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Familial Predestination, from Victor Niederhoffer

November 1, 2009 |

6 Comments so far

1. Steve Leslie on November 2, 2009 2:32 am

   I vehemently disagree with your global statement that a bookie and a hot headed father are ideal candidates for directing a child how to win. That is twisted thinking and extremely cynical. For each of your examples I can come up with others that refute your hypothesis. I will give just several from golf Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer. They certainly are winners on and off the golf course.

   An ideal father is one who understands the child personality and works with them accordingly. From many years of coaching I learned that "Its my way or the highway does not work with all kids." John Wooden certainly was not that type of person. Neither is Tony Dungy Tom Landry Marty Schottenheimer, Lenny Wilkins, Red Auerbach, Phil Jackson and many many others. A coach in many ways is a father figure. Many great athletes never had a father to lead them. Babe Ruth is the most famous.

   With respect to calling penalties on yourself and your partner, I assume this is done in the absence of a referee or linesman. You have a duty to uphold the integrity of the game sans referee and umpire. Otherwise it would be cheating. If it is that important to win and cheat to do so then what is the value of winning. There is no right way to do a wrong thing.

   Golf has a well defined honor system due to the nature of the game. If a player commits a foul it is his obligation to call it upon himself. If a player notices a foul by his playing partner he has a duty to uphold the integrity of the game and call said penalty on his opponent. Otherwise this would be nothing less than Sports Anarchy. Professional baseball went through 15 years of blindness with respect to ped's and look at where it brought it to. Nobody values the records of the last 15 years. They are forever tainted by being part of the steroid years.

   West Point had a very famous case when Red Blaik was football coach and found out that a cheating scandal was on the campus. He never hesitated to take the proper measures and dismiss the offenders. There was no place on his team for someone who would cheat in the classroom.

2. Lars Lannerback on November 2, 2009 8:27 am

   I vehemently disagree that sports figures are appropriate role models for proper parenting. Eventually they tend to not be as perfect as their handlers portray them. It is much better to raise children by a set of standards and values that stand on their own so that no celebrity endorsement is neccessary.

3. Pythagoras on November 2, 2009 12:36 pm

   and those without, who are both father and son to themselves..

4. vic niederhoffer on November 9, 2009 1:57 am

   one notes that there is much of the father in the child and that the son was often prone to tank matches for fear of playing in the sun with or without the hair. vic

5. vic niederhoffer on November 9, 2009 1:59 am

   it was loathsome to see stefi hitting the slice bakhand against him in practice in the 60 minutes intervu and one is not surprised by the vigilant reaction of the father after seeing such a weak shot, more appropriate to playing table tennis in the wind than tennis on a hard court. vic

6. douglas roberts dimick on November 11, 2009 2:17 pm

   Métis, Outis, and the Gods

   A week’s pondering of V’s “familial predestination” presents the copia of science, philosophy, and a rather profound listing of experiential anecdotes among those with both the knowledge of and a wisdom in that “thrill of victory and the agony of defeat” as reflective upon these related areas of interest. Here in China, table tennis is a national sport, thus the Reisman reference appears within jurisdiction.

   Marty Reisman: “I succeeded in table tennis because of an accident of birth… I learned very quickly what to do and what not to do while under pressure. Anybody can make great shots when the bankroll is not threatened… I have enjoyed some degree of fame because of the impact I have on the audience as well as on the media… I had ventured to very interesting places during very historical times and had the courage to do whatever was necessary in order to survive or achieve my goal… I discovered, early on, how to play faking a basket case in order to get a bet… Almost immediately, I got into the swing of things, creating the action, excitement and drama, playing money matches four and five hours daily against anybody who cared to wager based on a carefully negotiated handicap for either myself or my opponent. Richard Bergmann, four-time World Champion… was the easiest to play against but the most difficult to beat. Most of all, his desire to win was frightening. As the game went on, he got stronger until it was impossible to hit through his defense or catch him on a drop shot. Alex Ehrlich, a three-time World singles finalist, who, incidentally, survived three years in a concentration camp only because he was spared by the guards who recognized him as the former German table tennis champion, even though he was Polish, once described Bergmann as an “animal.” Such was his reputation for ferocity among his peers… No player past or present has ever matched or come close to Richard’s astonishing record of incredible comeback victories in major tournaments from what seemed to be totally hopeless situations.” (Interview With Marty Reisman: http://www.usatt.org/magazine/01may-june/reisman_interview.shtml).

   Before reading the interview, purview of at least my thoughts on the subject was limited, more analogous to the notion of a condition precedent. There an actor directly or indirectly benefits from a prior performance or event (see http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/condition-precedent.html), likely to be considered a requisite to success – however we care to formulate that domain (?).

   After my first moto at the Waterboro track, commencing my teenager motocross racing years, my father commented in a direct yet nonthreatening fashion that I spent too much time looking behind me (before entering a turn) instead of focusing on the next pass ahead. To this day, his counsel remains in my forethoughts with living life. Was it his power of observation, care as a father for a son, and/or desire to vicariously advance success that impacted my behavior within intended and unintended venues?

   Reference to the formative athletic milieu of Victor’s father caused me pause at Page 14 with the feature article from The Great Debaters. “Literature not only affords the touchstones that intelligent, sensitive, honest, good human beings need, but helps them understand their very life processes…” Notable but for our discourse on Trojan markets?

   See that page’s 1965 picture of Professor Hobart Jarrett with his fellow faculty of the English Department. One might ask: is the environ of any more or less import for the one at the competing center, be it opposite the side of a line, opposed by one, or within a given set of boundaries and cast within a brawl among many with either a finite or approximation of members or teams, when competing, fighting for that goal, the win, reputation, even life itself?

   So now we come to it… or back to it… literary criticism. My limited studies place classical and all subsequent criticism to that origin in mythology where greatness (or championship) is achieved by a proximate causation to “Métis, Outis, and the Gods.” Given our query, one has only to recall how skill, craft, and timing may equate to our personal and collective fortunes, as recorded throughout the ages – as a sampling, see characterization (http://www.shmoop.com/odyssey/characterization.html) and poetics (http://books.google.com/books?id=ghVelzgo40kC&pg=PA34&lpg=PA34&dq=’metis,+outis,+and+the+gods%22&source=bl&ots=bEfedqMVUf&sig=pdvMkC6cegYo1MgIQs8xuegrO-8&hl=en&ei=c8v6SqC_G9OZkQXd18mqCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CB0Q6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=’metis%2C%20outis%2C%20and%20the%20gods%22&f=false) relative to how familial and (non)related considerations are effected (perhaps affected as well, collectively, with time) during victory and defeat.

   Steve’s and Lar’s dissents arise because of how unsatisfactory, incomplete one’s attempts may be to quantify that which the world’s prose is unable to fully account. Estimation should be accorded to how competition as found on and in the courts, public or as a private campaign, is not proven to be bound to some constitution, neither of solely to genetic nor psychological predispositions.

   Skills (human) can be acquired, developed, and then mastered to a certain peer-oriented level of perfection – often with an objective delineation of standards and procedures by licensure or certification. Craft is a subjective recognizance from where a discipline is decreed (as that what is known) to an advancement of greater accomplishment, such as recognized with tribulations of success, usually imbued by association or fraternity, even notoriety.

   Assuming these two components and all inclusive within being equal, our outcomes are reduced to that one consideration (or timing) as highlighted by Reisman on the “ferocity” of Bergmann. How does this notion of the will of a player to triumph become outcome determinative, so considering all other factors assumed equal? How did Professor Hobart Jarrett prevail as one when among the contra-indications of many?

   Cannot it be demonstrated how many if not most victors in sport and champions of competition ascended with little or none of the benefits supposedly afforded by family predestinations?

   Yet the central issue here at commentary is a specific application, being parental: fathering. My father, as his mother died when he was nine years old, was mostly without his father, who remarried and supported the three boys to raise themselves in his absence. As a result, I was sired with little predilection but unquantifiable contributions of familial love until his last breath.

   How do we go about comporting that father-son edifice into a fixed quantity, a known benchmark? Perhaps we do not.

   The import of Reisman’s interview for fathering is perhaps more instructive than one may read as to what comports relative to the will of a son or daughter a la that of the father’s. Diligent, purposefulness, determination, self-discipline, desire, deliberate, discretion, bearing, declaration: all these aspects of one’s will – be it that of the child or the parent – resonates in the ping pong player’s story.

   When consider the very definition (see http://www.thefreedictionary.com/will), a constant found among those variations is the factor of time. As a case in point, whatever attributions in my life may be considered as successes, time was instructive as a result of benefiting from that constant of my father’s love. While for Reisman, there appears another configuration of time to which he partially attributes his success; he allotted both, his lifetime and his time of day, each and every day, to identifying and then seizing upon moments in time where opportunity presented him the possibility of success. And with time, as he developed his skill and craft, time appears to have increasingly awarded him with accumulating victories. Thus, we may conclude that time fathered him from the development of his skill and craft, ultimately to varying points of fame and success.

   Analogous for the ancients, we may say here appear those domains, being human performance and events attributed to that of the gods. For those of us who either are or so inspire to become a father, those gods tell us that the will of the father is representative of time, thereby adding or subtracting to the collective knowledge and wisdom of the son’s (or daughter’s) will to strive as a competitor; however, as such, his will remains the ready servant of that of the child, which, as a calculation, may be characterized as familial predestination, though rarely determinative in individual accomplishment and perhaps as likely to be found as a formidable impediment to success within other aspects of life – perhaps those of greater consequence.

   dr