After Kentucky’s drubbing of West Virginia last night, John Calipari expressed a tidbit of his coaching philosophy that a whole bunch of Kentucky fans wouldn’t necessarily approve: He doesn’t want his team playing angry.
Most sports journalists focused on Calipari’s “you have to step in the ring, we’ll lift the rope, you’ve got to come in here” quote concerning West Virginia’s players’ trash-talking in the media. However Mike DeCourcy of Sporting News reported Calipari following up that quote with thoughts on playing angry:
“I don’t want my team playing angry, I don’t want them to be mean, nasty, hateful, I don’t want that. It’s not us against the world. It is play with joy and love of the game and love of each other. That wins every time. The other stuff turns to fear. When it’s not going good and you’re mad and you’re trying to elbow and all of a sudden you miss a shot, your physiology is real close to fear. They may have said we wanted to win by 50, but they won because they were focused on how we had to do.”
I think it’s fair to say that many coaches and fans equate playing angry with winning. You must be tougher than your opponent, fight your opposition and take the game personal. As extensions of fans’ passion, teams are expected to “hate” the opponents just as much as the fans hate the opponents. (Personally, I’m not immune from these feelings, given how hard I go at IU).
Calipari is saying that a player’s anger doesn’t improve the player. Anger causes mistakes because it distracts the player from the ultimate goal of winning. Calipari isn’t decrying passion since he spends time nearly every game screaming at his team when they make mistakes. His screaming is focused what his player is doing and how that player can improve, not on the opponent. He wants his players focused on enjoying the challenge presented to themselves and their teammates and finding strength in each other.
It’s a twist of an old Jedi saying: “Anger leads to fear. Fear leads to hate. Hate leads to losing.”
