The Sports Gene - Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance by David Epstein

If you have even the remotest interest in sport sciences, I’ve got a new release for you.

David Epstein, a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, presents some pretty complex topics in the very readable “The Sports Gene” where he explores the concepts behind whether there is a genetic predisposition for sport (nature) or is it about development (nuture); the eternal nature vs. nurture debate aka "are champions made or are they born."

Consider:

Major league baseball players play a charity softball game during the off-season. With the American League down 9-1, the sponsors send out a ringer – USA Gold Medal pitcher Jennie Fitch. Her defense promptly sat down at their positions knowing they'd not be needed. She faces Albert Pujols; 4 pitches, 1 ball and 3 swinging strikes. Two more big leaguers go down swinging. Weeks later with no fans or media, she blew right by Barry Bonds. Alex Rodriguez refused to face her.

Fitch’s pitching genes? Maybe not. Those MLB-ers have this massive library of ‘game film’ of pitchers: the arm’s cycle, ball release, spin, etc. to predict where the ball will cross the plate and when and where to swing the bat. They had no ‘film’ on Fitch’s underhand delivery of a ball with no visible seams (so they couldn’t see the spin) delivered at 65mph from 43 feet vs. 60.5 feet. Against Fitch, they were just like us - bums. But were the pros born with the tools to catalogue pitching? Or did they develop some unique visual skill that we all have that led to baseball success? Or was it that infamous 10,000 (and overhyped) hour rule? Baseball, tennis, volleyball, cricket players have learned to identify the flight of a ball in milliseconds. And that’s not reaction time, which is largely innate. Elite team sport players not only can identify the flight of a ball in a heartbeat, they can also reconstruct the players on the field with only a glance. No one’s born with that. Score one for nuture.

Don’t put too much faith in that 10,000 hour rule. That number came from interviews with a grand total of 10 violin prodigies. Australia took good female athletes and within 14 months, turned out world class skeleton competitors (a winter Olympic sport). Epstein presents many more examples. The most visible? Usain Bolt wanted to be a cricket player until a track coach noticed his speed, which most all coaches know you really can’t teach. Score one for nature. And most of those fast Jamaicans and tireless Kenyans didn’t grow up running for sport. They grew up running for transportation. Sure, there are plenty of tireless Germans and Costa Ricans. The genes didn’t leave them and migrate to Jamaica or Africa. The culture did. Minus one for nuture.

Here’s something about speed you probably didn’t know. We all plateau eventually. And the younger an athlete starts training for speed, the earlier they plateau. There’s no guarantee that kid who sizzles in 8^th grade will continue to get faster all the way through college. More likely, that kid may have already peaked. Minus one for early specialization.

But speed kills, right? And speed is all about fast twitch muscle fibers, right? But it looks like the fast twitch player can't tolerate training like everyone else. Score one for individualized training. One size training does not fit all athletes.

Normal wingspan is (roughly) your height. NBA wingspan is well beyond their height. Actually, having a wingspan greater than their height is more important in the NBA than height alone. The leg length in runners is a greater proportion of the runner’s height than the population. The pelvis is narrower (males and females), and the leg muscle mass is less in long distance runners than the population. Score one for nature. And for distance runners, the less muscle mass in the legs contributes to being more efficient after training. Plus one for nurture. 

Geneticists have been crawling all over the world looking for the genes that explain the Jamaican sprinters, the east African distance runners, those with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (main reason young athletes die in sport) – both those who die and those who seem to get by, those rare individuals whose blood looks like they’ve blood doped and go out to win Olympic medals with little organized or intensive training, or a gene that predicts who is more likely to get injured, or accelerate damage after brain injury, or that really rare person who doesn’t have the ‘stop gene’ that normally places a ceiling on muscle growth. 

Every experienced coach has presented the same training program for a team. Some kids flourish with rapid improvement in their fitness and others seem to respond little to training. Were those latter players ‘non-responders’ to training or was their fitness so naturally and abnormally high that training was too easy? Nature and nuture butting heads.

Isn’t it possible that there is someone in China with the same genetic gifts as the east Africans? Or in Finland is the next Usain Bolt? Nature. The big problem is exposing people with these gifts to a variety of sports so they can find what suits them. Nuture.

Which made me think about my own favorite sport.  Soccer was mentioned only in the discussion about reading the field of play. No specific genetic traits are needed so anyone can play it and have fun.

I hear a pick-up game calling my name, so I'm going to take my generic middle-of-the-road genetic gifts and go have some fun. I’m out of here. Score one for soccer.

East Coast Don

Kiss Me, Evil by Blackie Noir

'Nicky Kid' Dimitri, light heavyweight boxer of some note, can't seem to climb that last mountain having been unable to unseat the current champ,  twice. His manager can get him $4 million for a third shot, but a detached retina in need of repair has Nicky spooked; he declines and abruptly retires. Hey, he's got good money squirreled away. He'll get on fine.

That doesn't sit well with the stunning Trina who has gotten used to the quasi-rock star life of a title contender's wife. When Nicky needs to escape this shrill woman, he hangs with Trash, his only friend who scratches out a living working on motorcycles and maybe some marginally legal enterprises. Trash's right hand man is Moondog; peace of shit if you ask me. Trash has been helping Roxi out of the depths of addiction and self loathing brought on by being abused by her stepfather. 

Now Trina may be a stunning head-turner who take a back seat to no one in LA, but Roxi's mid 20ish grunge look certainly can hold her own. Seeing as how Nicky is sure that Trina is going to dump him and get all his money, our boy succumbs to Roxi's advances. But turns out, it's more than a one night stand. After a couple thrilling days in the sack, they actually find that they like each other, a lot.

But life isn't what it seems. Trina has orchestrated a deceptive series of twists to take Nicky down and get not just half the estate, but the whole pot so she can go out and grab some old fart with some real money.

Admit it. With a name like 'Blackie Noir' you can just guess this author's favorite genre. Just look at this guy. Web site? Yeah, right; like that'll ever happen. Bet he doesn't drink no stinkin' latte or eat tofu or sushi either. Got to love the quote on the page Amazon has for him: "Raymond Chandler taught me the only French word I know . . . 'noir'. 

And it's not just the expertly presented 'noir' mood that will draw you in. This has a very clever plot with more jagged turns than the author has scars on his face. 

Best know what you are getting yourself in for here. This is down in the gutter, trash talking, sexy, violent, in your face noir.

And I loved every *&%!*# word of it.

East Coast Don

Silken Prey by John Sandford

This is the seventh John Sandford book that has been reviewed in the blog, and that in itself is a pretty favorable comment about this author. This is the most recent of the “Prey” series, the 23^rd, published this year. Lucas Davenport is the detective extraordinaire who has moved up to the weirdly titled BCA, Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Davenport now takes special assignments from Minnesota’s Governor Henderson. This crime novel is built around a political intrigue. The incumbent Democratic senator Porter Smalls is expected to win reelection against the newbie politico, Taryn Grant. But, only days before the election, kiddie porn is found on Smalls’ personal computer. After only a couple days, Davenport figures out that the porn was planted there. All evidence points to Grant’s campaign as being the ones who would mostly likely benefit from a Smalls’ election loss. Grant is not a woman that is easy to like – a billionaire by inheritance, beautiful, and only interested in her own well being. Henderson directs Davenport to look further into the matter, and Tubbs, the guy who planted the kiddie porn, turns up dead. Then, there are more deaths, seemingly aimed at cutting of the trail that would lead to Grant.

Although the book started out a little slow during character development, it picked up speed quickly. The entire book covered a period of a week, and takes the reader right through election day events. Sandford included his usual cast of characters. He writes a good story, and I’d give this one an A-.

Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes

Waino Mellas is fresh off his Princeton graduation with plans of law school, politics, and maybe public office. Just one obligation stands in his way . . . that pesky ROTC gig, so it's off to OCS and a few years in the Marine Corps. One problem:

it's 1969,

and that means Vietnam. 

But that can't be so bad, can it? Being a combat vet could only help his career ambitions. Manage a platoon for a few months. Maybe even get a company. Maybe even a medal or two. Just 13 months then leave the bush behind and head back to life.

Mellas is assigned a platoon in the NW corner of Vietnam within spitting distance of Laos and the DMZ. 1st Platoon, Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 24th Regiment of the 5th Marine Division stationed at Matterhorn. They've cleared the vegetation off the top and dug in excellent defenses. Sure there is the occasional mortar shell or sniper, but nothing that can't be handled by the more experienced platoon leaders.

A few weeks pass and Mellas has to lead his platoon on patrol. Careful, slow walk through the jungle that is stopped frequently when the man on point gets nervous. Out a couple days. No real contact with the NVA or evidence of their presence.

But what Mellas does learn, and pretty quickly, is that the Marines is not just a bunch of gung ho hard chargers. And leadership is not just leading men into battle. He has to be part social worker, part counselor, part platoon nurse, part bad ass lieutenant, part befuddled rookie. He faces overt racial divides, internal class warfare, black on black, white on black, black on white racism, cowardice, bravery, malingerers, black power, crotch rot, malaria, immersion foot, gangrene, unfathomable fatigue, hatred of commanding officers to the point of plotting murder, hunger,  diarrhea, and dehydration in the middle of monsoon season. But not before one of his men is mauled in the jungle by a tiger and his men have to carry his stinking remains back to Matterhorn for processing back to the states.

The brass wants a new firebase set up and Bravo Company is ordered to abandon Matterhorn and hump it to the new location in maybe 3 days. But the brass obviously can't read a map's topo lines or the weather forecast; the hump takes more like 7 days and the company packed rations for the expected 3 days in the bush. And the weather is so bad that copters can't fly in food or water - make do says the brass, sooner you get to the destination, the sooner you can rest and eat.

Prick.

They arrive, get a little rest and start the process of building a new firebase. Guess what, the brass are now sure that the NVA have settled into the old Matterhorn base and have ordered Bravo Company (and more) to go, determine the strength of the force and retake Matterhorn because from there the Marines can monitor and disrupt NVA supply lines coming into Vietnam from Laos.

The resulting assault on Matterhorn is brutal, full of fear, shit pants, mud, tears, rationed water and ammo, and heroism that would never make the papers in the US, but would become the stuff of legend to the mud crawling grunt in the bush.

And all for what? To take back a stinking hilltop that only weeks before they had held. The brass seems less concerned about the condition of the troops than they are about the body count so the Generals could puff their collective chests in what was not a war based on territory, but a war of attrition. Kill so many that the NVA will run out of manpower (And we bought this as a strategy?).

I read that it took Marlantes upwards of 20 years of on and off again writing to complete his manuscript. Writers are told to write about what they know. Marlantes was a decorated Marine in Vietnam (Navy Cross, Bronze Star, 2 Navy Commendation Medals for valor, 2 Purple Hearts, 10 Air Medals). The real genius behind this story is Marlantes' ability to assemble his collective memory (notes? diary?) into this massive epic (~600 pages, 2012 copyright) narrative of Vietnam.

One would expect that a Vietnam novel would be filled with firefights, tunnel rats, B-girls, and more battles. Marlantes takes his time introducing the reader to the key Bravo Company players and it's probably 150 pages in before any real hostilities (at least against the NVA) happen. Other than that brief fight, Marlantes spends upwards of the first 400 pages about the boredom, start/stop, mud, hunger, thirst, pus-oozing skin diseases, blood-sucking leeches (one up a urethra) and more that was almost as much of an enemy as were the NVA.

While those 400-ish pages could never be called 'slow,' once the assault on Matterhorn begins, Marlantes takes us all for a massive 150+ page encounter that roars so loud and rolls so fast that the involved reader can see the tracers headed their way, hear the thump of mortar shots, cringe at the NVA taunting the Marines when they capture a squad's radio, cry when soldiers we've become to see as friends trip a mine and get cut in half, wonder if a Marine's death was due to friendly fire . . . I can still see images in my mind.

Having graduated high school in 1967, I grew up in fear of the draft and Vietnam (no, didn't go. #314 draft lottery number) and learned not to ask friends who I know were there about combat; I wasn't there, I would never understand. My son-in-law's stepfather was a 1965-era Green Beret stationed near the DMZ and all he would tell me was snippets about political restrictions put on them by Washington. Matterhorn is probably the closest that those of us who didn't go will ever get to what the down-in-the-mud grunt experienced.

I'm sure that some will compare this to Oliver Stone's Platoon, considered to be one of the great anti-war movies ever. I thought Platoon was a morality play set in war and Matterhorn probably is, too. But I see Matterhorn giving us more about what the soldiers faced, good and bad, while being stationed in the shit. The tag line for Platoon was something like, "in war, the first casualty is innocence." Matterhorn may also be, but it is also about anger, jealousy, racism, politics, hatred, unrelenting fear, and love for the guy whom you just dug your fighting hole. Just survive one more night and we are one  day closer to going home.

Apologies to Marlantes because I have left dozens and dozens of subplots unsaid and probably have mis-stated some of the plot points I did mention. Just because I left many out doesn't make them any less uninteresting or unimportant. They are all connected in this complex, but highly readable and visible 3-D web.

East Coast Don

Grind Joint by Dana King

An empty Penns River, PA strip mall, once anchored by Penny’s and Monkey Ward, is being converted into a casino.; a grind joint of slots and drinks for this down and out town. Supposed to bring lots of new jobs to a dying manufacturing city just outside the Pittsburgh sprawl – and maybe pull some customers from the downtown’s bigger, full-service casino. A week before the opening, the body of a low rent drug dealer is dumped on the casino’s front steps. Looks like someone is sending a message about this new venture.

Ben Dougherty (pronounced DOCK-er-dee, aka Doc; King thankfully offers a pronunciation guide to the western PA ethnic names), a Penns River native, ex-army, and now detective draws the case right as his uncle/chief goes down with a heart attack. The interim is damn sure that Mike Mannarino, local car dealer/regional crime boss is responsible and pushes Doc to arrest Mannarino.

Now Mannarino may well be responsible for the kid’s death. Seems the kid ran some of Marrarino’s drug business, but decided to go out a bit on his own and got some product from a growing Russian presence in the area, prompting Mannarino to send a message.  So not only are the police after Mannarino, so are the Russians for having stepped in their growing business.

And a friend of the vic gets a hard ass to look into a way to get back at Mannarino for having his friend killed. Now Mannarino may be mob connected, but at least his business is predictable and he keeps the nonsense in Penns River to a minimum, so there is an uneasy alliance between some of the cops and Mannario’s crew. The Russians, however, are crazy and violent, so Doc is more focused on the Russian’s and makes some overtures to Mannarino to help run them out of business.

Grind Joint is not available until November 2013. Stark Publishing sent the book to me and the introduction is by MRB friend Charlie Stella, so I’m guessing Stella was behind this freebie (Thnx to the Knuckmeister). King offers up a winning threesome: likable good guys/nasty bad guys, a very cleverly developed plot, and staccato, in-your-face dialogue. I liked Doc and was happy to see he is in a couple other books by King. Doc is awkward with the ladies, but equal parts vicious/manipulative with the bad guys.  Those who make the effort to locate Grind Joint will be rewarded with a story that's equal parts George Higgins, Elmore Leonard, Charlie Stella and I see a little Ken Bruen as a topping. Sweet company. King has 3 other books, all published since 2011.

Can't speak for you all, but I know I’m in.

East Coast Don 

Ancient Anger by Thomas K. Matthews

This novel brings together several genres: crime novel, mysticism, historical fiction, and travelogue. Albert Poliska and Richard Halden, are anthropologists who have been independently studying as-yet undeciphered hieroglyphics from the ancient Mayans. They both hit roadblocks in their research and needed to collaborate with each other to advance their academic understanding. For them, it’s a collegial and happy union of forces. They learn that there are still a few Mayans alive who believe in and practice their old beliefs, who might be able to help them read the old symbols. However, Padre Mio, the 105-year-old keeper of the Maya secrets had a vision of the Mayan ancient forces needing to destroy the world in order to give it a rebirth. The anthropologists find Mio as he is in the process of bringing his vision to fruition. Mio needed a warrior to carry out the human sacrifices that his ancient directives demanded. The warrior he chose was none other than Carols Javeda, a Los Angeles drug dealer, a psychopath who underwent a remarkable conversion in the face of the mystical power of Mio.

I thought the first few pages were a bit choppy as the author set up the characters and plot, but I was hooked by page 30. I usually steer clear of this much mysticism, but I’m sure it is right up the alley for East Coast Don and his love for author Robert McCammon. With the mystic side of the story, it’s possible to buy into the conversion of Carlos. The author’s well-written travelogue took the reader from Los Angeles, to the Yucatan, New York, Louisiana, and Sedona. There was a Cussler-like quality to the grand adventure of the anthropologists, although all of Matthew's characters were more three-dimensional and real than Cussler’s stereotypic and predicable ones. I thought Matthews did a wonderful job of intertwining the several story lines and bringing them to a surprising conclusion. There were twists that I did not see coming until they happened in the last few pages.

Never Go Back by Lee Child

Never Go Back is Lee Child’s latest and most anticipated Jack Reacher novel.  He is even charging admission to his book signing events.  Even with such high expectations Child does not disappoint.

After thousands of miles of hitchhiking, Jack Reacher returns to his former unit, the 110^th MP Special Unit in hopes of finally meeting the sexy voice on the phone of Major Susan Turner.  Turner now the commander of the unit was introduced four books earlier as Reacher’s love interest and he has traveled far and wide to ask her out to dinner.  Reacher is surprised to find that not only has Turner been arrested and relieved of her command but Reacher too is immediately returned to active duty while an investigation against him is pursued.  Seems two law suits are pending against him from his long ago military days.  One involves the beating to death of a suspect and the other a paternity suit, both from Los Angeles but neither of which he remembers.

Reacher who trained himself to turn fear into aggression, suspects these law suits have been recently created to make him run and forget about Major Turner.  Instead he is compelled to covertly investigate his and Major Turner’s charges which quickly lands him in the same prison as Turner.  In a matter of hours, he orchestrates their escape and he and Turner are off to California with $30 cash borrowed unwittingly from his attorney.

Their journey leads them to encounters with West Virginia meth dealers, military MPs, the FBI, and Army Special Forces.  Reacher and Turner form a special bond while smashing heads, breaking arms and fingers, and shooting those in their way, all for the purpose of clearing their sullied names by revealing and punishing their foes.

Never Go Back is Child at his best… a master of suspense and mystery.  He develops a character we know only in fiction but fantasize is real.  He makes every chapter an adventure in and of itself yet weaves in clever connections to the plots of this and previous novels… very efficient… nothing irrelevant.  We are relieved by the outcome not so much that justice prevails but that Jack Reacher lives on so Child can craft future tales.  This is the essence of the genre that is Men Reading Books.