The Captain Class: A New Theory of Leadership

by Sam Walker

If it’s true that our lifelong obsessions stem from seemingly mundane events in our childhoods, then I suppose this is mine. I ache to be part of a great team.

“You do your job so everyone around you can do their job,” Tom Brady once said. “There’s no big secret to it.”

The Captain Class is the culmination of a lifetime of watching sports, two decades of spending time in the orbit of world-class teams, and my own lengthy investigation into what drives the dynamics behind a surpassing collective effort. It’s not the story of one team’s triumph, although there are many triumphs recounted here. It’s not a biography of one transcendent star or coach, although many legendary figures will be discussed. Though it uses sports as its source material, it’s ultimately a book about a single idea—one that is simple, powerful, and can be applied to teams in many other fields, from business and politics to science and the arts. It’s the notion that the most crucial ingredient in a team that achieves and sustains historic greatness is the character of the player who leads it.

As any athlete will tell you, the first thing nerves interfere with is fine motor control. Every touch pass becomes hundreds of times more difficult with a gallon of adrenaline coursing through your bloodstream.

The legendary American football coach Vince Lombardi, who led the Green Bay Packers to five NFL titles in the 1960s, was a proponent of this idea. “Individual commitment to a group effort,” he once said, “that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.”

The crucial component of the job is interpersonal. The captain is the figure who holds sway over the dressing room by speaking to teammates as a peer, counseling them on and off the field, motivating them, challenging them, protecting them, resolving disputes, enforcing standards, inspiring fear when necessary, and above all setting a tone with words and deeds.

Duke University’s Mike Krzyzewski, who has won more games than any basketball coach in the history of the NCAA’s Division I, once wrote that while talent and coaching are essential, the secret to greatness is something else: “The single most important ingredient after you get the talent is internal leadership. It’s not the coaches as much as one single person or people on the team who set higher standards than that team would normally set for itself.”

In other words, this study showed that for units roughly the size of basketball teams, the collective talent level, and the ability to work democratically, turned out to be far more valuable than the isolated skill of one supreme achiever. “Having a superstar on your team is only beneficial if the rest of the team also scores relatively high,” the researchers wrote.

The same principle—the power of a talent cluster—seemed to apply to famous teams across many different disciplines. In business, there were the Nine Old Men who built Walt Disney’s animation studio, for example, or the programmers who developed Google’s search algorithm. Historians often cite the general brilliance of the framers of the U.S. Constitution. Scientists point to the three-nation Manhattan Project that developed the first nuclear weapon, the Oxford University team that developed penicillin, and the small knot of Soviet engineers who designed the Sputnik satellite. These groups weren’t driven by a single visionary but by an extraordinary concentration of brainpower.

There was one national team in Tier One to which player salaries mattered immensely, however—the 2011–15 New Zealand All Blacks. Because the rules forbid players from competing for the national team if they signed with a professional rugby club in another country, the New Zealand Rugby Union, which oversees the All Blacks, had to find a way to keep its top athletes at home by paying them market-competitive salaries. To that end, the NZRU began a campaign to sell sponsorships and broadcast rights that ultimately netted a team record ninety-three million U.S. dollars in revenue in 2015. This fundraising effort surely helped the All Blacks maintain a competitive team, but in the end it seems unlikely that money alone was the catalyst. The NZRU’s revenue was a drop in the bucket compared to the nearly three hundred million dollars England’s Rugby Football Union earned in the same year.

The man who’d saved Davis from football oblivion was Vince Lombardi, who had taken over as Green Bay’s head coach one year earlier with little fanfare and some novel theories about talent. The turnaround had come quickly. In Davis’s first season, the Packers narrowly lost the NFL Championship Game. They went on to win the next two. After a dip in form in 1964, Lombardi defied the racism of the day by rebuilding the Packers with undervalued black players. In 1965, he took the strategy a step further by making Davis the team’s defensive captain, one of the first African Americans to hold that title in the NFL. Immediately after Davis accepted the job, the Packers won another championship. When they met the Chiefs in this 1967 title game, Davis was one of six black starters on defense, four of whom would end up in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

he’d also picked up on something else—the kind of hunger that comes from being counted out. This was a quality Lombardi could feel in his own bones. As a highly regarded offensive coordinator for the New York Giants from 1954 to 1958, he’d seemed destined to be a head coach, but the calls never came. Lombardi suspected his Italian surname was an issue, especially when it came to positions with prominent college programs. The only reason he’d ended up in Green Bay was because nobody else would have him. “Coach Lombardi felt as if he had been denied, he had been looked over, passed over,” Davis said. “When he got to Green Bay he was determined that this was his opportunity. This was his chance to show that he simply could not be denied.”

What distinguished Lombardi the most from other coaches was his knack for oratory. His speeches were simple, forceful, and urgent—rich with emotional overtones and war analogies. At a time when sportswriters had a monopoly on coverage and a weakness for poetry, they shared his quotes in their columns, building a spectacular catalog of inspirational sayings such as “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing” and “Perfection is not attainable. But if we chase perfection we can catch excellence” and “It’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get up.”

Davis believed that the quality at the center of Lombardi’s character was an overwhelming desperation to prove his value. He used his words, and the blunt force of his personality, to make this sense of longing contagious. “He dwelled so heavily on that,” Davis said, “until he had every player feeling absolutely the same way.” Even when the Packers were good, they played like a team clamoring for recognition.

“It is essential to understand that battles are primarily won in the hearts of men,” he once said. “Men respond to leadership in a most remarkable way and once you have won his heart, he will follow you anywhere.”

On another occasion he said, “Coaches who can outline plays on a blackboard are a dime a dozen. The ones who win get inside their players and motivate.”

Puskás also expressed deep affection for Sebes, whom he described as one of the most genuine and honest people he’d ever known and “the real heart and head of that golden team.” Yet when it came to following Sebes’s instructions, Puskás made it clear that he had a mind of his own. “He was a street footballer from small childhood,” said Les Murray, a Hungarian-born soccer journalist. “He had not much time for coaching or coaches. He once told me that every time Sebes would go through this ritual of drawing all sorts of squares and diagrams on the blackboard in the dressing room before a game, he would lead the team out, and in the tunnel he would tell them to forget all that nonsense. ‘We’ll just play the way we normally play,’ and they would always win.”

McHale was innovative as well, widely credited with inventing a position known as the ruck rover and for teaching his players to work at a faster tempo and improvise. “I did not set out with any specific intention of building a football machine,” he once said. “I never liked the term, because it suggested the side was a combination which worked to a rigid plan and could not think. And if there is one quality we demand at Collingwood, it is the quick-thinking player with a dash of imagination.”

In reality, professional athletes are different from our adolescent selves. By the time they make it to the elite ranks, they have developed their own wellsprings of motivation and have spent thousands of hours practicing. They know when their footwork needs tightening or their conditioning has fallen off, and they have a firm grasp on tactics. To bring a team to the top, coaching only goes so far. A team’s fate depends on what the players do.

The public has a tendency to view coaches as singular forces. In reality, my study showed that even the most revered ones came packaged as part of a twin set. The only way to become a Tier One coach is to identify the perfect person to lead the players.

That said, there are coaches who seem to possess some dollop of magic. They have shown the ability to reframe the game with tactical innovations, to build cultures that are more powerful than any individual, or to move people to do spectacular things through their words, if not the force of their will. In sports, however, these coaches only achieved their greatest success when they had a player serving as their proxy on the field. The other half of this partnership was the captain.

From the outset of my research, one thing I noticed about Russell and the other Tier One captains was that when their careers ended, people always said some version of the same thing: There would never be anyone else like them. Since they did not conform to our notional models of leadership, their achievements were viewed as laboratory accidents that could never be repeated.

In a throwaway line, the article addressed one of the most baffling incidents from Russell’s past—his refusal to participate in his 1975 Hall of Fame induction ceremony. The Hall of Fame, Russell explained, is an institution that honors individuals. Russell had declined, he said, because he believed his basketball career should be remembered as a symbol of team play.

All at once, the puzzle pieces of Russell’s confounding personality started fitting together. He didn’t score many points because his team didn’t need him to. He didn’t care about statistics or personal accolades and didn’t mind letting teammates take the credit. “It was never about contracts or money,” he once said. “I never paid attention to MVP awards or how many endorsements I had lined up. Only how many titles we won.” Russell devoted himself instead to defense, and to doing whatever grunt work fell through the cracks.

Russell’s teammates didn’t think he was complicated and aloof; to them he was more like an action hero: simple, consistent, pure of heart. “Russell was the winningest person I’ve ever been around,” his teammate Tom Heinsohn said. “He had helped us out so many times, and we believed in him so much, there was a communion of spirit and a belief in each other.”

THE SEVEN TRAITS OF ELITE CAPTAINS 1. Extreme doggedness and focus in competition. 2. Aggressive play that tests the limits of the rules. 3. A willingness to do thankless jobs in the shadows. 4. A low-key, practical, and democratic communication style. 5. Motivates others with passionate nonverbal displays. 6. Strong convictions and the courage to stand apart. 7. Ironclad emotional control.

One of the highest compliments coaches can pay athletes is to describe them as relentless, to say that they just keep coming. Not every star has this quality. Some have a tendency to take games off; others shrink in critical situations. Among the Tier One captains, however, this trait was displayed over and over.

Immediately after the Pittsburgh Steelers selected Jack Lambert in the NFL draft, he began showing up at the team’s practice facility to study film—something his coaches had never seen a rookie do. Lambert developed such an intricate knowledge of the defense that his coaches installed him at middle linebacker, where he would have to call the defensive plays and contend with much larger interior linemen. By the end of the season, said fellow linebacker Jack Ham, “I forgot the fact that he was a rookie.”

A smaller group of kids had a different reaction, however. Faced with the failure problems, they kept working. They didn’t think they were dumb; they believed they just hadn’t found the right strategy yet. A few reacted in a shockingly positive way. One boy pulled up his chair, rubbed his hands together, and said, “I love a challenge.” These persistent kids, as a group, hadn’t been any better at solving the easy problems. In fact, their strategies suggested that they were, on average, slightly less skillful. But when the going got tough, they didn’t get down on themselves. They viewed the unsolved problems as puzzles to be mastered through effort.

Eighty percent of these “mastery-oriented” children maintained the same level of problem-solving ability on the tough questions as they had on the easy ones. And a smaller portion, about 25 percent, actually improved their strategy levels. These children weren’t any smarter, but they outperformed the children who felt helpless. Dweck went on to show that the two types of children had different goals. The helpless kids were preoccupied with their performance. They wanted to look smart even if it meant avoiding the difficult problems. The mastery-oriented children were motivated by the desire to learn. They saw failure as a chance to improve their skills.

The helpless kids viewed their skills as fixed from birth. They believed they were either smart enough to do something, or they weren’t, and it was up to others to render a verdict. The mastery kids had a more malleable sense of their intelligence: They believed it could be grown through effort. “They don’t necessarily think everyone’s the same or anyone can be Einstein,” Dweck said, “but they believe everyone can get smarter if they work at it.”

common sense suggests that a person’s natural ability should inspire self-confidence, Dweck’s research showed that in most cases, ability has very little to do with it. A person’s reaction to failure is everything.

Dweck’s research offers a possible explanation for how these Tier One captains—though not the most talented athletes—managed to overcome their weaknesses to exceed the accomplishments of those with greater gifts. I suspect they were not only “mastery-oriented” people, they were likely members of that rarefied 25 percent whose skills and strategies improved in the face of difficulty. Because they viewed their abilities as malleable, and ...

The same unceasing drive was something displayed by Russell, Puyol, Berra, Richard, and every other captain in Tier One. Early struggles culminated in a defining moment, a breakthrough that left no doubt about their desire to win at any cost. And in each case, after they had established this fact, their teams began to turn the corner. The pattern was so consistent that it suggested their doggedness might, in fact, have been contagious.

In 1913, Ringelmann conducted an experiment in which he asked his students to pull on a rope, both individually and in groups, while he measured the force they exerted. The conventional view was that people in a group would have more power collectively than they did alone—in other words, adding people to the pulling group would have a multiplying effect on the force. But the results showed something surprising. While the force applied did grow with every new person added, the average force applied by each person fell. Rather than amplifying the power of individuals, the act of pulling as a team caused each person to pull less hard than they had when pulling alone. Later researchers coined a name for this phenomenon. They called it social loafing.

It was a fact of human nature. The less identifiable one person’s effort is, the less effort they put in.

researchers at Fordham University decided to look at whether social loafing could be overcome. They wanted to see whether one person giving a maximum effort could incite others to improve their performances. The scientists grouped their shouters in pairs and, before they began shouting, told them that their partner was a high-effort performer. In these situations, something interesting happened. The pairs screamed just as hard together as they had alone. The knowledge that a teammate was giving it their all was enough to prompt people to give more themselves. This experiment demonstrated that high effort, or just the perception of high effort, is transferrable. In other words, the Ringelmann effect can be counteracted. The antidote is the knowledge that someone else in the group is leaving nothing in reserve. The Fordham study seemed to confirm my suspicions about Tier One captains: Their displays of tenacity could have positively influenced the way their teams performed.

During matches, Puyol’s relentlessness was often demonstrated by his intimate relationship with the medical staple gun. During a match in April 2012, in the middle of a tight race for the league title, the manager of the opposing team alerted the referee to Puyol’s forehead, which had been cut in a collision with another player. Puyol dashed over to the trainers with an expression of cartoonish urgency. Unless Barcelona wanted to substitute Puyol (which it didn’t), the only option was to staple the wound right there on the sidelines. Puyol was fine with that. His only concern was that the process went quickly. As the trainer examined the cut, Puyol impatiently grabbed at the staple gun as if he wanted to employ it himself. When the trainer snapped the staple in place, Puyol didn’t flinch. He ran to the touchline, manically waving his hands at the referee. Minutes later, with Puyol back in place, Barcelona’s Lionel Messi scored the winning goal. In an interview, Puyol described the incident as “nothing.” As I showed him a video of the stapling event, Puyol said he hoped he’d apologized to the doctors. “I’m a disaster for them because I rush them,” he said. But because he played defense on a team that wasn’t very defensive, he hated to miss even a few seconds. “If the other team scored a goal, I would have felt horrible.”

I have always felt I had to give everything. That’s how I’ve always been. It’s my way of respecting football and respecting my teammates.”

The longer he played, and the more Barcelona won, the more acutely Puyol felt the need to keep the team focused, to keep pulling hard on the rope. “Winning is difficult,” he said, “but to win again is much more difficult—because egos appear. Most people who win once have already achieved what they wanted and don’t have any more ambition.”

I asked him whether he thought his effort was contagious. “I think that when you see a teammate go to the maximum and give everything—I don’t mean myself, but anyone—what you cannot do is to just stand there and let another team’s player pass right by you,” he said. “If everybody is giving one hundred percent and you are only giving eighty percent, it shows. So I think it makes everyone go to one hundred percent.”

Carles Puyol’s uncommon determination to persevere, combined with a willingness to give everything all of the time, was a hallmark of Tier One captains, also typified by Russell, Shelford, and Berra. But it was not the only thing about the way they competed that stood out.

One of the most confounding laws of human nature is that when faced with a task, people will work harder alone than they will when joined in the effort—a phenomenon known as social loafing. There is, however, an antidote. It’s the presence of one person who leaves no doubt that they are giving it everything they’ve got.

The captains of the greatest teams in sports history had an unflagging commitment to playing at their maximum capability. Although they were rarely superior athletes, they demonstrated an extreme level of doggedness in competition, and in their conditioning and preparation. They also put pressure on their teammates to continue competing even when victory was all but assured.

After Luis finished pouring her pent-up emotions into the receiver, there was no response. For a second, she thought her mother might be confused about who was calling. “Mommy, it’s me….” “Me who?” Catalina replied coolly. Mireya wondered if something was wrong. “Mom,” she said. “Is everything okay?” “The people of Cuba are doing very badly!” “Yes, I know, but…” “Listen here,” Catalina said. “I didn’t give birth to a daughter so she could go and cry in front of her adversary. And don’t go to the hairdresser anymore, because I saw you changed your hair. You went to Atlanta to play volleyball, not to get your hair groomed!” Catalina gave her daughter some tactical advice for the next match, and then she hung up.

In a 2007 book, Aggression and Adaptation: The Bright Side to Bad Behavior, a team of American psychologists noted that nearly all of the most highly ambitious, powerful, and successful people in business display at least some level of hostility and aggressive self-expression. The authors didn’t go so far as to argue that these behaviors constitute “moral goodness,” but they didn’t dismiss them as the mark of evil, either. “Aggressive behavior offers avenues for personal growth, goal attainment and positive peer regard,” they wrote.

All of my research showed that contrary to the public view, it is possible for a water carrier who prefers toiling in the service of others to become a strong captain. In fact, superior leadership is just as likely (if not more so) to come from the team’s rear quarters than to emanate from its frontline superstar. Carrying water, especially on defense, is clearly vital to a team’s success, even if it’s not something that inspires people to compose epic poems or chisel their names in stone.

Buried inside an obscure 1997 clinical psychology textbook called Aversive Interpersonal Behaviors, there is a chapter titled “Blowhards, Snobs, and Narcissists: Interpersonal Reactions to Excessive Egotism.” The authors were a Wake Forest University professor and a handful of his undergraduate students. The paper concluded that self-centered people who project arrogance through their speech and body language tend to be viewed less favorably by others and can weaken a group’s cohesion. The most significant thing about this paper was the identity of one of its student co-authors, a twenty-one-year-old named Timothy Duncan. Duncan wasn’t just another psychology major at Wake Forest. He was the star of the basketball team.

The best way to look at one’s teammates, Duncan said, is that “you’re helping them as much as they’re helping you.”

his teams had won five NBA championships and had made the playoffs in all nineteen of his seasons. Individually, he managed to set the most impressive mark of all—winning more games with one team than any player in NBA history. There would be no fawning goodbye tour, however. Duncan kept his retirement plans private during the season, then announced his decision with a 146-word letter to the fans, which ended: “Thank you to the city of San Antonio for the love and the support over these years. Thank you to the fans all over the world. Much Love Always, Tim.”