REFLECTION
It’s not an exaggeration to say that every great accomplishment I’ve had in my life was the product of teamwork. Whether that team was my family, supporting me in my athletic endeavors as a kid. Whether it was my actual teams at Serra High, Michigan, New England and then Tampa Bay, coming together as a unit to work and fight toward a common goal. Whether it’s my personal team of associates, friends, mentors, and advisers who guide and assist me in my business endeavors. Or now, with my FOX team helping me become a better broadcaster every week. In each case, the success I achieved was never mine alone. As Arnold Schwarzenegger would say, you can call me anything you want, just don’t call me a self-made man.
During this year’s Ryder Cup, we saw different brands of teamwork on display, with varying degrees of success and impact. On Friday and Saturday, the teamwork of the Europeans resulted in both exceptional, complementary golf and strong camaraderie that helped them race out to a huge lead and endure a rowdy pro-USA gallery around nearly every tee box and green.
On Sunday, in the singles matches, the Americans led the way for each other. Each guy gave the guy playing behind him something to aim at, something to aspire to. They showed each other what was possible on each hole, each shot even. And the result was a near miraculous comeback, with only one lost match.
The ebbs and flows of this year’s Ryder Cup, as well as its final outcome, are a testament, at least in part, to the power of the team. The more often, and more consistently, you can work together, the more likely you will be to find success—especially against equal or superior talent.
LESSON
This begs the question: what does good teamwork look like? In my opinion, it has a few different faces.
First, it looks like every person doing their job, and doing it consistently well, so that teammates don’t have to worry about them. When teamwork is on point, your teammates know where you’re going to be and you know where they’re going to be. As a result, you can focus 100% of your energy on your own job instead of expending some portion of your energy worrying about theirs. This was one of the things that made playing with guys like Wes Welker and Logan Mankins so enjoyable. I never had to worry about them and they never had to worry about me. We trusted each other to do our jobs on each play, in every practice or game, and we won a bunch of games because of it.
Good teamwork also looks like going the extra mile. Doing the extra rep. Watching an extra hour of film. It’s doing things right, and always working to get better. When enough people on a team do this, it doesn’t just set an example, it sets a standard of excellence. And usually, that translates to success. In the pros, I was a psycho when it came to prep. I did everything to 100%. It was an example I wanted to set, because it was how I got in the league and how I got my shot as a starter. Eventually, my example became the standard for our team, especially on the offensive side of the ball. As Drew Brees said the other day on the FOX NFL pregame show when asked about his late night film sessions, you have to “earn the right to win before you step on the field.”
Perhaps most importantly of all, good teamwork looks like camaraderie. It looks like supporting each other physically, mentally, and emotionally to be the best each of us can be. That doesn’t mean you have to be best friends with everyone on your team, or everyone you work with, or even everyone in your family. It just means you have to find common ground and common cause—usually through your values and your goals—-and then commit to each other, 100%, on that basis. There were plenty of guys I played with who I never hung out with socially off the field, but I would do anything for them on the field, in the locker room, in the film room—you name it—because we shared a uniform, a set of values, and a mission. We were bonded. In the trenches of life, when adversity is coming at you with both guns blazing, sometimes that bond is the only thing still holding you together.
APPLICATION
There’s a great saying: if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go with others. Great teamwork is the rocket fuel that can launch your career, your hopes and dreams, into the stratosphere. It’s like a chemical, chain reaction that produces exponential force capable of propelling you further than you ever thought possible.
With great power comes great responsibility, however. And in the case of teamwork, your responsibility is to make sure you don’t make yourself a Team of One and direct all that work solely toward your own self-aggrandizement. That’s how you blow up on the launchpad.
This probably sounds self-explanatory, like common sense. But it’s actually kind of an insidious trap that takes awareness and effort not to fall into thanks to where we are culturally with things like social media, celebrity and even NIL, which was initially designed to protect young players from being exploited by college programs, but has evolved into a program that has incentivized great young talent to think first, and most, about themselves.
You can’t fault young guys too much for falling prey to these influences, because they’re all part of this me-first culture we’ve created for ourselves. It’s become such a natural part of how we interact with the world, in fact, that we instinctively build teams around ourselves specifically for ourselves.
Agents, managers, publicists, social media gurus, marketing teams, financial advisors. Even parents and partners who want nothing but the best for you, who want to love and support you, can become part of this chorus of voices that draws your focus inward, away from the team and the work you have to do in support of the team’s goals.
When that starts to happen—which it will as you start to find success, especially if it’s something you’ve been passionate about for a long time—it’s important to return to your earliest dreams of winning championships or changing the world. It’s essential that you recognize you will never do those things alone. And it is just plain truth that the way you’re going to get where you want to go is with teamwork.
