Football

Kicking Out: Bouton's 'instinctive' players can make terrible managers

I HAD never heard of Ball Four until a few days ago.

Since discovering it on a trawl of random sports books to meet the needs of a recent reading binge, I haven’t been able to put it down.

Despite having limited interest and even less knowledge of American sports, it came highly recommended.

So unique was it in its revelations that Time magazine listed it among the 100 greatest non-fiction books of all-time.

It was also the only sports-themed booked to make the New York Public Library’s list of Books of the Century.

Jim Bouton had been the New York Yankees’ pitcher in the mid-1960s but a bad shoulder hampered him. In 1969, he was with the Seattle Pilots and decided to write a warts-and-all diary recounting the life of a Major League Baseball player.

The reaction to its publication was so volatile that baseball authorities demanded – unsuccessfully – that Bouton apologise and declare publically that the whole thing was a fabrication.

In the book’s preface, he recalls entering the clubhouse after a game against the San Diego Padres to find the book’s charred remains lying for him to find.

“I can still remember Pete Rose [a baseball legend], on the top step of the dugout screaming, ‘F*** you Shakespeare”, is another vivid recollection.

Once you become accustomed to the language of baseball, the book becomes an easy and very funny read.

But beneath the controversy of baseball’s most tawdry revelations being laid out in print, Bouton is a wise-cracker with some keen observations.

For instance, he broke athletes into three categories.

First, there’s the guy who does everything instinctively and does it right.

Second, there’s the athlete who’s educated.

The third kind is the one who is intelligent enough “to know that baseball is basically an instinctive game”.

Gaelic footballers fall beneath the same headings.

We have the first school of figures whose footballing brain is a natural phenomenon.

Various coaches helped them along the way but they’d have made it anyway. They just knew instinctively where to be and what to do with the ball.

The second, an educated athlete, describes so many modern-day stars. The sport has moved away from instinct and has come to be dictated by the coaching manual.

Players now are experts in their own bodies and how to maximise themselves. They study the sport in order to empower themselves.

It takes a lot to become the colour through that greyscale, but without the willingness to be educated then many of these players would amount to little.

Bouton considered himself among the third category, who had enough instinct to survive but had to make sure he was in the physical shape to enable him to compete.

“What I do, kiddies, is work hard, stay in shape, practice – then, once I’m on the field I let my instincts take over. Also, I don’t smoke.”

Players are what they are and will be what they will be.

The problem is that, in a way that is not unique, the GAA is eternally bogged down in the idea that great players make great managers.

To have the vision on a football field to pick up a ball 50 yards out with your back to goal, to know and hit the run of the man inside before he’s taken his first step, is something very unique and special.

But if you asked many of those responsible for such behaviours as a player to coach the next generation to do it, it is a hopeless affair.

This column has had many who were once great players described as bluffers and cowboys when it comes to the managerial circuit.

It is often unfair, but understandable.

These men belong to Bouton’s first group.

“I don’t think these guys can articulate what they’re doing, they just know what to do and they go out and do it,” he wrote before telling a story about Yogi Berra.

He was the New York Yankees’ catcher for 18 seasons and would later become a manager and coach in the sport.

“I remember Yogi standing around the batting cage trying to explain hitting to some of the guys and he started to talk about his hands and his legs and he couldn’t make himself clear.

“Finally he said, ‘Ah, just watch me do it’.”

If physical demonstration was an effective method of coaching then great GAA players would indeed make great managers.

But for many, the struggle is to communicate to others what came so naturally to themselves.

Knowledge, right to the point of winning All-Irelands and Allstars and anything else, is only power for a coach if they have the means to put their ideas across to players effectively.

To say that players are being failed by the failure to properly coach coaches is giving players undue credit.

For while they may come in quick time to regard a big name player as a hopeless coach, they’ll at least give them a chance.

But any coach coming without a big playing reputation has to work ten times harder to earn his stripes in a GAA dressing room.

“Sure what did he ever play?” is the question that will follow any budding young coach.

Coaching any sport requires a level of playing experience, but you don’t have to have won All-Irelands to understand Gaelic football.

Good ideas are critical, but they’re no good if they’re locked inside your head and all you can think to do is the Yogi Berra approach of ‘here, just watch me do it’.

The ability to communicate half-decent ideas is more valuable to a player’s development than the inability to offer good ones.

The instinctive genius often has no idea why he was a brilliant player, and that can make him a terrible manager.