Coach Paul Assaiante (silver, glasses) with his 2004 national champions, a team that was part of the longest unbeaten streak in college sports history. “Most coaches at the first practice of the season ask you what your goals are. I don’t care about your goals,” Assaiante writes. “I want to know what you’re afraid of. What will hold us back? Let’s confront your fears.” Photo: Dick Druckman, courtesy of coach.
While it holds few surprises, this week’s report from the scientists who advise the United Nations on climate change couldn’t be starker. To those who study the effects of the one trillion tons of carbon we humans have moved from where it’s safe, beneath the Earth’s surface, into the atmosphere, where it traps solar energy and fries the planet, it’s clear that we’re beyond the prevention stage and well into the we’re-seriously-screwed phase. To pick just one data point, within this decade we’ll blow right past the 1.5° Celsius rise in global temperature where “irreversible,” compounding effects get locked in; for example, once we’re running that hot, thawing Arctic tundra releases methane gas which traps even more heat which melts glaciers that are the source of drinking water for hundreds of millions of people. Add a new war in Europe over sovereignty, democracy, and, yes, fossil fuels, and it’s easy to despair, or swing into reckless abandon. Party on, dude, for tomorrow we’re toast.
On days when I struggle with this manic response (a.k.a., my polar disorder), I harken back to a story I first read twelve years ago. It’s a story from, of all things, the world of squash—the sport, not the vegetable. It’s almost too cinematic to be believed, and hinges on the winningest coach in college sports history advising his star athlete to play as if he’s already lost. Sounds like a stretch, I admit, as in, what does an obscure sports championship have to do with “we’re all gonna die”? Hear me out.
On February 22, 2009, the men’s squash team from Trinity College, in Hartford, Connecticut, faced Princeton in the finals for the national championship. At stake is not only the championship, but the longest unbeaten streak in college sports. Led by coach Paul Assaiante, the Trinity men’s squash team begins the day having not lost a single team match since 1998. Again, it’s 2009. For eleven straight years, Trinity has squashed the big-name, well-endowed Ivies at their own game.
Naturally, no one at Trinity wants to be the one who ends the streak, but it soon appears that this honor will fall to Manek Mathur, a senior from Mumbai, India, and the team’s captain, who finds himself losing badly to Princeton freshman Chris Callis. Mathur is down two games to one in a best-of-five set, and Callis has won the third game 9-0. Callis can taste blood. Mathur is too nervous to sip Gatorade.
“Listen, the match is probably over,” Coach Assaiante tells Mathur, sitting on the bleachers outside the court before the fourth game. “But at least lose while being Manek. You aren’t playing like Manek Mathur. Samurai, Manek, Samurai.”
Samurai is the code word Assaiante and his assistant coach James Montano hit upon to help Mathur “stop worrying about results, about the streak, about the score,” Assaiante writes in Run to the Roar, his terrific 2010 book co-authored with James Zug. “Samurai warriors in ancient Japan would fight freely once they accepted defeat. Manek is going to lose. Callis is starkly outplaying him; there is no doubt. But relieved of the burden of winning, Manek can now play with freedom in this final game. He can play his game.”
If you’ve seen movies like The Last Samurai, the Tom Cruise picture Assaiante sometimes watches with his athletes, some of this ethos is likely familiar. It owes largely to an earlier book, Bushido: The Samurai Code of Japan. First published in 1905, and written by Inazō Nitobe, the essays in Bushido present the Samurai to Western readers as an analog to knighthood. While criticized for some historical inaccuracies, Nitobe cites multiple sources, some a thousand years old, to support that these warriors cultivated courage in the face of death and shared a “best of enemies” respect for those they fought.
Mind you, there was more to Assaiante and Mathur’s exchange on the bleachers than mythic valor. By urging him to play “his game,” Assaiante is reminding Mathur of the second of the two things he tells all his athletes they alone have control over: the effort they put in, and how they feel about it. Even in a hard loss, you can feel great about how you played. Also, Assaiante is sharing responsibility for the probable loss, telling Mathur to abandon their game plan.
“I really screwed that one up,” Assaiante reflected on the phone last week. “Going into that match, I thought I’d do this masterful job as his coach by picking apart his opponent’s game. But the adjustments I asked him to make neutralized Manek’s natural strengths.”
Back on the court, Mathur focuses on making plays he loves to make. Soon the daring lefty is winning more volleys, more points—“not playing perfectly,” Assaiante observes, “but happily.” As I’m sure you’ve guessed, Mathur wins game four, then the match. Much more recently, Mathur and Callis joined forces as the first-ranked pro men’s doubles partners in the world.
Releasing on the outcome, playing your own game, playing for the memory of how it felt—this is what I urge for anyone dismayed by climate change; or, at least, this is what helps me. If there were a climate Jumbotron in the sky, we’d look up only to confirm what we already know: we’re getting our asses handed to us, and, worse, we’re beating ourselves with unforced errors. But we still have a choice. We can give in to the moment, or we can change the two things we have control over: the effort we put in, and how we feel about it.
Obviously, there is no final score for climate, one where we’re safe, the other extinct. So we’re blowing past 1.5° Celsius. We may have to release on that. But it still matters—and matters a lot—whether we let it rise by 1.8° or 2.0° Celsius. Those additional 0.2 degrees, the science tells us, wipes out all the remaining coral reefs and, along with them, one quarter of all marine life on Earth. It’s also the difference between a few million people displaced and as many as 140 million people losing their homes. There is still a point to climate action: to limit the suffering.
Let’s play our game. We must model, because it’s true, that the choices we make to reduce our carbon pollution also improve our quality of life, the way eating less red meat reduces abuse of factory farm animals, the risk of a heart attack, and greenhouse gas emissions. Win, win, win.
Let’s play our game, even in the face of war. Bill McKibben, who has been on the climate beat since the late seventies, had another great idea just this weekend: have President Biden invoke the Defense Production Act “to get American manufacturers to start producing electric heat pumps in quantity, so we can ship them to Europe where they can be installed in time to dramatically lessen Putin’s power.” Let’s starve the oil and gas dictators of their dirty money with renewable energy. Heat pumps for peace!
Let’s play for the memory of how it feels. Let’s keep getting out on the trail, into the waves, on the lake at dawn, so we’re reminded of what it’s all for. What Edward Abbey had in mind when he advised to “save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it.”
Like messing about in the backcountry, climate hacks can lead to new friendships, enliven old ones, and build community. Our friend Paula recently took on replacing the gas motor on one of our rowing coach’s boats with an electric one. She’s been struck by the amount of people—from rangers at the lake to engineer scullers and solar panel companies—pitching in to make it happen. She’s experiencing a modest version of what Christine E. Nieves Rodriguez writes about in her essay for All We Can Save by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine Wilkinson, about the way neighbors in Puerto Rico came together in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.
“When everything collapses—no ATMs, no water, no food, no diesel, no communication—you have to tap into a preexisting system of trust and dignity and reciprocity,” Nieves Rodriguez writes. “When disasters happen, the person right in front of you is your best chance at survival. That’s when we understood: The times we will be facing are going to require us to recognize that the most important thing around us is community.”
Paul Assaiante would call that teamwork. “The single quality necessary for success,” the winningest coach ever told me, “is resilience. But to be resilient you must fail. We all must rise from something.”
Samurai, friends. Samurai.
P.S. Though the readers of this newsletter are yet modest in number (“tens and tens subscribers” as I recently boasted to a book publicist), they’re awesome. To help me realize my daydream of plugging inactive, leaky oil wells (“A Hole Is To Plug”), a few wrote to say they’re buying carbon offsets from the Well Done Foundation; a cartographer from my Bloomberg Businessweek days made short work of confirming all the idle wells on my Lake Casitas commute; another got in touch about a device we could use to sniff out leaks; and a lawyer (thanks, Hope!) offered to work pro-bono on permitting. We’re going to plug a well, people, just you wait.
That was a good one, Brad. Thanks for writing it. I'm thankful for something that helps me see beyond the throw-up-your-hands desolation that the climate situation puts me in.
This is not related to climate, the part about squash reminded me of it, but I don't know if you saw this great article about Gregg Popovich and CalTech from last year. You might enjoy it: https://www.latimes.com/sports/story/2021-03-25/gregg-popovich-pomona-caltech-losing-streak-spurs.
Brad, another great piece! We are looking forward to working with you and the team!