112
NOVEMBER 2013
•
HEMISPHERESMAGAZINE.COM
HEMISPHERES:
I just thought of the Saul
Bellow line, where they asked him if he
regretted not going to Harvard, Princeton or
Yale and he said no, that those places would
have destroyed him. There is a great Bellow
echo throughout this.
GLADWELL:
I didn’t know that; that’s
a great quote. But it’s ramped up to an
almost preposterous level in this book.
HEMISPHERES:
So what led you to this?
It’s radical. You come to the David and
Goliath story and you manage to make
Goliath look like a sympathetic character.
One, your research shows Goliath to be a
poor blind guy with acromegaly, the same
glandular affliction as Andre the Giant.
And it would have left him quite fully blind
and arthritic as David, violating all norms
of combat—which dictated fighting at
close range—shot a stone into his head
with a sling whose power and accuracy
were roughly equal to a modern handgun.
GLADWELL:
Yes! Goliath is sent out with a
guide! I mean, he has to be led out by the
hand onto the ba lefield saying, “Come!
Come tome!” It’s pathetic!
HEMISPHERES:
Once you’ve revised
the David and Goliath story, you’re on a
course to say that the rules are made by
the powerful against the powerless, so
the powerless shouldn’t play by the rules.
And you do that, I think quite intelligently,
through the story of a girls basketball team.
GLADWELL:
That gets really interesting,
because it absolutely is the case that
it is fundamentally obnoxious to play
the full-court press with 11-year-old
girls, which is what the coach inmy
book did. It is obnoxious. The other
teamwill not get the ball up the court. I
mean, it is not basketball. That is deeply
offensive on one level. On the other
hand, the coach in that story is right.
Where is it wri en that the function of
11-year-old girls playing basketball is to
learn basketball? He’s teaching them,
I think, a waymore important lesson,
which is: If conventions are stacked
against you, challenge the conventions.
Don’t be passive and lose. I swear those
girls will never forget that lesson. I’m
convinced that’s changed the way they
fundamentally see the world.
HEMISPHERES:
What are you working
on now?
GLADWELL:
I’mdoing a piece about
doping; I’mbeingmischievous. I read
this book called
The Sports Gene
. It talks
about how great athletes are mostly
genetic freaks. They have something
that’s one in amillion about them that
causes them to react to training and
everything way differently than the rest
of us. Once you understand that, you
understand that when someone takes
performance-enhancing drugs, they’re
not trying to be Superman, they’re just
trying to create a level playing field
between themselves and the freaks. So if
that’s the case, what’s wrong with it?
HEMISPHERES:
If I’m watching an
Olympic broadcast, I’d much rather have
THE
HEMI
Q&A:
MALCOLMGLADWELL
a background segment where I meet the
guy’s entire pharmaceutical team and
they talk about exactly what they’ve put
into his body than one where I meet his
hardscrabble parents who raised him under
difficult circumstances.
GLADWELL:
Which is the way out of
the problem: I think what you have
is no penalties and full transparency.
So if I’mUsain Bolt and I want to take
testosterone, I can take testosterone; I
just have to tell the world exactly how
much I’m taking. Now, what would
happen if everyone did that is that there
would be a kind of shaming effect. So if
Bolt wants to run a 9.45 100meters and
takes lots of testosterone, I would say,
“Not interested in that. I’m interested in
the time of someone who takes nothing.”
But in other cases I might say, “You know
what? If A-Rod is recovering froma seri-
ous injury and is in the back side of his
career and his team’s in the pennant race
and he’s not contributing and he wants
to take some testosterone medically,
that is, to heal and get back on the field
quicker? God bless. Go for it.” There’s a
real distinction between those two. And
I think we’re smart enough, particularly
as sports fans—sports fans are smart
enough to parse the difference.
HEMISPHERES:
You see the bulging neck.
You’re not being fooled.
GLADWELL:
You’re not being fooled. Was
Ray Lewis taking something in the last
five years of his career? Do we care? I
don’t care. So I’m trying to do it in a way
that’s quietly subversive, not openly
subversive. It’s that tricky thing where
you don’t want to be the guy sort of just
saying outrageous things. Youwant to
say something and then youwant people
to think outrageous thoughts—but you
want them to think that they had the
outrageous thought. Like, “Wait aminute!
That means….” You don’t want: “Gladwell’s
saying that.”
DANAVACHON
is currently thinking out-
rageous thoughts that he suspects were placed in
his mind by MalcolmGladwell. He has written for
Vanity Fair
and
The New York Times.
»
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