Forget charisma and skill — the captains of the best teams in sports history shared 7 subtle traits
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Superstar athletes, brilliant coaches, a shrewd front office — all three are components of excellent professional sports teams. What you may not have given as much thought to is the role of captain, the player-leader of the team.
Not only is this role also vital, it is the single most important factor for a team's success, argues Wall Street Journal editor Sam Walker in his book "The Captain Class."
Eleven years ago, Walker embarked on a research project to to determine the commonalities of the world's greatest professional sports teams throughout history. An idea for a Journal feature ended up becoming a book, and by the time he was done, Walker had analyzed more than 1,200 teams dating back to the 1880s.
He used a strict and rigorous grading system that resulted in the 16 best teams in history, judged by how consistently they won championships as well as performed at the highest level in their league. Walker was as surprised as most of his readers would be to see that the one common element of these teams was the nature of their captains — or, in the cases where no captain was formally named, their informal player-leaders.
"The most crucial ingredient in a team that achieves and sustains historic greatness is the character of the player who leads it," Walker wrote. These leaders serve as models, teachers, and support to their teammates.
Walker determined that all of these captains shared seven traits:
1. They are relentless.
Yogi Berra was never officially named captain, but he was the heart of the New York Yankees team that made history by winning five consecutive World Series titles from 1949-53.
Before becoming an outstanding catcher and team leader, Berra as a rookie in 1946 was a lousy catcher and was so out of place on the team that the front office had to tell the players to stop making fun of him.
Ahead of the 1949 season, the Yankees manager decided to put Berra through an intensive training program with three of the team's best pitchers. Berra embraced his catcher training so dramatically that he and his wife moved to live closer to the pitchers. Within a year, he had transformed from one of the league's worst to the best, and his dedication inspired his teammates.
Walker said that leaders like Berra have what the psychologist Carol Dweck calls the "mastery mindset." That is, when faced with failure, "They didn't think they were dumb; they believed they just hadn't found the right strategy yet."
2. They play to the limits of the rules.
Ahead of the Cuban women's volleyball team's semifinal match against Brazil in the 1996 Olympics, team captain Mireya Luis felt nervous. The Brazilians were an intimidating team, and Luis had seen her teammates get comfortable with their success. Knowing that the Brazilians faltered under the same hostile energy she and her team thrived under, Luis decided that her team was going to get nasty.
As the game unfolded, Luis led a barrage of insults at her opponents. Despite taking several penalties for their unsportsmanlike behavior, the Cubans continued to brutally smack talk until the Brazilian team became visibly shaken — the Cubans were acting; the Brazilians had become genuinely furious and their play suffered. The Cuban team ultimately won the match, and would go on to beat China in the final.
The Brazilians were so angry at the end of the match against Cuba, though, that a fight broke out, and the day is remembered in infamy.
So why does Walker bring it up? He determined that the greatest captains in history knew that they had to get away with as much as possible if it was with the calculated intention of winning. "The world puts a lot of pressure on athletes, especially captains, to be champions and paragons of virtue," he wrote. "But these two things do not always correlate."
3. They do thankless jobs.
As an undergraduate student at Wake Forest University, Tim Duncan helped his professor write a psychology textbook chapter entitled "Blowhards, Snobs, and Narcissists: Interpersonal Reactions to Excessive Egotism." It became the perfect prologue to his career as the captain of the San Antonio Spurs.
From 1997-2016, the Spurs won five NBA titles and achieved the NBA's best long-term win rate in history at 71%. Also in this time, Duncan never reached the celebrity status of a LeBron James or Kobe Bryant, but it wasn't due to a lack of talent. He deliberately positioned himself as a support player, switching positions if necessary, depending on the composition of that year's team.
He even made the "unheard of" decision to be paid less than his market value so that his team would be able to sign better players.
As Walker said of Duncan and the others he identified, "The great captains lowered themselves in relation to the group whenever possible in order to earn the moral authority to drive them forward in tough moments. ... The easiest way to lead, it turns out, is to serve."
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