Sally Jenkins Thinks Losing Is Wonderful

are we going to have to say this novel was written with the help of caffeine and therefore should not be? should not get the the reviews that you get? I started thinking about all the actors who have always acted a little buzzed. Should their awards be disallowed because they calm their nerves with booze, or they opened up their imaginations and they freed their inhibitions by having some booze or smoking a joint and doing a take? Are we going to investigate them and take away their their awards, or should we should?

what about prosthetics? are those performance enhancing? It's all a very strange thing that we do in sport, where we have this idea that there's an objective performance, a clean performance, and I think the problem is with us and our conception of what we think is clean. And I think that'll change. I for one will be, will be out there picketing the Oscars against any kind of prosthetics.

I'm David Duchovny, and this is Fail Better, a show where failure, not success shapes who we are. Sally Jenkins is an award-winning and celebrated sports writer. She's been a columnist and a feature writer for the Washington Post for over 20 years. It's not an understatement. She's been a trailblazer in a male-dominated profession.

She was the first woman inducted into the National Sports Writers and Sportscasters Hall of Fame. Sally's written several books. She's teamed up with some of the most influential figures in sports to help them tell their stories. This includes the legendary basketball coach, Pat Summit and Lance Armstrong, but we start by discussing her latest book, The Right Call what sports teach us about work and life, where she draws upon her decades-long career to deliver practical, real-world advice for all of us. Here's our conversation.

Hi Sally.

you come face-to-face with your own bravery and your own cowardice, and you know, you know, if you choked or not, you know, even if you didn't choke on the outside, you know how you were feeling, and it's it's an amazing, you know face-to-face that you've got to do with yourself, and there's no bullshitting, you know, there's no bullshitting.

on some level, you know, everything is performance, right?

there's so many things that had nagged at me over a 35 year career that I wanted to pull all the threads together, you know, and into the full tapestry.

So my color that I'm using is failure, right? That's my major color for this. whatever it is that we're doing and you know, you have quotes here, for Taylor is the most common experience in the world. Yes. Yeah, and yet we don't.

we don't talk about it. Like it's, like it joins us all. we talk about it. Like it separates us into, you know, a shameful space of loneliness and regret, you know,

It's separating. It's, you know, it's the foundation for all what you might call bullying in the world.

Why is some work not so good? And you have to have a sense of elitism in order to do that.

You know, that's the other side of it, whatever. But I've been collecting thoughts, wisdom, experience for a long time now. And that enables me to have an opinion. And I won't be. you know, you can try to talk me out of it.

I'll listen to your opinion. But I know in my gut and talk about sedimentation again, it's all been swirling around there for many years. When I see bullshit, I know it. When I see sports, when I see a choke, I know it, you know, and you can't really talk me out of it. And my judgment is what I have.

It's a very athletic passage in Tom Stoppard.

Yeah.

Were you? were you into sports yourself through your dad's interest in sports? Was your dad an athlete, your brothers, all that stuff?

And he was away every weekend at at football games. He covered World Cup skiing, Olympic skiing. He covered golf and college football and then pro football.

Really, I'm thinking, right.

in addition to being a sports writer. I was, and so were a lot of other, a lot of other people at the Matt, you know, George Plimpton wrote for the magazine, you know, people like that, people of literary aspiration. And so it was better than the average sports page. It was difficult for for a long time for anybody to compete with Sports Illustrated. It's, it's kind of a tragedy.

what's happened to the brand.

For people that don't know what faces in the crowd was it was at the back of the magazine. I'm thinking they would. they would list like three or four or five young kids, boys and girls, who were, you know, the elite at that age, at whatever sport they were doing. And, as I said, my dream was to be a face in the crowd.

But then as an older person, a more mature person. I think you can feel a certain command of the fundamentals that you lacked as a younger person. that gives you the ability to break them more effectively. So where your younger work can look very sort of raw and vital, but also really really flawed or excessive in some ways, and then your mature work looks has real surgical, can have a real, a real precision to it, a real edge.

He wants to see how the other side is responding to all of that. And he's got this great brain and this great sense of organization. and he and he learns from those things over the course of the game, and they may not look very good at first. But by the fourth quarter, he's got a couple of plays in his hip pocket that he is pretty sure is going to really sting the opposition. And I think that that's something he really had to learn over, you know, 35 years.

I'm on a train and they've lost my luggage dreams.

And so you talk about scaring yourself. clearly, you know, podcasting, whatever interviewing, is new to me and it scares me, you know, even though I'm, I don't feel scared talking to you or whatever. Clearly, my unconscious was like, you're not prepared enough. You know, you shouldn't sleep. You can't sleep.

If you don't sleep, it's going to be screwed up. And I was chasing my luggage. I ended up losing my guitar. I found my luggage, but I lost my guitar. I do not know what any of it means, but I will tell you that I'm scared.

You see tennis players do it. You see a lot of one-on-one athletes do it. And that takes wisdom and restraint, you know, and not coming out and spending it all in the first 30 seconds of the first game, the first set, you know, the wisdom to know that this is a long game we're playing.

It was true of Federer, Nadal, Djokovic. It's true of currently. it was true of Martina Navratilova, Chrissy Everett, you name it. John McEnroe was around 50%. Jimmy Connors was like 51%.

No one does better than 50 to 54%. And when you look at a match, a five set match, you can see that the difference comes down to over five sets of men's, a men's Grand Slam tennis match. The difference comes down to about eight points. So even a guy who's lost a really, really painful match is probably, I mean, Francis Tiafoe the other day was only eight points worse than Carlos Alcarez in their match.

So it takes the ability not to be embarrassed by those losing points and to understand, or by a 6-2 set, in which you may only have lost three crucial points. And tennis players, the great ones, really learn a mental resilience as much as a physical resilience.

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If we go back to your dad and sports writing and you're kind of, you know, you're a young kid or you're a teenager and you're thinking about what am I going to do with my life? Am I going to go into dad's business? Uh, you know, this kind of stuff, get me inside your head at that,

I understood, golf tournaments lasted four days and a football weekend was only two days. Right. So, uh, anyway, but you know, from a very young age, I mean, I think I went to my first us open golf tournament when I was seven, and my first British open when I was seven, we traveled with him in the summers. Uh, so, that meant golf tournaments and, uh, it was fascinating. You know, I, I mean, I literally can remember, uh, my father was doing a feature story on Tom Watson, the great grand slam golf champion, Tom Watson.

And, uh, I was at a tournament in Akron, Ohio and my dad had to go do some work. And so he sat me down in the restaurant at the country club there and said, you know, get yourself a burger. And Tom Watson saw me sitting alone and he and his wife came over and sat down to keep me company. So, I mean, I, I remember having a cheeseburger with Tom Watson, when I was really probably 13 years old. So I, I feel like I've been around athletes my whole life and sort of understood a little bit of their psychology and gotten to know them, some of them well enough to really talk to them and pull the curtain back.

And, uh, with the right call, what I really wanted to do was, was again, you know, pull it all together. There are individual things that I'd noticed and picked up on over the years that my father and I would talk about sometimes. And, um, but I really, I'd never read a book that, that, you know, there's some books about the neurology of sports. There are some books about leadership. There are some books about decision-making.

Um, and, but I'd never seen it all pulled together in one comprehensive picture. And the, one of the things that I really believe is that we waste athletes. We, we waste the learning that we can get from them. We view them as trivial. We view them as, as celebrities who have nothing extremely important to teach us.

They're there to awe us and entertain us, but not especially all the time, teach us. And yet, on some gut level, we really do know that what they're doing is important, because we spend an awful lot of money building stadiums to watch it. And, you know, as someone who's just spent time in Greece, you know, sometimes you'll enjoy this. Like a lot of times, I tell audiences or I tell people, I'm speaking to, look at this from an archaeological standpoint. Someday people are going to look back at our culture and draw conclusions about us based on these really, really large stadiums that they dig up.

And they're going to say, well, we know something about them. We know how much they valued play and competition. And that's true of the Greeks too. That's one of the things we really do know about Greek culture is the importance they placed on competition. And competitive cultures can create genius cultures.

And that's one of the things that in cultural studies, there are such things as genius clusters. And a lot of them come out of highly liberally competitive cultures.

So was there any hesitation or fear about going into the family business?

You write every day. You learn to write on deadline. You learn to beat writer's block. You learn to get it right, to have a sense of accuracy. And he just thought newspaper writing taught really great fundamentals.

Was the notion at some point, I'm going to be a fiction writer and not a journalist? When did that pivot happen?

My dad said, it's a good place to get to know people. It's a large campus at Stanford University. It's a much bigger school than you've ever been around. And I knew a couple people on the school paper already. They were upperclassmen who had interned at Sports Illustrated.

And my dad said, why don't you wander over to the school paper and introduce yourself? And so I started very early. I think my first beat was water polo, which at Stanford was an Olympic sport. We had a lot of Olympians on that team. So it was a great place to cut your teeth.

I applied to a bunch of big papers right out of college and didn't get a job like a lot of kids. And I got laid off very early. I got laid off from my very first job at the San Francisco Examiner after two years of high school football.

It was mortifyingly low work. But I did it to earn a paycheck and lived in a little squalid little studio apartment off of Olympic Boulevard.

Made it clear. He would tell us, you know, I really love my job and you should appreciate that. Because I remember he said it all the time. Ninety nine percent of the people in this world don't like what they do for a living. They do it because they have to.

And if you have a job, if you find a job you like, you're one of the real lucky people on the face of this earth. And so, you know, the first early career reversals, where I was making mistakes and getting laid off, and because I was young and they didn't need me and I wasn't that good. It was just, you know, go back to the fundamentals and learn, learn something, work hard at the job. you don't want to try to get the job that you do. And I spent, I don't know, maybe a year and a half in L.A.

and then a job came open. I was hustling letters to sports editors and stuff and a job came open covering small college basketball up in San Francisco at the San Francisco Chronicle, which was the larger paper in San Francisco. And so I I managed to grab that and was working desk shifts at night. I would I would cover my beat during the day, write a little story and then take a desk shift at night, writing headlines and editing wire copy for Digest and stuff.

Herald. And I spent some time with Diane, some good time. She was a good teacher, too. But in the day to day, my my bosses and my colleagues were were mostly men and desk guys who who had ethic. You know, you had to when you were editing a story or writing headlines, you know, you had to be quick and efficient and make deadlines, even in editing a lot of times under a lot of tension.

And so you couldn't screw up or some horrible typo got in the paper or a garbled headline. And so you had to be really responsible. And they were. they were demanding taskmasters in a very kindly way. And again, they preach the same ethic my dad did.

My dad had been a newspaper man and you it was. it taught responsibility. You were. you were responsible to all these other people and to the overall product of the paper. Your personal error could literally show up in the paper in a very embarrassing way.

Right. That indicted everyone's credibility around you. And you were taught that at 21 years old.

His halftime question and answers are legendary, because they'll say, Pop, what do you need to do in the second half? Score more points.

You're not bullshitting, but also your job and the poor guy interviewing him on the court is to try and get something new.

you've already learned this. There's only one trick in interviewing, and that is authenticity. Like, pure curiosity wins people over. It's the most disarming thing in the world. So the trick becomes, the real trick becomes, how do I ask something?

I am truly curious about that he may be curious about answering?

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It just died about a year ago and I went and saw him before he died, and it was still, when I get around him, I'm his fucking player.

And to act, to care. And to act like I cared. Because I did care. And I was covering that.

I said, look, Pat, I wrote one not very good book before I met you. I wrote 10 after. I mean, she had an effect on me as a young woman.

She only won, I say only, she won eight national championships. 30 years, she went home losing. really hurt her, you know. And she said most people are afraid to say that's the best I can do. That's what she taught me.

And it's amazing how much better you can accept the result when it's that, you know.

And, and, you know, I had a hilarious conversation with her once where I said, Billie Jean, what does it say? What is the Kipling quote that's engraved over the door of Wimbledon? If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same. And she slapped her hand down on the table and said, Kipling is full of shit.

You become risk averse, all of those things. So the truth of the matter is that you can't, I don't think you can learn to win without losing. first, number one. In anything that that's a fundamental thing. that's in this book that athletes teach you and coaches teach you, is that you have to stress.

some stress, something. Any organism only improves under stress, right? It's physiological. You know, let's talk about pressure for a second. Pressure is an actual physiological barrier.

OK, it's not just, I think. when people feel like they're losers or chokers, they feel like they responded to some kind of invisible phantom thing. And that's one of the reasons why it makes them feel so weak. But when you understand information is power and when you understand physiologically what's happening to you under pressure, you really start to find ways to cope with it. So the fight or flight response, which is triggered by pressure, right?

Whether it's a time deadline that I face at the Super Bowl at midnight when the game has been electrifying and I have 60 minutes to write it. and I'm just. I'm exhausted and my day is just is only half over. Right? Or there's the pressure that a Steph Curry feels in the clutch, you know, with a, with a big game on the line.

What happens is your body sets off a series of physiological reactions, one of which is it shunts blood from your small muscle groups to your large muscle groups.

One thing I've become alert to is I can, I can get the score wrong. The most fundamental thing in the story, if I'm not careful, golfers have reported looking at the scoreboard and literally misreading it under pressure down the stretch in a major championship. There's famous examples of that sort of thing happening. It's why, guys, it's why Rory McIlroy can miss a three foot, a slippery three foot putt in the U.S. Open.

Your blood flow is literally moving in an opposite direction from what it was doing five minutes earlier. And so, when you unpack these things, now, there's methods to cope with them. There's simple exercises you can do, from breathing exercises to just pure awareness.

You know, we don't practice like. the perfect example is golf. We all go to the driving range. Right. And we beat balls into the distance at on a perfectly level driving range.

And then we go out on the course and we don't understand why we don't hit the shot we hit on the driving range. There's not a level lie on the golf course. Right. Golf courses. Yeah, they move.

They have all kinds of contours in them. You know, they're not flat.

Actors, you know, it's not on me. I'm just going to be here for you. You know, I'm going to. I'm not even trying anything. I'm just like trying to be a good team player, you know, trying to give to you.

And then, all of a sudden, the camera turns around and it's like, oh, now it's about me. What I do is I try and still make it about you like to get, because those nerves of like, OK, now it's your close up. We've got. you know, we've got three minutes to get this before lunch. You really got to deliver.

That all sucks in terms of like performance. But you can either choose to embrace that and go, fuck, yeah, here we go. This is it. Or you can go, I'm going to play a game with myself where I'm still off camera. I'm still off camera.

somehow. I'm going to just play, you know.

You know, I have to watch stuff all the time for work. And she's like, I don't understand it. I don't understand how they do it. That looks miserable to me. And I say, you know, you don't understand it.

They love it. They're enjoying this. They are. They, even if they look miserable, even if they look miserable, but they do live for it. You know, yeah, they truly do.

Yeah. I mean, that constant test is enjoyable, you know, once you embrace it. And the guy who really personifies that for me right now is is Carlos Alcaraz in tennis. He's so creative with the racket. He's got so many choices and so much feel in his drop shot.

Yeah, the drop shot. And he drives his coaches crazy because he tries these glamorous little drop shots. And one time his coach said when he was a teenager, which was all of two years ago. His coach said, not one more drop shot in this match. I don't want to see you do it one more time.

And literally a point later, like Alcaraz did it again. And he turned around and just shrugged. I couldn't help it. I couldn't help it. You know, he plays with real pleasure in the racket.

That that impinges on a lot of what we're talking about is your experience writing the book with with Lance Armstrong, you know, and then and then finding out that he hadn't been entirely forthcoming. You know, talk about a reversal. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I read the letter that you wrote after, you know, you found out that Lance had been taking the steroids and, you know, that you forgave him.

I knew it was a possibility. We had talked about it over the years. I had said, is there anything you need to tell me? Do you need help telling something to the world?

And, you know, and he said, I'm fine. I mean, I basically like I wouldn't have done the books if he hadn't talked about doping it. And, you know, he was very persuasive and he passed an awful lot of drug tests. And my first question for him, when he finally came clean, was how on earth did you pass all those tests? You know, I mean, I had some fundamental questions because I really had a lot of faith in him.

And, you know, and they were based on the fact that he took thousands of drug tests and had passed them. And so, you know, after the apology, he said something very meaningful. And this is why, you know, I really forgave him. First of all, I had known it was a possibility. And I wasn't stupid, you know, number one, but number two, and I took responsibility.

I got all the benefits of working from Lance Armstrong. I was part of a number one bestseller. I got to go to the Tour de France and watch this extraordinary event. And I really enjoyed his friendship and his dash and his courage. I love.

It's Not About the Bike. It's a book about cancer, not about cycling. And he beat cancer fair and square. So I had no moral qualms about his basic character. And I really find the anti-doping fight very hypocritical and very misplaced by conviction.

And so I didn't struggle with it from that standpoint. What I struggled with was, you know, he should have told me first, right? And I said, you know, if it had come from you, like it came from Andy Pettit, you know, I think the public would have had a whole different approach to you. But the fact that they learned it from someone else, the public is going to feel the way I feel. What bothers me is learning it from someone other than you.

And so we talked about that. And he said, you know, there are all these people who say they're my victims. And he said, and they're not my real victims. He said, a lot of them did a lot of the same things I did. He said, my real victims are the people who believed in me, and you were one of them.

And that was a very meaningful thing for him to say. And I said, well, look, I'm nobody's victim. I'm not your victim either. But I appreciate that apology, you know, because I did believe in him. And my...

Anything like that?

And I don't think that was realistic. You know, when I wrote the books with Lance, I was a freelance writer. And then I had gone to work for the Washington Post. And we had a reporter on the story. And I felt like it was my job to stay out of all that.

I felt like, let our reporters do their work. And I think I may have facilitated a couple of phone calls with him or given somebody some numbers or something. But I was pretty cognizant of sort of staying in my lane, you know. I had been his collaborator on a book. That created a conflict of interest in any investigation of him as a doper.

And so.

. So I didn't... Yeah, I had to unpack some of that stuff. But the main thing I was concerned with at the time... When he finally came forward, I was concerned for him personally.

What it was going to do to him.

But I wonder if he acknowledged that he could have done you damage as a writer.

I mean, he was certainly cognizant of that. But again, you know, I take responsibility for my own status there. I enjoyed all the benefits of working with him. I didn't get rich, you know. I got paid a flat fee.

And it was a handsome one, but it was certainly not a career maker. But I certainly enjoyed... You know, I'd never had a number one bestseller. I mean, I certainly enjoyed a lot of the success of It's Not About The Bike. And enjoyed his friendship.

So it wasn't.

. Again, my issues with him was not... I mean, I felt like I'll put my head down. I'll go back to being a good writer and good reporter and doing my job. And, you know, it's a good humbling experience.

It's a good reminder of.

The Washington Post was great. Don Graham, the publisher of the paper at the time, is a lovely human being. I saw him not to... I mean, I think, within the week at a book party for a colleague. And he grabbed me by the elbow and he steered me into a corner.

And I felt awful for the paper. What I cared about was not my reputation. I cared about whether I'd given any of my colleagues. I cared about the paper.

And Don got me by the elbow and steered me into a corner at this party. And he said, listen, he said, don't ever feel badly about believing in something.

I don't know. I've never felt this badly about the whole experience, as some people want me to.

And quite frankly, I've never really understood. I mean, I don't know how people expect these cyclists to get to the top of an Alp on a bicycle that a car transmission has a hard time getting up.

There's a certain amount of fraudulence in how these things are sold to young athletes. that really pisses me off. You know, they're not.

You know, what we're saying is you're supposed to come to the field with what God gave you. That's what we're saying. Although now, you know, if you have money, you can have a trainer. You know, you can have the best kind of diet. Like.

there are advantages that money can bring. But basically, it's supposed to be your body. So why do we let people wear glasses on the field?

I mean, it's very, very difficult to draw the line. And advanced substances change.

Or coffee. I mean, so the bottom line is the rest of us are allowed to do whatever we need to do to get back to work for one more day. And it's called professionalism. And if we don't do it, we're called...

So I find the entire argument to begin with.

. And by the way, they can't catch... I mean, the entire Chinese swimming team can apparently dope, and the entire Russian weightlifting team can apparently dope. And you can't... The bodies that are mostly catching individual athletes in smaller sports that don't have huge bureaucracy, country bureaucracies behind them.

Yeah. Are the ones getting punished. I mean, there's an insane case in our paper this morning by a great writer named Adam Kilgore, about a brilliant young sprinter who, it appears, probably took a couple of Gatorade recovery cubes that may have been tainted in pictogram amounts by some sort of substance that's on the banned list for some reason. And the kid's suing Gatorade and everyone else in sight, because it's such a draconian system. And so I really hate the whole system.

And so that really underpins.

. And I hated it before I even knew Lance Armstrong. I hated it around Marion Jones. I hated it around Barry Bonds. I loathe the entire system.

I think it's grossly unjust. And one day we'll look back on it the way that we'll look back on Jim Thorpe being stripped of his Olympic medals for the sin of professionalism.

Well, thank you so much for this. My pleasure. It's fascinating.

I was thinking about Sally Jenkins and what an informative conversation it was for me.

I mean, the thing that struck me most is when she said.

. She was complimenting me about the questions I was asking. And she said there was authentic curiosity behind them. Because I think I was asking about, you know, how do you get beyond the rote answers that athletes give or will want to give, you know?

And I started thinking how hard that is when you're interviewing different people. And also that you're not going for any kind of gotcha moment. And I'm not. I could be less interested in that. I realize it gets news pickup or whatever.

And it probably would make this podcast more popular. If I went for those moments. But it's not in my nature. And I'm also not interested. I don't want it.

I do want them to say what they want in a new way. I want them to rethink the rote answers. You know, what I call resting podcast face. There's six million podcasts out there, right?

So most people that I'm talking to, because they're successful and well-known, most of them, have done numerous podcasts, have been asked the obvious questions, and have got their responses. Another thing I was thinking about is, I read somewhere that, you know, we don't actually remember events. We remember the last time we remembered them. We remember the last time we spoke about them. And so if you start doing the math on that, the game of telephone math on that, you've got, this is removed.

once, it's removed twice. Ten podcasts later, you're remembering 12 times you've remembered this event.

You're telling a story at that point. You know, it's fiction. So how do you break beyond that cycle?

There's more. Fail Better. with Lemonada Premium. Subscribers get exclusive access to bonus content. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts.

Fail Better is a production of Lemonada Media in coordination with King Baby. It is produced by Keegan Zemma, Ari Abraci, Donny Matias, and Paula Kaplan. Our engineer is Brian Castillo. Our SVP of weekly is Steve Nelson. Our VP of new content is Rachel Neal.

Special thanks to Carl Ackerman, Tom Krupinski, and Brad Davidson. The show is executive produced by Stephanie Whittles-Wax, Jessica Cordova-Kramer, and me, David Duchovny. The music is also by me and my band, the lovely Colin Lee, Pat McCusker, Mitch Stewart, Davis, Rowan, and Sebastian Modak. You can find us online at Lemonada Media, and you can find me at David Duchovny. Follow Fail Better wherever you get your podcasts or listen ad-free on Amazon Music with your Prime membership.

I'm Sam Smith, and welcome to The Pink House. I love being in The Pink House with you. Join me as I talk to my friends and some amazing queer icons about their idea of home, like Elliot Page, Joel Kim Booster, and Gloria Estefan. Music was always my escape. It was my happy place.

The Pink House from Lemonada Media is out. now. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts.

Get ready to dive into some of the funniest podcasts around with Lemonada Media's comedy lineup. You can enjoy choice words with Samantha Bee as she laughs along with guests while they talk about their sometimes questionable life decisions. Or listen in as Sarah Silverman answers unpredictable voicemails from her fans on the Sarah Silverman podcast. And don't miss Threedom, where Scott Aukerman, Paul F. Tompkins, and Lauren Lapkus hang out, tell stories about each other, and see who can make the other two laugh the most.

And the best part? You can listen to all of these podcasts and more from Lemonada Media on Amazon Music.