Sam Walker - The Captain Class: The Hidden Force That Creates the World’s Greatest Teams

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 didnt look like I knew what I was getting into, thats because I didnt. This locker room belonged, as fate would have it, to Michael Jordans Chicago Bulls.

Since that March evening in 1995, I have seen Tom Bradys 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 whod 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 120.

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 worlds 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 its 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 explanationswe 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. Theres no big secret to it.

In 2004, I took a leave from my job to write a book about competing in Americas 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 castoffsoddly shaped and sloppily bearded party animals with unconventional skills that other teams didnt value. Behind the scenes I found them to be candid and funny, unpredictable and hopelessly undisciplineda 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 wasnt 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 werent championship contenders.

In early August, however, the Red Soxlike that youth baseball team of mineseemed 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 hadnt 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 didnt 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 Julyand yet somehow the players had pulled together to form a brilliant, resilient whole. I wouldnt call the Red Sox a dynastyit would take them another three years to win a second titlebut out of nowhere, theyd been gripped by a contagion that allowed them to play like every other magnificent team Id observed. What I wanted to know, but couldnt fathom, was