Last Word: Applause for opponents then, psych-wars now

The Hindu

11-05-2025

Traditionally, and certainly in India, we expected our sportsmen and sportswomen to be polite, humble, unselfish, empathetic, and respectful of the opposition. When I was growing into adulthood, our champions were Prakash Padukone (right), Gundappa Vishwanath, Bhagwat Chandrasekhar, Vijay Amritraj, and Ajit Pal Singh — all of whom embodied these values.
When they won, they applauded the opponent; when they lost, it was with a smile. We believed this was how athletes ought to be. Good behaviour was often rated above ruthless victories. It was considered better to lose with grace than win with rancour (and that's only a slight exaggeration).
Recent research, however, suggests that being self-centred, ruthless, and manipulative may be the route to glory. Scientists at Nottingham Trent University (NTU) have concluded that 'specific characteristics considered malevolent in social settings are highly relevant in performance sport.'
Interestingly, according to the researchers, coaches who exhibit these traits tend to work against their athletes. The more self-centred a coach is — or the higher their level of narcissism — the less responsive they are to their athlete's needs. Success, then, seems to depend on a productive mix of personality traits.
The research focussed on the 'dark triad' of qualities — narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy — or, in practical terms, selfishness, strategic exploitation, and deceit.
I have often felt that in team games, you need a variety of characters to work together. As the great Mike Brearley wrote, 'a cricket team works only by dint of differentiation.' You need your best players to be selfish — in the sense of putting the team above everything else. Don Bradman, for instance, tended to look less than ordinary on wet tracks (those were days when wickets were not covered) and avoided batting on them as much as possible.
This kind of selfishness served the team. Great players understand when they are most effective and plan accordingly, knowing they are, in effect, half their team.
Ruthlessness, too, is often a hallmark of top players. In the years when Vijay Amritraj was one of India's nearly men — good enough to beat the best but consistently falling short in the Grand Slams — someone (I think it was Jimmy Connors) remarked that when you have an opponent down, you get even more aggressive to make sure he never gets up again. This was something Vijay was unable to do, and the prevailing cliché then was that Indian sportsmen lacked the killer instinct.
Do nice guys really finish last? If so, it ignores another truism — that you can be ruthless and selfish on the field but a 'decent human being', as Leander Paes puts it, off it. I imagine Roger Federer is a good example of this, as are some of our more recent champions like Viswanathan Anand, Rahul Dravid, and P. V. Sindhu.
In competition, however, as the former world chess champion Mikhail Tal summed up almost poetically, 'You must take your opponent into a deep dark forest where 2+2=5, and the path leading out is only wide enough for one.'