their less accomplished counterparts, and neither group recorded above-average levels of visual function.
It had to be something else. I asked Douglas to tell me about his early education in table tennis, and the mystery was instantly solved. It turns out that Douglas had perhaps the most unusual grounding of any international table tennis player of the last half-century. Brought up in working-class Birmingham, struggling and unmotivated in his academic work, Douglas happened upon a table tennis club at school. The tables were old and decrepit, but functional.
The problem is that they were housed in the tiniest of classrooms. ‘Looking back, it was pretty unbelievable,’ Douglas said, shaking his head. ‘There were three tables going along the length of the room to accommodate all the players who wanted to take part, but there was so little space behind the tables that we had to stand right up against the edge of the tables to play, with our backs almost touching the blackboard.’
I managed to track down a few of the others who played in that era. ‘It was an amazing time,’ one said. ‘The claustrophobia of the room forced us to play a form of “speed table tennis” where everyone had to be super-sharp. Spin and strategy hardly came into it; the only thing that mattered was speed.’
Douglas did not spend a few weeks or months honing his skills in that classroom, but the first five years of his development. ‘We all loved playing table tennis, but Des was different,’ another classmate told me. ‘While the rest of us had other hobbies and interests, he spent all his time in that classroom practising his skills and playing matches. I have never seen anyone with such dedication.’
Douglas was sometimes called the ‘lightning man’, because it seemed that he was so fast he could duck a bolt from the blue. His speed baffled opponents and teammates for decades. Even Douglas was perplexed by it. ‘Maybe I have a sixth sense,’ he said. But we can now see that the solution to the riddle is simple. In essence, Douglas spent more hours than any other player in the history of the sport encoding the characteristics of a highly specific type of table tennis: the kind played at maximum pace, close to the table. By the time he arrived in international table tennis, he was able to perceive where the ball was going before his opponents had even hit it. That is how a man with sluggish reactions became the fastest player on the planet.
It is worth pausing here to anticipate an objection or two. You might agree with the thrust of the argument that expertise in table tennis, tennis, football, or anything else requires the performer to have built up a powerful knowledge base drawn from experience. But you might still sense that something in this account is missing.
In particular you may feel that recognizing the patterns in an opponent’s movement and framing the optimal response (a cross-court forehand, say) is a very different thing from actually executing the stroke. The former is a mental skill drawn from experience, but the latter seems to be more of a physical talent requiring coordination, control, and feel. But is this schism between the mental and the physical quite what it seems?
It is often said that Federer and other top sportsmen have ‘amazing hands’, which neatly emphasizes the supposed physical dimension of hitting a winning smash or dabbing a delicate drop shot. But is there really something in Federer’s fingers or palm that sets him apart from other tennis players?
Or would it not be more accurate to say that his advantage consists in the sophistication with which he is able to control the motor system (the part of the peripheral nervous system responsible for movement) such that his racket impacts the ball with precisely the right angle, force, speed, direction, and finesse? Or, to use computer parlance, is not the genius of Federer’s shot execution reflected in a supremacy in software rather than hardware?
This is not to deny that any tennis player needs an arm and a hand (and a racket!) to make a return, but simply to emphasize that the limiting factor in making a world-class stroke is not strength or brute force, but the executive control of fine motor movement to create perfect timing.
The key point, for our purposes, is that this is not something top sportsmen are born with. If you were to go back to the time when Roger Federer was learning technique, you would find that he was ponderous and sluggish. His movements would have been characterized by conscious control of the skill, lacking smoothness or unity. Only later, after countless hours of practice, were his skills integrated into an intricate set of procedures capable of flexible execution.
Today, Federer’s motor programmes are so deeply ingrained that if you were to ask him how he is able to play an immaculately timed forehand, he wouldn’t be able to tell you. He might be able to talk about what he was thinking at the time or the strategic importance of the shot, but he wouldn’t be able to provide any insight into the mechanics of the movements that made the stroke possible. Why? Because Federer has practised for so long that the movement has been encoded in implicit rather than explicit memory. This is what psychologists call expert-induced amnesia.
It is also worth noting that the development of motor expertise (skilled movement) is inseparable from the development of perceptual expertise (chunking patterns). After all, perfect technique is hardly useful if you fail to hit the ball – think of a totally blind person trying to play tennis. Highly refined, instantly chunked perceptual information is necessary to integrate the movement of the body with the movement of the ball (hand-eye coordination). Without this information the motor programme would be nothing more than a stab in the dark.
Great shot-making, then, is not about developing ‘muscle memory’; rather, the memory is encoded in the brain and central nervous system.
The ascendancy of the mental and the acquired over the physical and the innate has been confirmed again and again. As Anders Ericsson, now widely acknowledged as the world’s leading authority on expert performance, puts it: ‘The most important differences are not at the lowest levels of cells or muscle groups, but at the athletes’ superior control over the integrated and coordinated actions of their bodies. Expert performance is mediated by acquired mental representations that allow the experts to anticipate, plan, and reason alternative courses of action. These mental representations provide experts with increased control of the aspects that are relevant to generating their superior performance.’
In other words, it is practice, not talent, that holds the key to success.
Knowledge Is Power
At 3.00 p.m. on 10 February 1996, Garry Kasparov strode into a small room in the Pennsylvania Convention Center to contest one of the most anticipated chess matches in history. He was smartly dressed in a dark suit and white shirt and wore a look of intense concentration. As he sat down at the match table, he glanced across the board to the man on the other side: Dr FengHsuing Hsu, a bespectacled Taiwanese-American with a quizzical expression.
In the room, besides Kasparov and Hsu, were three cameramen, one match official, three members of Kasparov’s entourage, and a technical adviser. A strict silence was enforced, with the five hundred spectators packed into a nearby lecture hall to witness the event on screens fed from three TV cameras and live commentary from grandmaster Yasser Seirawan. The atmosphere was, by common consent, quite unlike that of any other chess match in living memory.
Kasparov is almost universally considered to be the greatest player in the history of the sport. His ELO rating – an official score measuring relative skill – remains the highest ever recorded: 71 points higher than that of Russian grandmaster Anatoly Karpov, and 66 higher than that of the great American player Bobby Fischer. Kasparov, at the time of the contest, had been the world number one for ten straight years, and his mere presence before a chessboard was enough to intimidate some of the world’s most revered grandmasters.
But his
