Sports Gene - Minds in Motion

Today's podcast episode discusses the reliability of David Epstein's information in his book about sports genetics. The hosts question Epstein's sources and the way he presents information, citing an example where he portrayed Barry Bonds as aggressive when he was actually friendly in a video. They also discuss Epstein's lack of scientific background and his tendency to focus on dramatic aspects rather than providing a balanced view. The hosts debate whether genes or work ethic matter more in sports and discuss examples from basketball and swimming. They also mention how certain sports, like skeleton and bobsledding, may rely more on physical attributes than skills or genes. Overall, they believe that work ethic and skill development are important factors in sports success. Hello, and welcome to Minds in Motion. I am Liam West, and with me today is. And I'm David Hoffman. And this is our podcast. All right, well, what are we talking about today, David? All right. So after reading the sports team, we've had some many insights on the information that we have learned. And I would say our main topic here today should be, can we really rely on David Epstein's information? Because the reason behind this is mainly in a lot of his, a lot of his sources, they seem to come out from 70s, 80s. More stuff that is catered to his idea of the sports team. And his specific view, his specific view. And he seems to. And we can even see this in chapter one in Beat by an Underhand Girl of the interaction between Jeannie Finch and Barry Bonds, where he was saying that Jeannie Finch could not strike him out. And Epstein really painted it out to seem very, like, sexist and gross and even, like, aggressive on Barry Bonds' part. But yeah, like how he just got, how he's saying that he got through all the media, like he was, like, like how he pushed through a throng of media, a throng of media. But we can see in a video that was provided to us by our English teacher, Miss Lee, we could see that that was not the case. And he was actually a really nice guy. And he didn't even push through any media at all. And that was really confusing in my part. In the video, it showed that not only did Jeannie Finch approach Barry Bond, there was, he was coming out of the dugout and they were already pretty close. On page three, David Epstein says towards the end of the page, whenever you want to, Bonds replied confidently, you faced all them little chumps. You got to face the best. You can't be pretty and good and not face another handsome guy who's good, Bonds said, simultaneously flirting and unfurling his peacock feathers. Bonds then told Finch to bring a protective net when she was ready to face him, because you're going to need it with me. I'll hit you. And, you know, that really paints the picture, not not only to me, but to my fellow classmates, that Bonds was trying to be overly aggressive and sort of inappropriate in a way. Yeah, but I definitely feel that. I think I think it's not a good, but it's not a good way to present information, you know? Yeah, but I mean, even at the same time, we have many. We have many other things that come into question from this book of how he says stuff, he doesn't say stuff the correct way, in my opinion. And he really he really like jumbles his information and a lot of the way that he words his sentences, it just doesn't seem. Correct. Yeah, I mean, a lot of the way he talked in the book made it seem sort of like a reality show, like where he's only taking the dramatic parts and leaving out everything else, leaving out kind of the boring stuff. And sort of making it more marketable and just so more people will talk about it. And it doesn't it doesn't it's not very good for your book to for a book to be like that, in my opinion. Yeah. And even research that we've done on our own, I, for one, have definitely not been able to find any scientific background that David Epstein has been a part of. Yeah, he doesn't I don't as far as we know, we don't we don't believe he has a scientific background besides being a collegiate athlete. He doesn't really know, like he's not a geneticist. You know, he's a writer for Sports Illustrated that doesn't make you a genius when it comes to sports and genetics. Yeah. But I feel like a lot of this stuff from his book can be called into question, like even like even one question here. Do you feel David Epstein favors one race in the sports team? You know, it's kind of it's strange because he's the way he presents it is kind of talking the way he talked in the introduction when he was talking about the Dowie Jamaican boy. He made it seem as if he were. I don't know how to I don't know how to word this, you know, but he made it seem as if he was only better than him because he was Jamaican and because he was white. So. I don't I don't believe I don't believe that's the way he should paint the picture, but he does bring up points later on in the book. About how. How people from different parts of Africa are better at certain things like distance and sprinting. Yeah. He does bring that up, and I mean, he even painted and stuff from different points of views from like China and Australia. Like what they do is that they pull kids aside. They may even pull them out of sports entirely to put them in the sport that their body is made for, which doesn't really come off as the most racist to me. And that like actually comes off as something that is more scientific and probably one of his better points of the book, if if not one of the best points that he had to make. And I would say even some evidence that we could use for the race and on my side is at the start of the book in the introduction on a page on the on the second page of the introduction. He he stated did Peyton Manning and Eli Manning inherit Archie Manning's QB skill or was it just growing up around football? Kobe Bryant definitely inherited his father's stature, which really kind of comes into question. Like, why is it that Kobe Bryant, one of who is known as more of the African-American descent, definitely inherited his father's stature when it was the Peyton Manning and Eli Manning who are from Caucasian origin was did they? It's kind of I mean, the thing with that is stature is more like height and body size. So I don't think you can tell by the way Kobe played compared to Joe Jelly Bean Bryant that Kobe definitely did not inherit his skills because he turned out to be, you know, a lot more successful. But the size thing, I think he probably did, and especially in the environment Kobe grew up in, he definitely did inherit that. I think there's a high possibility he inherited that from his father. Yeah, I see where you're coming from. But I also have the question of, can we really say that genes matter in sports? Like, for example, Muggsy Bogues got shortest player to ever play in the NBA at 5'3". That's not a basketball height, in my opinion, and probably in many people's opinions. As you can see, even if you take Muggsy Bogues and you compare him to Taco Fall, a player who is currently in the G League, Taco Fall hasn't had great success in the NBA, but Muggsy Bogues did. That really comes into question for me as Taco Fall is like 7'6". That really makes me question if your genes really do matter. I think one thing that plays into Taco Fall's lack of success is his lack of a career so far. He hasn't been playing professionally that long, but I believe he's going to end up overseas with how things are going here. When he's overseas, he can be more of a star because he's not facing as much talent. If you compare overseas basketball to American basketball, American basketball is typically better at the higher level just because it's so popular here in America and it's seen as the highest level possible. True. Even the best swimmer ever, Michael Phelps, he has a body built for swim. He's perfect for swim and he's the best swimmer ever. We could really mix that into there and disproving that point and also proving that point. I would say that it sometimes matters, but there are just some few that work harder and I feel like in the end, work ethic over genes in my opinion. Absolutely. I think one sport that it doesn't come into play or it doesn't matter as much is skeleton. On page 49, they talk about the AIS project and women from Australia trying out for the skeleton team and all you needed to do was fit on a sled and be able to sprint. I think really all it came down to for them was sprinting and learning how to do the sport just because they could fit genetically and were built more for that. It said midway through the page, it says, so much for needing a feel for the ice. Suddenly, the initial helpfulness came standoffishness as rival skeleton athletes and coaches realized they stood to be displaced or embarrassed by women they had previously viewed as ranked novices. I think that goes to show that some sports just require better genetics than skills, than overall skills to develop. I see exactly where you're coming from there. I feel like many things count and many things can't. For example, would we exactly say bobsledding? Could that be more of a work ethic thing? I don't believe so. I believe that it's like skeleton. You just have to be able to sprint and fit in the bobsled. If you can do that, you can excel in the sport and be great. I believe there is definitely some technique that comes in and some skill and some work. But overall, is there a supreme amount of skill in that sport? Yeah, I definitely see where you're coming from at that angle. How do you believe that there's a supreme amount of skill? I believe there's a work ethic and there's skills that you have to achieve throughout your experience with those specific sports. But I do not believe that there is a body type or gene that comes into play with those two sports. I could very well be wrong. I don't know enough about skeleton or bobsledding. Just based off of what we've learned from David Epstein from skeleton, I would say that it could definitely be more of a skill-based and work ethic more than a sports gene. I definitely see where you're coming from. The one thing that is making me think, I don't necessarily understand how they could work on the sprinting. But working on the sport, you don't have as fast as the sled is going in both bobsledding and skeleton. As a person, you don't have much control over that. Is it more than just working on being better sprinters, better short distance runners, or is it getting in and out of the sled faster? I would say that it could go for both of those of working on sprinting faster. Even in a documentary that we've watched in our contemporary athletic issues class of Miss Barry, there was a skeleton participator in the Olympics. She had to work on a lot of sprinting and being able to stay on the board correctly. Even skeleton, I feel like that could take a bunch of core work. That could be a lot of working out on your core because you have to stay straight and steady. You really have to work on that core. That's a lot of work ethic that goes into it. If you don't want to work on your core, you're not going to be successful in my opinion. That actually raises a really good point. I did not think about that at all. Thank you for opening my mind to see that. Going back to page 49, one thing that it said, I have a couple of quotes. Jason Golbin, a physiologist at the AIS, which AIS is like Australian Institute of Sport. He said, they told us it's a real feel thing. It's an art. You need time in this sport. The biggest naysayers were really the coaches from other countries. Further on down the page, it said, the AIS scientist chronicled the program's success in an aptly titled paper, Ice Novice to Winter Olympian in 14 months. That builds off the question, did these women have to, did they come in, well, they obviously came in good sprinters. Did they have to build the core strength for those 14 months? Or were they already fairly strong in the core and able to hold themselves well? I mean, when I think that, I think that you really need to work on your core. Because even if you would say you could be born with a so-called strong core already, based off your genes, I feel like you still need to work on that. It may be easier for you to build a stronger core, but you still need to do those core exercises to really get that, to get to that point of having that core. So I think that maybe they started it out. They had fun and they had a decent amount or like a moderate amount of core strength to be able to do it. But I would say that they are not nearly as good as they were then as they are now because they have a stronger core now. So they are much better than they were in the past. Absolutely. I see where you're coming from. And I think that really helps to put a lot more things into perspective. It may not be exactly working on technique or like riding the sled all the way through the course. It's more of overall strength and conditioning of your body to keep it, to be able to participate in the sport. Exactly. Yeah. I think with every sport that you do, it's going to take some technique and probably some practice. And in the end, I feel like there could be both of a sports gene, but in the end, I do think that it takes much more work ethic. In the end of the day. Absolutely. I mean, I believe that too. If you look at like professional bodybuilders or football players, you don't see them, you know, as athletic and as, well, no, more professional bodybuilders, as big and muscular as they are. That muscle doesn't translate. So I just, it, it goes to show that being strong or having good genetics doesn't automatically make you a great athlete. That it definitely takes time and commitment and just purpose. I believe purpose and passion for what you do to be great. Exactly. And going back to David Edstein's information, I feel like a lot of the points that he brings up in the book is very, there's many points in the book where they can be very untrusted, but I feel like a lot of his information can be trusted in the end. I feel like a lot of his information that was said can be trusted in the end. I feel like a lot of his information that was said can be trusted. Just, he had some points in the book where it just seemed, where it just seemed like it couldn't be trusted. It was mixed information or it was from old sources. Oh, absolutely. But the thing, the thing about these old sources, aren't they, they aren't just some backyard study where it's just some guys doing a random study. They're actual scientists and people who know what they're talking about and who are probably some of the top people in their field of the time to be able to do this test. Yeah, and I see where you're coming from there. But at the same time, we have more and more people that develop over time and more and more research that develops. So to say, like, even we could say, like, even back in B.C. time, we had people that thought that the Earth was revolved around and that's what the research was done, is that scientists believed that at that time and then we evolved and now we realize that we're the one that's orbiting. Yeah. So I feel like our research has developed more and we have more information now and more updated studies to really show off and to be more reliable off of the more recent studies. I just feel like the reason why I didn't choose it is because it didn't match with what he was trying to say in the book. Yeah, it didn't pertain to his point. Yes, exactly. Yeah, I mean, I think that's really all that you can say about it, honestly. Yeah. I don't know what else you want to, what else you can really say is, you know, it's a lot more mindset, it's a lot more mindset than it is anything else and it's also more, I mean, personally, I believe it's more mindset than anything else. Yeah, I feel like it's always mindset over your actual gene. Yeah. Gene, of course, genes play a role. Yes. But it's more mindset. And like all things considered, it's definitely more mindset because you can put your mind to anything and achieve it. So it's all just believing. Exactly. Well, I think that is all the time we have for today. Oh, man. I was having fun. I like this. Yeah, exactly. We'll have to keep on doing more. Keep on doing more. Exactly. So you'll have to see us on our next episode of Minds in Motion and that should be out pretty soon. And what is the next episode? What is our next episode? What is it? We will have to let the fans decide. Fans decide. All right. Sounds good. Makes it a little more fun. Yes, sir. All right. It was good talking to you, buddy. Good talking to you, too. All right. You have a good rest of your day. You too. All right. See you. See you, big guy.