IN 1997, A California valley upstart launched selling and renting DVDs by mail. They toiled away for a decade as the internet blew that corner to bits. Quickly, the small business pivoted towards streaming and video on demand.
Yale graduate and Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes watched this minion’s moves with nonchalance. A threat? It wasn’t even in the same league. “It’s a little bit like, is the Albanian army going to take over the world?” he dismissively told the Times in 2010.
Reed Hastings was the founder and CEO of Netflix. Red flag, meet bull.
“For the next year, I wore Albanian Army dog tags around my neck. It was my rosary beads of motivation,” he told the New Yorker. During a two-day retreat at the Silicon Valley convention centre, the company’s executives wore Albanian berets. They latched onto that insult.
By 2018 Netflix’s market cap had soared to double Time Warner’s.
Philly McMahon’s musings on Mayo’s failing reintroduced the idea of added motivation this week. For decades, GAA parlance was littered with examples of various remarks weaponised on the dressing room wall.
One of the great scenes in the greatest GAA documentary, A Year ‘Til Sunday, bore John O’Mahony brandishing a newspaper and throwing down the gauntlet. That Galway team were charged with being ‘Fancy Dans.’ How would they respond?
Then the tide turned. At the time sports psychology was not an accepted science. The Wexford hurlers used Niamh Fitzpatrick, but she was disguised as a physiotherapist. She and many since forged a path towards enlightenment. They used their charisma and vivacity to guide teams. Educate them. A seismic shift away from external factors, towards identifying and understanding your own values and goals.
The dressing room wall is still routinely plastered, although now it is with KPIs and performance targets. After their breakthrough 2018 All-Ireland success, a social media video of the Limerick dressing room emerged. On the wall was their statistical goals. Puck-out percentages and a big ‘5.0’, the numbers of tackles they strived to make per minute.
What did Jim Gavin’s process really mean? They too tracked tackle tallies for the season. In the aftermath of their 2017 All-Ireland final win over Tyrone, the banner on the wall was a quote from Viktor Frankl’s 1946 book, Man’s Search for Meaning:
“Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.”
Intrinsic motivation and the process are now commonplace. The modern-day player routinely talks about their use of them. But that doesn’t mean it is all they use.
On the latest episode of the excellent GAA Social podcast, Kilcoo stalwart Conor Laverty reflected on their epic All-Ireland victory and the path that led to it.
“It is brilliant. There are so many things. Just to prove people wrong. You don’t want to go into things, but to be able to say all the doubters, all the people who put pressure on us.”
Host Thomas Niblock, alongside Oisín McConville, was incredulous. Do people actually say that? Is that just something you create yourselves? Does it not have to come from something better than one person saying, ‘I don’t know, I think these boys might be past it?’
“Ask Oisín,” Laverty replied. “He tipped us to get beat in every Ulster championship match this year.”
Kilcoo were overseen by one of the modern game’s great coaches, Mickey Moran. A detailed and meticulous manager. In every game this year, Conor Laverty distinguished himself with serenity and in-game intelligence. Evidently, on top of all that skill, they employed motivational morsels to forge a will.
The absence of others recounting similar is in some ways thanks to the tyranny of relentless positivity. A rigid culture of endless Insta inspiration. The cult of good vibes only. Belligerence exists, unquestionably, but lurking in the shadows while the veneer of systems and structure is offered as an explanation for success.
It is easy to see why victorious teams opt for this avenue. Of course, often a process and blue-sky thinking do make good. This is a realm of professional sport that is straightforward to articulate yet exceedingly difficult to replicate. Secondly, to acknowledge such pettiness is to stray into the negativity sphere.
Tyrone are a team that unashamedly tap into the darkness. They harness it. Every time they take to the field, it seems they do so eager to upset the consensus. Every All-Ireland win includes a gargantuan chip on their hulking shoulders. Before they played Mayo last September, Andy Moran wondered if Mattie Donnelly might be moved to midfield to allow Cathal McShane to start.
After they lifted the Sam Maguire, Conn Kilpatrick posted an Instagram directed at Moran. Sitting alongside fellow midfielder Brian Kennedy, he asked the question, ‘which one of us should be dropped now?’
Kilpatrick was following a proud tradition of players utilising any perceived slight. Colm O’Rourke promising he would eat his hat if a Tyrone team with Brian Dooher won an All-Ireland and Pat Spillane’s puke football remarks are other notable examples.
That is not to say it is the sum and substance of success, merely that it can be part of it. As it turns out, even the best team of all time tapped into this reserve.
In his Herald column last week, former Dublin footballer Charlie Redmond was still fuming over the Mayo County Secretary’s remark in his annual report last year about how Dublin came onto the pitch for the second half of the All-Ireland semi-final with ‘their usual arrogance.’
“I can assure all down in Mayo that the comments were certainly noticed and served to raise a few eyebrows in Dublin GAA circles,” he declared.
“And I suspect that a few of the Dublin players might use the comments to stoke the fires in the pre-match dressing room.”
Philly McMahon’s recent controversial column merely reinforced what we already knew about the six-in-a-row side’s regard for their nearest rivals. On The Football Pod last August, Paddy Andrews spelt it out in no uncertain terms.
“We did hate Mayo. Because these guys were trying to take away our dreams of winning an All-Ireland.”
On he went.
“We would use anything to get an edge. I remember in 2015. Our mentality was Mayo was diving. Rightly or wrongly, we created a mentality. Mayo are diving. Look at the bad tactics from Lee Keegan.
“We have Philly McMahon down the other end marking Aidan O’Shea but we are like how could they do that. The GAA are after us. The Sunday Game are trying to shaft us. That is your mentality. It is totally irrational.”
The corporate jargon always seemed overblown. Even masterpieces have their imperfections. Acknowledging it more should be celebrated. There should always be a place for pettiness. That all-conquering outfit were phenomenal, principled players. And they were people.
