An article on Sidney Crosby called the superstar “gifted” and “innately talented.” A similar article on Max Talbot called the grinder a “hard worker” and a guy who has a “great work ethic.”
These terms are thrown around all the time in sports, specifically one that takes such unique talents as hockey does. One is an extraordinary compliment, the other is the equivalent of a participation award. Max Talbot got to where he is because he “works hard,” but Sidney Crosby, boy, oh boy, he got to his level because of a special gift that was bestowed onto him by the hockey gods.
Too bad the hockey gods (and more importantly, the hockey writers) got it backwards.
Since when is being a hard worker something to fall back on? The term “talent” has numerous definitions, including “a special, often athletic…aptitude,” while the term “gifted” means “showing natural talent or aptitude.” Unless our history books failed to tell us about the abundance of hockey games our hairy ancestors played, no one has a genetic predisposition to become a hockey superstar. That is something that is developed through – you guessed it – hard work. In essence, the aforementioned writers are suggesting that Crosby doesn’t work too hard, he just has the natural ability, while Talbot, he
only got to the NHL because he spent time practicing – as if it were a detriment to his personality.
If there’s one piece of psychological research that I adore, it’s that of Stanford professor Carol Dweck, who has conducted experiments on people’s perceptions of intelligence. She finds that people who explain their abilities in terms of being developed through effort are much more likely to experience success, while those who explain their abilities from a perspective of innate talent consistently run into problems in their lives. When a young athlete is clearly having more success than all other athletes, we encourage them to think that it is because they were born with that ability, and that they are both precocious and innately gifted. This is extremely problematic, because when someone who believes they are innately talented fails, they believe that there is nothing they can do to change their luck – after all, the talent they have is the talent they were born with, and nothing can affect that. However, when the other person fails, they simply think, “I have to try harder.” Failure does not shatter that athlete’s self-esteem or perception of their abilities. It simply informs them that they have more work to do.
Looking back at Crosby, a writer for the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette jotted a note on a blog post back in 2009, saying, “it takes a lot less innate talent to do what I do than to do what Sidney Crosby does.” While there may be an argument that genetics and innate ability can give you the predisposition to develop physical and motor talents that are involved in hockey, in reality, it takes more innate talent to be a creative writer than it does to be an athlete. Our brains are wired to have certain levels of creativity, linguistic, and artistic abilities. However, our bodies are not born with the predisposition to develop the ability to stickhandle through four bulky hockey players armed with sticks and a desire to plant you into the ice below.
Players like Crosby, Claude Giroux, Alex Ovechkin, and Steven Stamkos did not necessarily have more innate talent than a Max Talbot or a Brandon Prust. What is more likely (and not a shot at any non-superstar player, but more a psychological explanation) is that these superstar players had a higher desire to practice and improve at various abilities when they were very young, leading to the label of “precocious” or “gifted,” which gave them the opportunities to practice and play even more, on higher-level teams and against higher-level competition.
If I were Crosby, I’d rather be called a hard worker than gifted any day. Because at the end of the day, it’s these hard workers that find themselves hoisting the most coveted trophies.
Alan Bass, a former writer for The Hockey News and THN.com, is the author of "The Great Expansion: The Ultimate Risk That Changed The NHL Forever." You can contact him at [email protected], or on Twitter at @NHL_AlanBass. 
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