Apparently, I’m the last person to read this conversation between Malcolm Gladwell and Bill Simmons. In my favorite part, Gladwell and Simmons talk about what makes greatness and why Phil Mickelson will never beat Tiger Woods:
Gladwell: As for your (very kind) question about my writing, I’m not sure I can answer that either, except to say that I really love writing, in a totally uncomplicated way. When I was in high school, I ran track and in the beginning I thought of training as a kind of necessary evil on the way to racing. But then, the more I ran, the more I realized that what I loved was running, and it didn’t much matter to me whether it came in the training form or the racing form. I feel the same way about writing. I’m happy writing anywhere and under any circumstances and in fact I’m now to the point where I’m suspicious of people who don’t love what they do in the same way. I was watching golf, before Christmas, and the announcer said of Phil Mickelson that the tournament was the first time he’d picked up a golf club in five weeks. Assuming that’s true, isn’t that profoundly weird? How can you be one of the top two or three golfers of your generation and go five weeks without doing the thing you love? Did Mickelson also not have sex with his wife for five weeks? Did he give up chocolate for five weeks? Is this some weird golfer’s version of Lent that I’m unaware of? They say that Wayne Gretzky, as a 2-year-old, would cry when the Saturday night hockey game on TV was over, because it seemed to him at that age unbearably sad that something he loved so much had to come to end, and I’ve always thought that was the simplest explanation for why Gretzky was Gretzky. And surely it’s the explanation as well for why Mickelson will never be Tiger Woods.
Simmons: On Mickelson and Sports Lent, I remember watching one of those 20/20-Dateline-type pieces about him once, and he was adamant about remaining a family man, taking breaks from golf and never letting the sport consume him … and I remember thinking to myself, “Right now Tiger is watching this and thinking, ‘I got him. Cross Phil off the list. This guy will never pass me.'” The great ones aren’t just great, they enjoy what they’re doing —