The Careful Curve
In that space right before you do a thing that you’ve never done but know you can, lives bravado the size of a buffalo. “What ifs” don’t distract you because you don’t even know they are there. The slate is too clean to be littered with all that could and might go wrong. All you see is what you want to happen when you are young and hungry and can’t wait to shock the world. Because you are writing the script and you’ve played the dream a million times already in your head (the place where everything works until you have evidence that it doesn’t.) Decisions are quick and sure. You don’t hem. You don’t haw. You just go for it. At the beginning, you’ll try almost anything.
And then after a while, you won’t.
The dramatic about-face doesn’t happen suddenly. It just sort of creeps in while you’re running cavalier without a tether, going shamelessly for broke. You go along punching and counterpunching and bobbing and weaving enroute to a good deal of success, and then one day a swashbuckling moment shows up and you can’t imagine betting the house. Even though you once did and a part of you wants to still, you just can’t pull the trigger. Too much is at stake and this thing called experience is standing in the way. The reverse that you used to call on 4th and short when the defense expected a sneak seems ridiculous now, even though it won you a big game once and it made you seem larger than life. The squeeze that you used to signal on the first pitch with two outs and a runner on third isn’t even on your maybe list now, though you know the game would be blown open if the third base sneaker scored.
You look up and without warning find yourself on the careful curve.
On the speedway when you’re just getting going, nothing feels like too much of a reach. You just go. Footloose and fancy free, you buck the odds. It’s easy to not be gun shy when not much is on the line. But experience gives us information (and sometimes a bit of a nest egg) and after a bit, the facts start to take precedence over instinct. We hesitate behind the litany of all the stuff we know.
Nearly every time I had a young team at Oklahoma, in the fall we would have a couple of weeks where our motion offense purred like a cat. Cuts were crisp, ball movement was sharp, and space was constantly being regenerated by players who seemed connected by 15-foot invisible threads. Then we’d add a couple of options and the whole thing would die on the vine. Once our players knew the possibilities and they had the freedom to make decisions based on not only what the defenders but also their teammates did, their sureness went out the door. Too much information wasn’t always a helpful thing.
Analytics have a place now on almost every sporting sideline regardless of level or game. The numbers tell us what is probable and improbable as well as what everybody else is doing when they’re standing in our shoes. Not much is left to chance, even for the young gunslingers who haven’t learned yet what they don’t know.
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When Bob Stoops was a young coach at Oklahoma, the masses nicknamed him Big Game Bob. He was a maverick in a headset. Fake a field goal on 4th and forever? Run a triple reverse with a halfback pass on third down with just inches to go? Yep. You couldn’t dream up the things he might try. The Boomer Sooner fan base lived to see what he would do. And then, after a while, they didn’t so much anymore. Because he didn’t so much anymore--do the upside-down-sideways thing, that is, that he once pulled out of the back of his pants. It wasn’t that Coach got scared. I don’t think Bob Stoops even knows how to be scared. He just got a little more careful. He knew, after some years spent calling plays, not only how high the odds were that something could go wrong, but how low the odds were that everything would go right. You could say he proceeded aggressively with caution. The go-for-it trigger got harder to pull.
If you’ve coached, you’ve been there. Or if you’ve had a hit song. Or written a bestseller. Or made a million dollars on a merger or a sale. The careful curve lies waiting after the touchdowns and trophies on the back side of winning big. The sword gets a little bit harder to swing when there’s something you might screw up. I tried all kinds of things in my first year at Oklahoma when we were 5-22 that I didn’t think about pulling out of the bag after we’d won three conference titles in a row. Winning can’t help but change how we look at things, though we could argue all day long about whether or not it should.
We live. We learn. We are the hero. We are the goat. Life happens and things pile up--things that we can’t unknow once we know them, things we carry with us along the way. So sometimes the seasoned coach bites a hole in his lip or subs too late or changes the last second play. Not because of what he doesn’t know but because of what he does. And though they don’t make movies about his play-the-odds decisions, they’re probably one of the main reasons he gets to keep his job.
The hook and ladder doesn’t always work. Neither does the statue of liberty or the fumblerooski or the barking dog. As a matter of fact, they rarely ever do. Those who’ve made it to the careful curve know that. But they get wistful, sometimes, nonetheless. Not for the plays or the way they might-- if someone has a penny in their shoe-- turn out. What they miss is the innocent bravado that allowed them to make the call in the first place. They miss the freedom of thought that comes from not knowing too many things. But that’s the nature of experience. It giveth wildly and it also taketh away.
P.S. "FUMBLEROOSKI"