Table Of ContentPRAISE FOR THE CAPTAIN CLASS
“The best business book of 2017 on leadership.”
—strategy+business
“The Captain Class is an awesome book. I find myself relating a lot to its
portrayal of the out-of the-norm leader.”
—Carli Lloyd, co-captain, U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team
“The Captain Class really resonated with me. It will absolutely be part of my
thought process as we continue to build our roster. Several of our players,
coaches, and other executives are reading it too.”
—Ryan Pace, general manager, Chicago Bears
“A well-told book about leadership, one that intelligently masquerades as a book
about sports.”
—Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times
“I couldn’t agree more with the premise of The Captain Class. Every elite team
and fighting unit I’ve seen in the military that has displayed consistent
excellence over time has a leader like Sam Walker describes. I wouldn’t be
surprised if the book develops a wide following throughout the military.”
—Jason R. Armagost, U.S. Air Force Brigadier General
“A remarkable book, one that articulates much of what you feel about great
teams but have been afraid to express.”
—David Walsh, The Sunday Times (UK)
“The Captain Class is the best book I’ve read this year. A player’s raw athletic
ability and their fitness for leadership are distinct and separate things.”
—Mike Dunlap, men’s basketball coach, Loyola Marymount University
Copyright © 2017 by Samuel Walker
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC,
New York.
Random House and the House colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of
Penguin Random House LLC, in 2017.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Walker, Sam (Columnist), author
Title: The captain class : a new theory of leadership / Sam Walker.
Description: New York : Random House, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016054597| ISBN 9780812987072 (paperback) | ISBN 9780399591198 (international
ed.) | ISBN 9780812997200 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Coaching (Athletics) | Sports teams. | Leadership. | BISAC: SPORTS & RECREATION /
Sports Psychology. | BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Leadership. | PSYCHOLOGY / Social Psychology.
Classification: LCC GV711 .W28 2017 | DDC 796.07/7—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/
2016054597
Ebook ISBN 9780812997200
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Mary A. Wirth, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Pete Garceau
Cover photographs: Tom Brady (Jim Rogash), Tim Duncan (Ronald Martinez), Carla Overbeck (Bob
Thomas), Carles Puyol (David Ramos), Bill Russell (Neil Leifer), Yogi Berra (Bettmann), Jack Lambert
(Tony Tomsic) (all photographs via Getty Images)
v5.2_r1
ep
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Prologue
Part I: Greatness and Its Origins: The Birth of a Freak Team
Chapter One: Alpha Lions: Identifying the World’s Greatest Teams
Chapter Two: Captain Theory: The Importance of “Glue Guys”
Chapter Three: Talent, Money, and Culture: Alternative Explanations
Chapter Four: Do Coaches Matter? The Vince Lombardi Effect
Part II: The Captains: The Seven Methods of Elite Leaders
Chapter Five: They Just Keep Coming: Doggedness and Its Ancillary
Benefits
Chapter Six: Intelligent Fouls: Playing to the Edge of the Rules
Chapter Seven: Carrying Water: The Invisible Art of Leading from the Back
Chapter Eight: Boxing Ears and Wiping Noses: Practical Communication
Chapter Nine: Calculated Acts: The Power of Nonverbal Displays
Chapter Ten: Uncomfortable Truths: The Courage to Stand Apart
Chapter Eleven: The Kill Switch: Regulating Emotion
Part III: The Opposite Direction: Leadership Mistakes and
Misperceptions
Chapter Twelve: False Idols: Flawed Captains and Why We Love Them
Chapter Thirteen: The Captaincy in Winter: Leadership’s Decline, and How
to Revive It
Epilogue
Appendix
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
By Sam Walker
About the Author
My ego demands—for myself—the success of my team.
—BILL RUSSELL
PROLOGUE
The first time I stepped through the looking glass into the private sanctum of a
professional locker room, I had just turned twenty-five. I had a notebook
jammed into the back pocket of my college khakis and a press credential looped
around my neck. If I didn’t look like I knew what I was getting into, that’s
because I didn’t. This locker room belonged, as fate would have it, to Michael
Jordan’s Chicago Bulls.
Since that March evening in 1995, I have seen Tom Brady’s Patriots win their
first Super Bowl and mingled with an FC Barcelona team steaming toward a
European soccer title. I have watched cyclists storm up Mont Ventoux at the
Tour de France and been doused with forty-nine-dollar champagne by the New
York Yankees as they celebrated a third straight World Series victory.
For a reporter, all of this was exactly as charmed as it sounds. Every
championship brought with it the guarantee of good play and a generous word
count in the newspaper, not to mention the chance to tell everybody who’d listen
that yes, I was there.
Behind the glamour, however, there was one persistent problem with my
career choice. Every time I watched some group of euphoric athletes collecting
its trophy, I had an intense personal reaction that surprised me. I felt jealous.
Every summer, throughout grade school, I played second base for a
neighborhood baseball team called the Burns Park Bombers. For the most part,
there was nothing remarkable about this team. Our pitching was decent, our
hitting was serviceable, and our coach was a taciturn guy with oversize glasses
who conducted practices with a cigarette bobbing between his lips. We usually
won about 50 percent of our games and played just well enough to earn the
coveted postgame trip to Dairy Queen.
In the summer of 1981, however, something changed. The nose-pickers who
used to let balls roll between their legs started making competent plays. When
hits were needed, hits materialized, and our pitchers threw just enough strikes to
hold the lead. All of us seemed to have escaped the confines of our eleven-year-
old bodies: We floated above the diamond in awe as these children who looked
suspiciously like us transmogrified into a formidable team.
We finished the season 12–0.
What I realized about this glorious experience, years later, is that it had
forever modified my expectations. The Bombers gave me a taste of what it was
like to play on an excellent team, and this had rewired my brain to believe it was
my God-given right to experience the same sensation many times over. As the
years passed, however, it became painfully clear it was not. The 1981 Bombers
were the only championship team I ever played for.
As I started writing about a multitude of sports, and parachuting in to cover
some of the world’s best teams, the memories of that summer kept bubbling up.
Feelings of disappointment and longing took possession of a modest apartment
somewhere at the back of my brain. If it’s true that our lifelong obsessions stem
from seemingly mundane events in our childhoods, then I suppose this is mine. I
ache to be part of a great team.
—
Behind the scenes with these elite groups of athletes, I always paid rapt
attention. I studied how they spoke to one another, noted their mannerisms and
body language, and observed their pregame rituals. When they offered theories
about what made their collaborations successful, I jotted them down in my
notebook. No matter the sport, I always heard the same handful of explanations
—we practice hard, we play for each other, we never quit, we have a great
coach, we always come through in the clutch. More than anything, I was struck
by the businesslike sameness of these groups and by how nonchalantly their
members spoke about winning. It was as if they were part of a machine in which
every cog and sprocket was functioning precisely as intended. “You do your job
so everyone around you can do their job,” Tom Brady once said. “There’s no big
secret to it.”
In 2004, I took a leave from my job to write a book about competing in
America’s toughest fantasy-baseball expert competition. My strategy was to
spend many days and nights with real major-league teams collecting inside
information. The club I followed most closely was the Boston Red Sox.
The Red Sox franchise had a long and glorious history of failure and
heartbreak dating back to 1918, the last time it had won a World Series. The
moment I met them at spring training in February, I found little evidence that this
season would be any different. Despite a sprinkling of stars, the roster was
largely composed of misfits and castoffs—oddly shaped and sloppily bearded
party animals with unconventional skills that other teams didn’t value. Behind
the scenes I found them to be candid and funny, unpredictable and hopelessly
undisciplined—a profile that would earn them the nickname The Idiots.
When Boston fell nine and a half games behind their rivals, the dynastic New
York Yankees, I wasn’t the least bit surprised. I believed my first impression had
been spot-on. The Red Sox were nothing like the dominant teams I had known.
They weren’t championship contenders.
In early August, however, the Red Sox—like that youth baseball team of mine
—seemed to fall under the influence of a spell. The Idiots started playing with
confidence and ferocity, keeping cool under pressure and projecting a sense of
unity and purpose I hadn’t seen in the spring. After clambering back up the
standings and sneaking into the postseason, the Red Sox met the Yankees in the
American League Championship Series and promptly lost the first three games.
Before Game 4, the bookmakers put their odds of survival at 120 to 1. They
would come within three outs of being eliminated.
Yet the Red Sox didn’t fold. They not only battled back to win Game 4 in
extra innings, they defeated the Yankees three more times, capping the most
dramatic postseason comeback in baseball history. Next came the World Series,
where they swept the St. Louis Cardinals four games to none.
To Bostonians, who had endured one of the severest dry spells in sports
history, this championship felt like deliverance. Three million people jammed
the streets for a victory parade. There was even talk in the sports world that these
Red Sox deserved a place among the greatest ballclubs of all time.
Here was a team that had been left for dead in July—and yet somehow the
players had pulled together to form a brilliant, resilient whole. I wouldn’t call the
Red Sox a dynasty—it would take them another three years to win a second title
—but out of nowhere, they’d been gripped by a contagion that allowed them to
play like every other magnificent team I’d observed. What I wanted to know, but
couldn’t fathom, was why this happened. What provided the spark?
—
