a rule that they had to sit in the first three rows so that the professor could see if they were there, because if they weren’t there, she wanted the professor calling her up. The reason for the rule was not just to ensure that they got an education, or it wasn’t a petty rule. The rule had a real practical application. She wasn’t going to waste time on kids who weren’t maybe going to make their grades and might get ruled ineligible. She wasn’t going to waste a scholarship and waste a lot of energy on a kid who was going to wind up in academic trouble who couldn’t play, right?

Preet Bharara:

So it was a pragmatic reason, not just a cultural reason?

Sally Jenkins:

Yeah. Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

And you write in the book the person who was maybe the greatest exemplar of this point. And you write, “No one in sports lived out the concept of daily personal discipline more than Derek Jeter who won more trust with it chosen as the captain of the New York Yankees 11 times.” Do you really think that his personal discipline made a profound difference on the rest of the team, even if the rest of the team didn’t exercise the same discipline?

Sally Jenkins:

I do. I do, because he was so reliable, right? I mean, Derek Jeter’s habits were this compounding interest. The Derek Jeter story comes from a guy named Dana Cavalea, who was the performance coach for the Yankees. He told me that every year of his career, every season of his career, Jeter was in bed two hours after the end of a ballgame, no matter what. No matter how late it had gone, how early it had ended, no matter where they were playing, no matter what invitation he had. In season, two hours after the game, he was in bed getting his rest. You are your habits in baseball, right? Jeter’s records accrued over time, like compounding interest in a bank account. The Yankees just came… He was the 11 time captain of the team. He owns pretty much every record in the club.

And yeah, people begin to trust that in leaders. They do. They trust consistency over charisma, for one thing. I talked to a great guy named Robert Hogan who’s a personality assessment… He’s a leadership expert. He assesses leadership qualities for companies and for the military. And Hogan told me, “We study leadership from exactly the wrong perspective. We tended to look at the charismatic striver who caused his way to the top, when actually we should be looking at followers and who they’re following.” And the Yankees follow Jeter, right? It’s who do the underlings believe in is the more important question. I think that the other thing leaders maybe misinterpret about discipline is that if you don’t show it yourself and your team or your organization starts to distrust you, they’re the ones with the power and they will take you down. We see it over and over and over again. There’s a great example of Urban Meyer, the Jacksonville coach in the NFL, press leaks, players talking to the press off the record, just absolutely mortifying stories about his poor habits, his poor discipline until he was fired.

Preet Bharara:

Of the seven elements that you focus on in the book, each one has its own chapter, they’re all interesting. But I’ll tell you the one that I found the most interesting. Can you guess?

Sally Jenkins:

Failure.

Preet Bharara:

I found parts of that interesting. But people talk about failure and the importance of failure, and I’ve thought about that in my own life, and culture and discipline. But one that we don’t talk about and I hadn’t really focused on is your chapter on candor. You write in the very first paragraph of the chapter, “Coaches therefore will tell you that the pep talk is largely a myth. High performers are almost impossible to manipulate with counterfeit speeches, they say, but turns to performance is the truth.” So that really made me think. Can you talk about that a little bit more? Because in the movies, on Any Given Sunday, the only reason they won is because Al Pacino gives the Game of Inches speech.

Al Pacino:

Life’s this game of inches, so is football. Because in either game, life or football, the margin for error is so small.

Preet Bharara:

And you’re saying it’s not true.

Sally Jenkins:

You got to claw for that inch. You got to claw for that inch. Yeah, no, I mean, look, coaches are too busy at halftime thinking about strategy and talking about adjustments to really give pep talks. That’s one thing. It’s pretty funny, most coaches kind of laugh at the film portrayals of these big pep talks because there’s no time, for one thing.

But what I wanted to do in the chapter was to explain to people the degree to which locker room talk is this phrase that we kick around, again, these buzzwords and these phrases. Well, what does that mean? The locker room talk I’ve heard is some of the most honest conversation I’ve ever heard in my life. And Steve Kerr was really interesting about this. He said that Phil Jackson’s locker rooms, when he played on those championship teams with the Chicago Bulls, the player room, he said you had guys crying with each other. I mean, weeping, right? Exchanging the deepest, most intimate confidences in those rooms with each other. Phil Jackson was bonding them and was making that team room a place where they literally put each other other’s interests first, exchanged the most difficult challenges, the most difficult senses of pressure.

One thing Pat told me once was she said that there’s a tone that you can hear when a team is getting ready to win something really big. And I said, “Well, what does that sound like?” And she said, “It sounds like, ‘I’ve got your back’.” The exchanges on championship teams are really, really intimate and trusting. And it’s why the Golden State Warriors never implode, even though Draymond Green can have these huge explosive tantrums. I mean, there’s been times when him and Steve Kerr screamed at each other, but they have this deep, deep trust. I mean love, right? Championship teams love each other. So I wanted to get at that. And I wanted to get to the idea that corporate euphemism is somehow helpful. Talk is nonsense. Really good organizations don’t talk that way. Really good organizations treat vague speech and couch speech as duplicitous and insulting.

Preet Bharara:

Now you write this in the book. And I’m going to keep quoting from what I liked in here. “Poor workplaces are full of vague statements delivered in a murmuring or couched way, or worse, corporate euphemisms.” And you quote Steve Young, and this is the point we refer to earlier, as saying, “On the football field, I learned there are no liars because there are 80,000 witnesses to everything that’s happening.” And so candor is the order of the day. I mean, I wonder what you think about many workplaces and maybe even workplaces where you’ve been where there’s a sense that feedback has to be delivered very carefully, and I agree with that, but not so in athletic environments. Even the best person in the world, the greatest of all time, subjects himself or herself to withering criticism from the coach. You refer to Tom Brady at one point, “Even as a mature Superbowl winning quarterback, he took and accepted piercing critique from Belichick in practice.” What are the lessons there for more ordinary workplaces?

Sally Jenkins:

So the biggest lesson for an ordinary workplace is that even the toughest coach I’ve ever been around, like a Belichick, never delivers the criticism without also delivering the fix. It’s a crucial distinction because I think that there’s a difference between criticism like, “You need to play better” or, “You need to get tougher.” Well, how? Give me a tool.

And I think that people, first of all, they accept data much better. They accept film. Coaches have a real advantage in the film room, right? Because they can play your performance back to you. They can show you the gap between what you should have done and what you did, right? So you can start there. So you start from an impersonal standpoint. And you don’t make it about them, you make it about the performance. That’s one thing great coaches do. Secondly, once you’re onto the performance and you show them the shortfall in the performance, you actually have to show them the way to close that gap, right? And then that’s when they really start trusting. That’s when athletes start trusting coaches. That’s when followers start trusting leaders, is when you show them the how, right?

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, no, exactly right. So you talk both about, and to, athletes and coaches, and some have served in both capacities in their careers. Why is it the case that some of the best athletes in the world would never be great coaches and some of the greatest coaches in the world were never particularly remarkable athletes?

Sally Jenkins:

Yeah, I mean, I think it has a lot to do with unselfishness. Look, greatness can be a very selfish pursuit. Steve Kerr is a great, great coach. And by the way, if you ever want to see an example of showing someone the how, pull up YouTube videos of Steve Kerr talking to Steph Curry on the bench when Curry’s not shooting great. He’s going over the box score with him and he’s saying, “Look what you’re doing here, here and here. When you do this, we’re great. When you do this stuff, we’re great. Just keep shooting and just carry on and just make sure you’re doing these three or four things.” He’s very unselfish, Kerr, he’s all about them.

The biggest hallmark of a great, great coach is generosity. They are more interested in the undertaking than they are in their own place in it and their own statistics or their own records or their own place in it. They’re willing to surrender credit in ways that are very counterintuitive for a charismatic leader. And so I think that can be hard for a former superstar. It can be hard for a former superstar to be a marginal figure in a great undertaking.

Preet Bharara:

Is there a difference in the qualities of greatness for an athlete who participates in a team sport versus an athlete who mostly, even though sometimes part of a team or Olympic team, but mostly it’s an individual sport like swimming or golf?

Sally Jenkins:

I do think there’s a difference in temperament. Yeah, I do. It’s interesting because I think some of those people really crave the team atmosphere. It’s very lonely to be Michael Phelps. And probably the most excited I ever saw Phelps was when he was swimming on a couple of those team relays that were very, very close races and he was part of a team of four as opposed to just this lonely head in the water pursuit. I know it’s true of golfers. Look how American players respond to the Ryder Cup or look how tennis players respond to the Labor Cup. I do think that there’s a different, more lonely personality, the individual sport athlete.

I had a great conversation with Chris Everett and Martina Navratilova once. They loved playing Fed Cup together as teammates. They said, “For once we could both be happy at the same time” is what they told me.

Preet Bharara:

I want to ask you one more thing that you mentioned that has received attention, the psychology of choking. Why does that happen? If people are doing all the things that you’re saying that they do, even the best athletes will sometimes choke.

Sally Jenkins:

Yeah, because our bodies betray us, right? So this happens to everybody. The most ordinary thing in the world is to feel pressure. And this is what we can really take from athletes. And to me, that’s what they’re really worth, right? That’s where they show their true value for the rest of us because pressure’s the most common experience. The thing to understand about pressure is if you study it and you understand what it’s doing to you, you can start to mitigate it the way athletes do, even if you’re just sitting at a desk.

Pressure has actual physical properties. The word stress was borrowed from engineering, right? Hans Selye, the guy who popularized the term stress, borrowed up from the sorts of things that happen to a bridge when a lot of cars drive over it. Your body, under stress or under pressure, shunts blood from your small muscle groups to your large muscle groups as part of the fight or flight response. When you get a little alarmed or anxious, your hands and feet are slightly drained of blood, sometimes really drained of blood.

Carlos Alcaraz cramped up. His arms and legs started terribly cramping at the French Open playing Novak Djokovic just a couple weeks ago. Well, that was this same response. What happens when your body is doing that, when the blood is leaving your hands and feet, it gets harder to type, it gets harder to count. I mean, it has effects on your brain. You get tunnel vision. I’ve known of stories of golfers who misread the scoreboard because they had such tunnel vision under pressure. And you lose fine motor control. So that’s why you see a guy miss a three-foot putt at the Masters or the US Open, or you see a tennis player double fault on a really important point. Your body is betraying you.

And you can learn some techniques to deal with that. There’s breathing exercises, there’s some conditioning exercises that you can do. The big wave surfer, Laird Hamilton, uses ice baths, which trigger lots of sense of alarm, right? A really, really cold ice bath. Just as Laird told me, he said, “Your body doesn’t know what’s stressing you it. Your body doesn’t know if it’s an ice bath or your 16-year old took the car keys and still hasn’t come home at two o’clock in the morning.” So we can learn to sort of condition a little bit better for stress and we can learn a little bit more about how our bodies react.

Preet Bharara:

I mean, one of the ways that you talk about preparing yourself for that kind of moment is one of the elements that you refer to conditioning. And you talk at great length. And this is true, I find this to be true in the things that I’ve done, is fatigue, and an inability to prepare for a condition of fatigue can be fatal to any good prospect.

Sally Jenkins:

Yes. And also just basics like hydration. A lot of times we sit around at work and we get hungry and dehydrated and don’t even know it. There’s a fascinating study in the book about judges late in the day are just less merciful in granting probation.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

Sally Jenkins:

Right? That’s a famous study. So yeah, I mean, fatigue is not good on your judgment. There’s a mountain of neuroscience that shows the relationship between your judgment, your cognitive function, your executive function, and your physical state. There’s no fat CEOs much anymore. Have you noticed that? Like Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos, these guys are built, right? Bob Iger is built like a mountaineer. Those guys know. You have to be fit to be a big time decider.

Preet Bharara:

I could talk about the concepts in your book and all of those issues for many more hours, but I do want to, before we go, talk about one current event that I know you’ve been commenting on and maybe you can explain it to the listeners, and it has to do with a sport that I think you were say in the book that you revere or you’ve said somewhere that you revere. Not everyone does, but it’s the game of golf. There’s this merger between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf that I think as of this morning, we’re recording this on Tuesday, June 20th, or last night, the Justice Department has said it’s taking a look at it. Can you explain what this merger is, how Saudi Arabia figures in, why it’s controversial and what you think should happen?

Sally Jenkins:

So LIV Golf is the brainchild of Greg Norman who went to the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund, which is basically Mohammed bin Salma’s Sovereign Wealth Fund. They’ve invested about, oh, at this point, around $2 billion in trying to buy the game of golf. They poached a bunch of players from the PGA Tour, set up a rival tour in hopes of breaking the PGA Tour financially, which they’ve, I think, probably come closer to doing than anybody thought they could in just a year’s time. The PGA Tour caved despite the fact that they’d gotten some very, very favorable court rulings in litigation with LIV. They both filed antitrust suits against each other. They’ve agreed to dismiss the litigation against each other. And the PGA Tour has given the Saudi Public Investment Fund the right to be the exclusive investor in golf and to deliver all of its commercial rights and assets over to the Saudi Public Investment Fund.

This has created… It’s a secret deal done by three guys who ran the PGA Tour with Yasir al-Rumayyan, who is Mohammad Bin Solomon’s financier. And so, basically the Saudis have at this moment, if the merger goes through or the acquisition goes through or the sale or whatever you want to call it, the Saudis will have bought Golf. And National-

Preet Bharara:

And why does that matter? Who’s unhappy about that?

Sally Jenkins:

The players are unhappy about it. The PGA Tour is a cherished American institution. The players are not happy about taking their paychecks directly from Bin Salman. The 9/11 families are outraged. And any other American company, correct me if I’m wrong, Preet, don’t most American corporations, especially particularly publicly held ones, generally have limits on what sovereign governments can invest?

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, I think there’s a process by which some of those investments get judged and assessed, but it’s not unrestricted.

Sally Jenkins:

Yeah. So the problem here is sports washing. Sports washing is not just a ploy by say Vladimir Putin or China or Saudi Arabia to erase the audience’s memory of things like the murder of Jamal Khashoggi or the invasion of Ukraine. It’s actually a playbook. It’s a strategy to so entangle American commercial interests that it makes it hard for the State Department to then draw red lines, right? It hobbles our diplomacy in some ways when you have outsized investments or outsized commercial entanglements, right?

So there was a lot of American money in Moscow. It complicated deliberations over what to do about the Ukraine situation. Same thing with Beijing. Same thing with Saudi Arabia. And so this is one reason why Senator Richard Blumenthal has announced that there, he’s going to hold hearings into this merger, the PGA Tour-Saudi deal. It was a very, very secretive deal conducted literally over a period of just seven weeks, and it was concluded by about four men in a cigar bar in London. So we’ll see what the 10 point deal memo actually says. Hopefully, it will be disclosed and we’ll understand what the real ramifications of this really are.

Preet Bharara:

Final lightning round.

Sally Jenkins:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Should boxing continue to be legal?

Sally Jenkins:

I mean, look, I believe in self-determination. I mean, people who self select to box, it’s a skill. It’s a pursuit. Since time out of mind, people have been boxing for thousands of years.

Preet Bharara:

I sense you’re a little bit conflicted, Sally.

Sally Jenkins:

Yeah. I am very conflicted about it. I don’t believe in telling people what to do. I’m like Mike Krzyzewski. I don’t believe in too many rules. I think we overregulate like crazy. And no, I don’t think it should be illegal. I just think that people should be educated about the price of it, as with football.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. The new baseball rules, good or bad?

Sally Jenkins:

I think everybody loves the new baseball rules, don’t they? [inaudible 01:02:15]-

Preet Bharara:

I think so.

Sally Jenkins:

Yeah. I mean, at least it’s not like-

Preet Bharara:

We did an episode. We did a short episode on it. Attendance seems to be up. Viewership seems to be up.

Sally Jenkins:

Well, that’s mainly because people aren’t falling asleep before the end of the ballgame anymore.

Preet Bharara:

Could you spend a minute talking about what you think are the virtues of the television show, Ted Lasso?

Sally Jenkins:

Oh, my God, it’s one of the most truthful things ever written about sports.

Preet Bharara:

How so?

Sally Jenkins:

Isn’t that funny? Because it’s fiction. The first time I watched Ted Lasso for the first 15 minutes, I was just highly irritated.

Preet Bharara:

Well, the premise is not truthful where an American football coach goes-

Sally Jenkins:

It’s kind of a fantasy, right?

Preet Bharara:

It goes to the UK and literally doesn’t know the basic rules of soccer or football as it’s called elsewhere. But other than that, how is it truthful?

Sally Jenkins:

It’s truthful because it’s a genius examination of real leadership. It’s a genius examination of a real locker room and what makes a unit, what makes the cohesion, what makes a team. I mean, it was just so…. First of all, the characters could be imported into any sport in any locker room. I mean, all of those guys were fairly truthful. Jamie. I mean, they just were really pretty spot on, number one. Someone did a very careful study of athletes. So yeah, it was funny to see something that’s that fictional feel, that true.

Preet Bharara:

Favorite sports show otherwise and then favorite sports movie, and then I’ll let you go.

Sally Jenkins:

Moneyball’s a great movie. Moneyball is a great sports movie. Again, very truthful. There’s something very truthful. And even in the fiction. I mean Michael Lewis’s book is not fiction, but the movie was probably a little glammed up. I mean, Friday Night Lights was terrific. I think probably Bolt Durham is probably the best baseball movie ever written. Anything by Ron Shelton, who was the writer of Bull Durham because he was a minor league ball player so he really knew what he was writing about there. That’s very truthful. Slap Shot, timeless classic, absolute immortal movie about minor league hockey.

Preet Bharara:

Sally Jenkins, thanks again for being on the show. Congratulations on the book, The Right Call: What Sports Teach Us About Work and Life.

Sally Jenkins:

Great to be here. Thank you, Preet.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Sally Jenkins continues from members of the CAFE Insider Community. To try out the membership for just $1 for a month, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider.

 

THE BUTTON:

So to switch gears for a moment before we wrap, we get a ton of messages from listeners in response to our Stay Tuned episodes. It’s one of the best parts about doing the show, hearing from all of you. You folks tell us when you agree with something, disagree with something, or have an idea for a topic we should cover. All of it we encourage and welcome. And importantly, we read all of it.

So a couple of weeks ago, I got a message on Twitter from a listener in response to our recent episode with NYU Psychology Professor Niobe Way. In our conversation, Niobe and I spoke about loneliness and friendships and how to build better relationships that improve our general health. The listener whose name is Sherry wrote, “@PreetBharara, to me, this fit right in with your discussion yesterday with Dr. Niobe Way on Stay Tuned. We need to start inclusion when children are young.”

The link Sherry sent along was to a post by the account Call to Activism. It showed a picture of a young kid on a multicolored bench sitting alone. The caption said this, “Yesterday, I was visiting my son’s school. I see a bright-colored bench in the yard. I asked if this was the only place to sit, and he said to me, ‘No, that’s the bench of friends. When someone is lonely or can’t find a play partner, they’ll sit there and others invite them to play with him.’ I tell them, I thought this was great, and I ask them if he used it himself. He says, ‘Yes. At the beginning of the year when I was new here, I sat there and another student came to invite me to play with him. This made me happy. And now when I see someone sitting there, I also invite them to play’.”

What a great idea on mutual aid and kindness to implement in all playgrounds. This story is so sweet and such a great idea to get children involved in taking care of one another. We tend to think about kids bullying others who don’t have friends or who are alone on the playground. But small actions like this bench can teach kids how to do just the opposite, and those lessons can stick with them through adulthood. So thank you to Sherry for sending this story, and thanks to all of you who continue to engage with us at CAFE. It does not go unnoticed and sometimes even makes for great bits at the end of an episode.

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Sally Jenkins. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me at @PreetBharara with the hashtag #AskPreet. Or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338. That’s 669-24-PREET. Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com.

Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The senior producers are Adam Waller and Matthew Billy. The CAFE team is David Kurlander, Sam Ozer-Staton, Noa Azulai, Nat Wiener, Jake Kaplan, Namita Shah, and Claudia Hernandez. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. Stay tuned.