Love All – lessons in love from the world of tennis • 10.21.08

Growing up as a sports fan in the late 80’s and early 90’s in India, tennis was my window to a lot of things in the world. This was before cable TV came into our lives – things like European Football and the NBA were only found occasionally in the SportStar ( god bless them for that) . Tennis was one international sport that we got to see a lot of, courtesy Doordarshan, even though they used to break- off for the news at the most crucial moments of the game.

Tennis played an extremely important role in filling me with life’s wisdom – pertaining to love – its various forms and its nuances. Its role in this regard was very similar to the way we got educated in the tenets of love and romance by foreign novels and movies.

I think this happened because tennis was an individual game and an extremely popular one as well – there were lots of characters and good looking stars – and as a result tennis stars got a lot of attention from the media which was forever filling us in with juicy details of the player’s private lives. There was also plenty of time during the matches to catch frequent glimpses of the special boxes for the players’ entourage – as a result we got to see and know the player’s family, their love interests and their coaches as well. Tennis had both men and women players creating enough possibilities for real life case studies. Additionally, those players were largely westerners who led far more colourful lives adding to our educational process

The only other sport which we saw often was cricket but for some reason this generation largely escaped public scrutiny of their private lives, well except for a few like Ravi Shastri and Vivian Richards.

This was the closest they got to being a couple

The first thing that tennis did was to shake me out of a child’s notion of a perfect love story, instilled in me largely by Hindi movies. Back in the day, I expected Steffi Graf and Boris Becker to fall in love and get married. After all they were both top tennis players, immensely popular and good looking and from the same country – so no relocation and adjustment problems. They were like a lead pair in a Hindi film and seemed perfect. Their not falling in love taught me a lesson that this perfect love story concept between two people who were perfect in a similar kind of way was just a creation of Hindi films and nothing more.

This lesson was repeated when I discovered that a similar perfect pair from America had also not managed to go beyond a brief romance. That Jimmy Connors and Chris Evert had tried and failed was in fact a more telling rejection of my old theory.

Andre and the women in his life

Andre and the women in his life

After battering one of my theories, tennis, much to my surprise corroborated something else that I had discovered through Hindi films – that there existed these gifted individuals called playboys who could make many women fall in love with them at the same time without making the slightest bit of effort. Andre Agassi was the first who made me feel jealous and then Bjorn Born added really rubbed it in.

Tennis was responsible for my early education on same-sex love

Tennis was responsible for my early education on same-sex love

And then tennis gave me a shocker – people of the same sex could also love one another intimately. This knowledge was thanks to Judy Nelson demanding a share of Martina Navratilova’s wealth for being her partner. It took me a while to figure this concept out but I found a lot of reference material in the Sports World magazine (may its soul rest in piece, there was no Google then) to help me understand what a ‘partner’ meant in this particular case. I was a lot less shocked when I found that another tennis player, Billie Jean King had actually championed the cause of these same sex lovers.

This shocked everyone in Germany and someone in India

This shocked everyone in Germany and someone in India

A little later I discovered why Boris Becker didn’t fall for Steffi Graf – because he was in love with Barbara Feltus. This saga also opened my eyes to inter-racial love and its unacceptable status in society. I never knew of such issues – in India we were all brown people. Boris Becker became a poster child of the cause. Being a major fan I couldn’t help but get a finer understanding of the issues. Detailed information was again courtesy of the Sports World.

Love is a meeting of minds

Love is a meeting of minds

If Becker was wooing Barbara, then his celebrated rival Stefan Edberg was falling in love with Annette Olsen. While I hated the Swede’s talent on a grass court, there was no doubt that he was a tremendously good looking and handsome man. Nothing less than a modern-day Helen or Cleopatra would be good enough for his combination of looks and talent. But here he was madly in love with a cute but plump woman. The moral of the story – Love is not just about physical attraction. It’s also about matching mental wavelengths. Today when I see Federer and Mirjka, I can’t stop thinking about Edberg.

The greatest love story ever

The greatest love story ever

The final lesson happened a lot later. But it involved two characters from the old days – Steffi Graf and Andre Agassi – two of the most popular players of this era. For years Steffi Graf had been in a quiet relationship with Michael Bartels. Agassi on the other hand had had a dream marriage after finally finding love with Brooke Shields. Then there was heart burn for both of them as Steffi and Bartels broke up and Agassi and Shields divorced. But in a most amazing turn of events, Agassi and Graf met, fell in love, got married, had two children and have lived happily ever after. This is one of the most amazing love stories ever and gives hope to everyone who believes in true love. The final love lesson from tennis was about believing in love itself.

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HR lessons from the world of sports • 09.24.08

This post was originally published on the Workosaur blog. Workosaur is the coolest new job portal around – its a niche site focusing only on 7 figure jobs

The world of sports is extremely performance driven. It’s the hardest “industry” to continually stay at the top. No other industry is as competitive. Winning in sports is everything. There is no place for non-performers – winners thrive and losers perish. Business organizations also aspire to create a similar kind of culture – one which is completely performance driven and breeds excellence. However, few HR teams know how to go about doing so. What they need to do is take a break from what they have been doing all along and start doing what people are doing in the world of sports. So what are the key things that people in the world of sports do?
  • Great players don’t always make great managers and vice versa – In most organizations, the best individual contributors are often promoted to become managers. The world of sports runs differently – those guys have long known that the skill set required to become a great manager is drastically different than the skills necessary to be a great player. A lot of great managers have been very ordinary players but in corporate organizations managers have more often than not been great workers also. HR in organizations needs to learn this – to promote based on people and management skills and not just on their ability to contribute individually.
  • To win it is important to focus on the key positions that play the most significant role in securing victory – Sports teams know that it is not possible to have top performers in every position and also that attempting to do so is a futile exercise. HR teams are not so focussed and end up spreading their resources thin. Successful teams have always concentrated on filling the key positions with top performers and HR needs to do the same – start prioritizing jobs by their potential impact on the success of the business.
  • Your performance statistics will never improve if you keep hiding them – The best sportsmen always love to compete and compare themselves against others – by keeping score. The world of sports is obsessed with tracking performance figures and that ensures that non performers have nowhere to hide. Compare that to the corporate world, where the HR keeps all the performance statistics under wraps. No information about target achievements and appraisals are ever made public. This also forces the HR to keep salary increments a secret. Non performers keep getting away. Thus to build a performance based organization you need track, measure and distribute output and performance reports.
  • Rewards and recognition programs should not have a fixation for parity – In sports the best players often get paid many times more than the mediocre performers. In business, the difference is far less. HR uses tools like normalization curves and target percentiles to justify their action of keeping salary differentials low. It is difficult to get the top talent (as required for point 2) if they are not paid significantly more and treated differently than the average performer. It also corroborates the fact that in sports, performance is rewarded and paid for accordingly. HR often has no justification for its payment practices and hence is forced to keep them secret 9 another example of point 3)
  • Firing poor performers is a good thing and not a bad one – In sports, teams are always striving to improve – even if it’s by the teeniest bit – it’s a pre-requisite for teams that want to continue the winning habit. They are always looking to weed out the bottom performers and replace them with better talent. HR managers on the other hand believe that sackings are bad for morale and keep delaying it – giving poor performers’ chance after chance. How’s that for the motivation of the star performers – seeing their efforts get negated by that of shoddy performers, who are not even made to pay for it.
  • In sports, Winning isn’t everything… it’s the only thing – Sports teams are never satisfied with second place. It is this kind of “performance culture” that brings the best out of players. Unfortunately HR departments are quite happy with an above average performance. Average goals often result in below average results. There is no motivation to exceed expectations.
  • Don’t reward complacency with training sessions – Great sportspersons have the personal will and drive to get better. They don’t have to be tutored like school children to work on improving themselves. HR teams are preoccupied with training sessions. They believe that grown up and career conscious men don’t have enough self motivation to improve on their own and have to be sent to training programs to achieve that. Well I have news for them. If you have a company full of such men, you are in big trouble.

Disclaimer – We are talking of teams and organizations that want to win, not ones who are happy being mediocre.

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