Sports

Sports Intelligence

Certain traits of leadership are common to all fields. The central ingredient in all leadership is intelligence. In all human endeavors, the leader must possess sufficient intelligence to be able to identify [Page 1483]objectives and formulate strategy, to create a plan and design methods for executing that plan, and to adjust course as events unfold and circumstances dictate. Although the most highly intelligent are not always or even frequently the best leaders, there is nevertheless a level of intelligence, suitable to the activity, that any leader must have to be successful. Yogi Berra (1925–) and Ted Williams (1918–2002) are two players whose baseball intelligence made them leaders among players. Although Berra is not highly educated in the conventional sense, his baseball intelligence is superior. As a catcher, he was able to remember the strengths and weaknesses of each batter and guide his pitchers accordingly. Years after his retirement, the legendary Ted Williams, perhaps the finest hitter of his generation, could recite at length the tendencies of pitchers he faced to throw certain pitches at certain stages in the count. Nor are those two alone: There is a long list of successful coaches and managers whose obvious intelligence surely contributed to remarkable performance.

In professional football, the genius of Paul Brown (1908–1991) is legendary. A successful coach at Massillon High School in Ohio, he coached at Ohio State and during World War II at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station, where his team became dominant largely because Brown ignored the segregationist policies of the military and played a large number of future Hall of Famers who happened to be black. Among them was the fullback Marion Motley, who later became the model for all fullbacks because he was able to use his remarkable size (he was 185 centimeters tall and weighed about 96 kilograms) to his advantage as a ball carrier and blocker. Indeed the draw play, a staple of football since his time, was designed by Paul Brown to take full advantage of Motley's unique physical attributes. In the draw play, the quarterback “draws” the defense toward him, and then suddenly hands the ball off to his fullback. Motley, big and fast, was a terror in this play. Along with Motley, Paul Brown had such black players as Bill Willis, who had played for Brown at Ohio State, and Horace Gillam and Led Ford. All three later starred for the Cleveland Browns, the first integrated team in professional football.

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