Emotion and Execution In Sport

“Among the Lakedaemonians, it is considered a matter of indifference of whom and in what the enemy consists. The Spartans are schooled to regard the foe, any foe, as nameless and faceless. In their minds it is the mark of an ill-prepared and amateur army to rely in the moments before battle on what they call pseudoandreia, false courage, meaning the artificially inflated martial frenzy produced by a general's eleventh-hour harangue or some peak of bronze-banging bravado built to by shouting, shield-pounding and the like. In Alexandros' mind, which already at age fourteen mirrored that of the generals of his city, one Syrakusan was as good as the next, one enemy strategos no different from another. Let the foe be Mantinean, Olynthian, Epidaurian; let him come in elite units or hordes of shrieking rabble, crack citizen regiments or foreign mercenaries hired for gold. It made no difference. None was a match for the warriors of Lakedaemon, and all knew it.”

This quote, taken from Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire, a fictional account of the Battle of Thermopylae, speaks to the professionalism for which the Spartan military is commonly lauded. 

As Pressfield would have it, their skill and high level of execution, not bravado and fury, is what differentiated the Spartans from less professional soldiers. The Spartans did not have to personalize their enemies to artificially create a sense of purpose because the profession of soldiering was intrinsically meaningful. In sport, however, athletes are often celebrated for “playing with emotion” or “playing with passion”, an appealing albeit incomplete narrative. This concept likely resonates with us because like grit, it suggests that the more we care, the better we’ll perform. Athletes who display little emotion during games are often assumed to be disinterested or unmotivated.

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