Is there a recipe for being great?
Wayne Gretzky once said, “You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.” Relentless drive is just one of the intangibles that interests director Gabe Polsky in his documentary “In Search of Greatness,” an insightful and entertaining film opening in the Bay Area on Friday, Nov. 2. Packed with clips, the film features former 49ers wide receiver Jerry Rice, soccer great Pelé and, of course, Gretzky, a.k.a. The Great One, front and center.
Those three sat down with Polsky (director of “Red Army,” about the Soviet hockey team), but the documentary also zigs and zags all over the playing field, with Tom Brady, Rocky Marciano, Muhammad Ali, Venus and Serena Williams, John McEnroe, Dick Fosbury (originator of high jumping’s “Fosbury flop”), and even David Bowie, the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix making appearances. The idea is to discover the secrets behind their genius.
As you might imagine, drive and talent are huge components of greatness — be it sports, music or whatever — but it’s not that simple. Creativity and a desire to do things differently might be the biggest X factor. Rice, Gretzky and Pelé all say they benefited from an unstructured environment, and the film makes the case that today’s obsession with youth sports, where promising athletes are in a structured pipeline from an early age, might be suffocating talent.
“If you take 10 kids to a pond today and say ‘OK, go play,’ they wouldn’t know what to do,” says Gretzky, who scored the most goals in NHL history. “They’re so structured now. They’ve lost the creativity and the imagination that we had in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s.”
Rice, who has the most touchdowns scored and receiving yards in NFL history, said he didn’t even play football until he was a sophomore in high school, “because my mother thought it was dangerous.”
What made them great was that once they discovered their passion for their sports, they were not just dedicated but willing to explore their own ideas and not adhere strictly to accepted techniques. “My speed and power wasn’t going to get me to the next level,” Gretzky says. “My wisdom and creativity would get me to the next level.”
These are what Polsky identifies as “paradigm shifters.” The Fosbury flop, which Fosbury popularized while winning gold at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, revolutionized the high jump. McEnroe’s constant harping at officiating actually changed the way tennis is judged. When Hendrix unleashed his heavy metal version of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” he showed the national anthem was open to improvisation.
Obviously, sports fans will get the most out of “In Search of Greatness.” But there are self-help tropes for everyone.
“If you’re going to be successful, you have to believe in yourself,” says Glen Sather, Gretzky’s coach during the Edmonton Oilers’ dynasty of the 1980s. “Because no one else will.”