While the other teams were reviewing missed tackles and dropped balls, Landry instead focused his players’ attention on their wins, however minor. He combed through footage of previous games and created, for each player, a highlight reel of where that player had done something easily, naturally, and effectively. He reasoned that while the number of wrong ways to do something was infinite, the number of right ways, for any particular player, was not. It was finite, and knowable, and the best way to define and know the right way was to look at those plays where the player had done it right.

How do you go about making viewers in College Station, Texas, care about the Michigan vs. Ohio State matchup? A twenty-nine-year-old named Roone Arledge, whose previous responsibilities primarily involved assigning crews to cover baseball, boxing, and football games, wrote a memo suggesting ways to improve the coverage of college football games.

Arledge saw ample room for improvement. Sportscasters typically set up their cameras, focused on the field, and waited for something to happen in front of them. They ignored everything else—the fans, the color, the pageantry. “It was like looking out on the Grand Canyon through a peephole in a door,” Arledge said.

The memo was three pages long. It discussed camera angles, impact shots, opening graphics. The heart of the memo, though, was a new way of engaging viewers who might not ordinarily care about a college game in Corvallis, Oregon. The trick, Arledge said, was to give people enough context about the game so that they’d start to care.

“I knew from what happened to my father and what I’d seen on television that a career in sports didn’t last forever. Athletes have a small window of time to work with their body. And injuries don’t care whether you are young or old. The important thing was that if running didn’t work out for me, I would at least have a diploma from a respected university that would help me get a job. That would be my future, I decided, but for now, I had to get faster.

PART 3: The Secret of Our Success

9: Better at Everything

“Abrahams employed a personal coach, Sam Mussabini, before his 1924 Olympic victory. This was regarded as almost tantamount to cheating, but today even club runners benefit from extensive coaching, better diet and nutritional guidance, and from the advice of friendly competitors. Bolt runs 10 per cent faster and Kipchoge 50 per cent faster than the earlier winners in their events. These improvements in productivity have been observed in an activity whose essential character has remained unchanged for thousands of years. Mussabini could train Abrahams to win Olympic gold but could never have run the race himself; Abrahams could run faster than any man alive but had no understanding of sports mechanics. The combination was more powerful than either alone. The power of combinations of capabilities is the secret of our modern athletic prowess. And of our opulence.