Carroll gave up fear long ago. He gave it up the way people give up carbs. Fear now has no part in his daily life. Fear is like an old, distant friend. They know each other well, talk once in a while, but they’re not close like they used to be.
In meetings, practices, pregame talks, fear is Carroll’s theme. “That’s what we’re all about,” he says, lying back on the leather sofa in his office one night. “Our entire approach is to come to the point where we have the knowing that we’re going to win. There’s nothing to stop us but ourselves. To do that is to operate in the absence of fear.”
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These are some of the things Carroll doesn’t do:
Eat.
Drink.
Sleep.
Pee.
Vacation.
Think negative.
That is, I haven’t seen him do any of these things, not the way most people do them, with regularity. I, however, do all these things, sometimes at the same time, and following Carroll around, therefore, doing everything he does, not doing anything he doesn’t do, I’m always hungry, tired, thirsty, and need to find a men’s room. He pushes me to the limits of my endurance, until I’m barely able to function.
After we’ve spent the night cruising South-Central, after Carroll has catnapped on the floor of his office, I expect to find him exhausted the next morning. I want to find him exhausted. Instead he looks as if he’s slept ten hours, eaten a heart-healthy breakfast, then enjoyed a 90-minute deep-tissue massage.
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When he’s not helping them conquer their fear, Carroll is preaching to his players about fun. He urges them, if they do nothing else, to have fun, because fun is a natural antidote to fear and a prime motive for most of the things we do.
People who know him best invariably seize upon fun to describe Carroll, either saying it’s fun to be around him or that he’s forever having fun. His emphasis on fun comes mainly from his DNA but also from his reading, specifically W. Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis, a 122-page book with a cult-like following. (The latest edition features a foreword by Carroll.) Using tennis as a prism through which to view all human endeavor, Gallwey says we focus too narrowly on results. “The three cornerstones of Inner Game,” he tells me, “are Performance, Learning, and Enjoyment . Usually people put Performance first, and Learning and Enjoyment are almost absent.”
If we focused more on Enjoyment and Learning, Gallwey says, we’d perform better and we’d be a lot happier: “You look at a child. He learns while he plays. Anything he tries to do, or win at, he’s playing, he has a wonderful time doing it. They’re not separate things for a child. That means to me these things are inherently built into human beings. Most human beings, you have to coach what’s already inherent—that is, the drive of excitement to learn and keep learning, and the drive to enjoy. It gets really covered up when winning is everything. I agree with Lombardi: Winning is everything. It’s just what your definition of winning is.”
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Shortly before arriving at USC, Carroll sat down and drew up three rules, three basic imperatives that are central to his view of coaching. The three rules are among the first things a freshman learns when he steps on the USC practice field. The three rules must be memorized, internalized, or the player is out. The three rules are:
1. Protect the team.
2. No whining. No complaining. No excuses.
3. Be early.
No matter how many times I add them up, the three rules look to me like five rules. I feel like a malcontent, a contrarian, for raising the point, for even noticing, but I can’t help it.
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Carroll stumbled on a concept called “Long Body,” a way the Iroquois thought of the tribe. One feels pain, all feel pain. One triumphs, all triumph. Long Body. He began applying this idea to football. “Things were occurring,” he says. “I didn’t know—I had a meeting with players and coaches, and I was telling them about this Iroquois concept. Connection of the tribe. They live together, they hunt together. They become one. So I’m telling them about this concept—this is really far out—and I say, ‘As we go through this camp, go through this season, we’re going to get so close, we’re going to connect in this true fashion. Long Body. It’s going to take us to places we’ve never been before.’ And at the end of my talk I say, ‘As we get through it, I’ll explain it more to you, and I know this to be true so much right now that thunder will strike—’”
At that moment, Carroll says, he struck a table with his fist and a clap of thunder shook the building.
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Something about the discipline of writing every day made him look inward, a thousand miles inward. A logjam loosened; the universe got clearer. Eventually it all came pouring out, his principles, his beliefs. He wrote and wrote, page after page, caught in the grip of inspiration. He laid out the Carroll Doctrine, a battle plan, a battle cry, a manifesto, stressing the value of Fun, Competition, and Practice in helping athletes “self-actualize.” In other words, know themselves. An athlete who knows himself, Carroll says, is unstoppable. The Soul is the Zone that every athlete must strive to enter. Before a big game, Carroll is likely to remind his players to be themselves. “Be who we are. Don’t make shit up, ever!” He says this to his men before their game against Nebraska, a street fight in which they put 49 points on a stunned Husker team that thought it had improved.
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it’s perfect that Heritage Hall sits 20 feet from USC’s music school. Whenever Carroll walks to or from practice he passes through a wall of music.
Not music, actually, but scales, exercises. Students sit outside at all hours, rehearsing on their cellos and oboes and French horns. They unwittingly provide a sense of perpetual overture and underscore a central tenet of Carroll’s coaching—practice, practice, practice.
“One thing I’ve learned, which I was taught a long time ago but didn’t grasp at the time, is the power of practice,” Carroll says. “The discipline that comes from practice, that allows you to transcend the early stages of learning and take you to a point where you’re freefloating and totally improvising. Through the discipline, the repetition, you become free.”
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23 Reasons Why a Profile of Pete Carroll Does not Appear in This Space, LA Magazine 12.07
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