Alan Black:
Considering Sir Alex Ferguson, sports psychologists and motivational methods for some of the top teams.
Sir Alex Ferguson, soccer’s most successful coach, now retired, recently recalled the story of his favorite schoolteacher, Ms. Thomson, who whacked him regularly.
Belting across the palms with a leather strap called a “tawse” was the preferred form of discipline in Scottish schools until the ’80s, when the European Court of Human Rights intervened, leading to a ban on the practice. Scotland’s future was to be put in softer hands, a replacement for the hardened calluses of the industrial past of which Fergie was a product. He worked in a shipyard as a youth.
After the teacher’s death, she bequeathed her tawse to Fergie, loaded with a history of agony of which the Manchester United coach was a part. He was grateful, keeping it in his study, thankful to her for teaching him the meaning of pain and its measure to discipline. They kept in touch throughout the years.
Being Scottish, I, too, own a tawse, the eBay purchase being a physical reminder of the searing moment of humiliation when the belt crashed down. The effort to keep the upper lip stiff in front of the class, for the execution was a public affair. One of my high school soccer coaches, balefully named Mr. Bone, carried his tawse over his shoulder and was said to have savagely belted benches in the locker room before games to stiffen the spines of his players.
Fergie never used his tawse on wayward soccer stars, but he demanded discipline and obedience to his authority. He was famous for “his hairdryer,” a verbal bollocking for those who crossed him or played poorly; couple it with an impulse to lash out. Fergie once fired a cleat across the locker room and split open David Beckham’s carefully manicured eyebrow.
Open the debate. Is aggression linked to censure really the way to win? Fergie’s team, Manchester United, has been suffering losses since his departure after last season. New coach David Moyes did not arrive with the type of authority Fergie had engineered. Ferguson’s players played for him, not each other, his disciples fiercely loyal to “the father figure,” the great teacher. What chance does Moyes have to succeed in the shadow of the hard school? Perhaps Fergie should lend him his tawse and he can start whacking benches in the Manchester locker room.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in England, it was announced a shrink would be on hand to offer therapy on the couch to England’s players at the World Cup this summer. Quivering in their beds, shaken by nightmares of terrible beasts chasing them through the streets of London before being placed in the stocks and having rotten cabbage thrown at them for yet another failed campaign. It’s tough being English. The nation waits to win another World Cup — 1966 was so long ago. Mick Jagger looked like a boy with extraordinary lips, the Beatles had bowl haircuts, Syd Barrett was dropping acid in Pink Floyd. And the Queen handed the World Cup to an Englishman. Her Majesty is pushing toward 90 — what a present the World Cup would make for the lady. And the knighthoods would be conferred on coaches, players and maybe even the shrink. Bay Area stop: San Francisco gets a chance to give a patriotic send-off to the national team May 27 before the men head to Brazil for their World Cup opener against Ghana on June 16. The U.S. will play Azerbaijan at Candlestick Park, perhaps the last chance for the old stadium to raise a roar. Consider U.S. Soccer’s choice of the city as a booster stop on the road to the finals — acknowledgement that the Bay Area will be a hotbed of World Cup fever.