A grudge gives you focus

For 30 years I've seen athletes use resentment as a fuel for performance. It's effective, but it can also become a bit of a trap.

I was in college, writing for the school newspaper, the first time an athlete told me that he created grudges for the specific purpose of improving his performance.

Of course the 300-pound offensive lineman I was talking to didn’t use those words exactly.

He told me he used to imagine that the guy he was supposed to block had done terrible, terrible things to a family member and/or significant other. I remember him appearing almost sheepish about this. As if he were confessing that he had once ate a half gallon of ice cream in a single sitting, and he then said he no longer resorted to visualizing such extreme scenarios. He just imagined the opponent was coming into his house to steal something.

In the 30 years since, I’ve never encountered another athlete who had described using this particular tactic. However, I’ve had plenty of guys bring up a perceived slight, an actual rivalry or simply the desire to “prove everyone wrong” as something that motivated their performance.

They don’t just harbor grudges, they use them and occasionally create them out of thin air.

I was reminded of this when I read a piece that was published in the Opinion section of the New York Times last weekend:

• Why you need a nemesis

  By Rachel Feintzeig, New York Times

It is a very fun piece, and it points to a fact that is often ignored: Grudges can be useful.

They focus your energy and your attention on a specific task. This can be anything from blocking a 300-pound football player you’ve decided is trying to rob you to proving a very specific critic wrong and winning a game that individual had predicted you would lose.

Michael Jordan’s willingness to employ this tactic became such a recurrent theme in the multi-part documentary that it was more like a running joke.

Here is an incomplete list of people against whom Jordan waged some sort of petty vendetta:

• George Karl for not acknowledging him at a restaurant during the 1996 NBA Finals

• Labradford Smith scored a career-high 37 points against Jordan’s Bulls, and then — according to Jordan — had the temerity to say, “Nice game, Mike.” The two teams played again the next night, and Jordan vowed to match Smith’s 37 points in the first half. He came close, scoring 36 and finishing with 47. Turns out Smith never said, “Nice game, Mike” after the first encounter. Jordan made it up.

• Toni Kukoc for being an object of the affection of Jerry Krause, the GM of Jordan’s team

• Clyde Drexler because some people compared him to Jordan

Here’s a great mashup of all the instances in which Jordan admitted to taking something personal in the multi-part series, “The Last Dance” which I absolutely love.

I covered the Seahawks when Richard Sherman played there from 2011 to 2017, and he was very much the same way. He harbored some very deep-rooted hostility against Jim Harbaugh, who’d been his head coach in college at Stanford. He regularly minimized the talents of some of receivers he faced like A.J. Green and Roddy White. In one particularly comical bit, he changed his Twitter handle to Optimus Prime prior to a game against the Detroit Lions, whose top wide receiver -- Calvin Johnson – was nicknamed Megatron.

I asked Sherman about this tendency to be in conflict with opponents, and he said that whenever he’d eliminated this tension – often at the behest of coaches – he had not played as well.

Now I’m not sure whether Sherman nurtured these grudges because of the motivational fodder he believed they provided or he was a guy who naturally found himself in conflict and this tendency just so happened to confer a motivational benefit.

What I do know is that it absolutely worked for Sherman as it clearly did for Jordan. I think of them as Grudge Monsters in that they are attuned to even the slightest hint of disapproval, which they might be able to use to fuel their performance.

Is there a downside to this?

I’ve certainly seen some evidence of that.

First, the grudge monster tends to be epically sensitive and ready to take the most dramatic and hostile interpretation of anything that is said about them.

Second, I’ve found that people who always seem to be in conflict have a hard time maintaining long-term relationships even with those people who are close to them.

A few months ago, I started wondering whether there was an inherent issue with using grudges or resentment for motivation. I went so far as to develop an analogy: Maybe it was like burning coal or a fossil fuel, and that while it may provide the power you’re looking for, it also produces some emotional pollution. Resentment may be a renewable resource, but it isn’t exactly clean.

I reached out to a couple of sports psychologists to test my little hypothesis. Turns out it wasn’t just my metaphor that was a little clunky.

Brett McCabe didn’t say anything wrong, per se, with using a grudge to fuel performance.

In fact, he said, “it can provide a good kick in the butt.”

The sheer number of athletes and coaches who say they were motivated to prove the doubters wrong is testament to this. The caution McCabe offered was if you sought more than just motivation.

If hoping your resentment-fueled victory will provide a sense of validation or self-worth, well, that can lead to problems. How you feel about yourself — your sense of self-worth — becomes tied to the outcome, and there are tons of reasons that you might wind up losing that don’t have all that much to do with your worth as either a person or a competitor.

But even if you win, the satisfaction that comes from that is unlikely to be as lasting as we think, which means the validation that we (think) comes from that will be fleeting, too.

A grudge can be a good means to get to an end, but if it’s the goal, you risk seeing everything as a zero-sum game.