Freakonomics Radio - “This Didn't End the Way It’s Supposed to End.” (Bonus)

Episode Date: September 27, 2021

The N.B.A. superstar Chris Bosh was still competing at the highest level when a blood clot abruptly ended his career. In his new book, Letters to a Young Athlete, Bosh covers the highlights and the struggles. In this installment of the Freakonomics Radio Book Club, he talks with guest host Angela Duckworth.

Hey there, Stephen Dubner. We've got a bonus episode for you today. It is the latest installment of our Freakonomics Radio book club with a guest host that you are likely familiar with, and she is interviewing an author who you're also likely familiar with, especially if you follow the NBA. Do you remember back in 2010 when LeBron James became a free agent and he staged a primetime event on ESPN to announce where he was going? In this fall, I'm going to take my talents to South Beach and join the Miami Heat. When LeBron James went to the Miami Heat, it wasn't

just a case of the best player in basketball joining a new team. It was the best player in basketball joining a new team that had two of the other best players in the game. Dwayne Wade, who'd been in Miami for a while, and another superstar who joined the Heat the same year as Number one, Chris Bosh. Chris Bosh, you got to feel like the luckiest big man in the world right now. Yeah, I'm lucky. I'm lucky. I got LeBron on my left and I have D. Wade on my right. Like a video game. Chris Bosh, LeBron James, and Dwayne Wade were the core of the NBA's first super team, and they did go on to win two NBA championships.

Bosh, a 6'11 forward, had started his career with the Toronto Raptors. He was a great scorer, a great rebounder, and he was clutch. Allen for Bosh for the win! Yes! Yes! With a second lap! With a second lap! Miami up 88-86! Chris Bosh! But you want to know what makes Chris Bosh really special? It's his love of books. Eric Spoelstra, my head coach in Miami, he would gift us books every Christmas, and I'd be the only one in the locker room to read it. And that's how I discovered your book, Grit. And oh man, Grit every day. That is Bosh talking to the author of Grit, Angela Duckworth. Grit, he pounded it in there. I feel like I should, you know, apologize to a lot

of young players too. I'm sure their coaches are handing out, too. Hey, but we won, though. We won. We've got to show some grit. Angela is a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She's also my co-host on our spinoff podcast, No Stupid Questions. Today, she interviews Chris Bosch about his own book, a memoir called Letters to a Young Athlete. They talk about grit.

They talk about their favorite books. And they talk about what it takes to succeed even when the game suddenly changes. To go from, hey, man, we can't wait for you to play to being radioactive. It was quite an experience. Chris Bosh was just inducted into the NBA Hall of Fame and today he's on the Freakonomics Radio Book Club. Could things possibly get any better?

Chris Bosch, in conversation with Angela Duckworth, coming up right after this. This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your guest host, Angela Duckworth. I've spent most of my career studying excellence and what it takes to achieve it. And, as it turns out, so has Chris Bosh. Now, I didn't know whether I would connect with his new book, Letters to a Young Athlete. I'm not necessarily young, nor am I an athlete.

But you know what? Those aren't deal-breakers. If you want to understand the kind of commitment and rigor that it takes to make the most of your abilities in any field, then you will likely find something resonant in Bosch's story. Here's an excerpt from the introduction. You'll notice this book is called Letters to a Young Athlete. It's modeled on some of my favorite books, like Letters to a Young Poet and Letters to a Young Athlete. It's modeled on some of my favorite books, like Letters to a Young Poet and Letters to a Young Jazz Musician. Those might seem like strange books for a basketball player to be reading, but I love learning from anyone who can teach me. I hope I can share some of that love with you. One of the things the poet Rilke taught me was part of being wise is accepting

that you don't have all the answers right now. And that's okay. It's okay to be full of questions. Try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a foreign language he wrote in letters to a young poet. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way to the answer. Bosh has accomplished a lot for a 37-year-old.

He was an 11-time NBA All-Star. He has two NBA championship rings. He has an Olympic gold medal, and there's a lot more as well. But when you sit down for a conversation, he might do the TLDR version. I am originally from Hutchins, Texas. I had a 13-year career in the NBA, and that was ended due to a pulmonary embolism and then a recurring blood clot after that. And so in the prime of my career, I was forced to retire and I had to pivot, but that's what I did. And now I'm an author. I have five children. Chris, I want to ask you about the format of Letters to a Young Athlete and whether you had your five children in mind when you decided that in this first book

you would use the structure of letters. I mean, I had to wonder, is it secretly a book for your children or is it literally a book for young athletes? A lot of people ask, is it to your younger self? And there is some of that me speaking to my children as well. But we just felt that there was something intimate about letters. We want to make the reader feel like it was from me to them. And the best books

that I've always read throughout my life, it was always a universal message. It didn't matter if you cooked, cleaned, were an engineer or an athlete. All the books that helped me in athletics were not athletic books. And so I wanted to be able to translate to, you know, the soccer player in the middle of America or an engineer or coder on the West Coast. With a memoir that nods to literary history, it's no surprise that reading is a huge part of Chris Bosch's life. I always enjoyed looking at the people's faces when I was growing up. You know, just, oh yeah, I read. What? A tall black athlete reading. I don't get it. What do you usually see on their face? What surprise? Shock?

It's like a look in the eye. It's like a flash. You ever seen somebody's eyes like go big and then come back down like in less than a second? Yeah. Kind of like that. Just like in a Disney cartoon, but actually for real. His love of books started early. My first novel that I read was A Wrinkle in Time. Love that book.

Yeah. I want to say I was in the sixth or seventh grade, I believe. And I remember just feeling so proud. I think it was something for class. And, you know, nobody reads the book in class, right? And you write the report. But I was so happy because I finished the book. And so right then and there, it showed me it was possible.

So I always had that kind of appetite or just the ability to know, OK, yeah, I can finish that. And then I probably read a few more books in between that time and when I graduated. From high school. Yeah, from high school. And then after that, once I got into the NBA, I always thought it was fascinating how I started hearing the books like Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Read that, too. Yeah. Outliers, you know, the classics. And I just kept reading for whatever reason. I just found, I just liked it. It just gave me a sense of accomplishment. It was still a very different culture on the bus and on the plane. So I found that reading really made time go by faster in a good way because you're always sore and tired or on the

training table or on my way to the gym in cold weather. You know, you just want to keep your mind in something. For those who don't know, I played my first seven years of my career in Toronto. And so that's when the appetite for reading really, really got going. So I graduated to like 48 laws of power. And when I signed with Miami, Eric Spolstra, our first meeting, he told me, wow, you know, welcome to the team. I've heard you're a voracious reader. I love that. That's cool. And he gave me outliers. And I was like, man, thanks, but I read it. And I got that look, you know. I was going to say, I wonder what his eyes look like. Oh, yeah. You know, that same thing, like, oh. Whether Bosch was reading Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

or The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene, he found an escape in books, which turned out to be extra useful once he moved to Miami. When you're on the best team in the world, it's quite a bit of attention. The noise was even louder, and the reading kept me grounded. It helped me sleep. You know, it was just that thing that was always there. And I would read

all the way up until game time. It was something that I could just keep my mind on because I know it's about to get crazy. It's about to be screaming fans cursing us out. This team is going to try to beat us. We got a stressful situation coming up in 62 minutes, and the clock is counting down. But for right now, I'm in this book. Here's a passage from Bosh's own book, Letters to a Young Athlete. In my experience, the best evidence of the way that expanding your mind transfers to athletes has to do with visualization. Whenever I'd read in school, I'd work on visualizing the stories and characters in my head. I could see Harry Potter and his friends going to Hogwarts for another semester to learn magic.

I liked that image of the green light across the water in the Great Gatsby. And I found that the more practice I got with that, the better I was able to visualize what happened on the court. Whether it was replaying key moments from a game after they'd happened or anticipating what was going to happen next, there isn't a part of my brain marked basketball visualization and visualization for everything else. There's one part of my brain that's for visualization. And the more I strengthened it in the classroom, the more it helped me out on the court. So when you went to Miami, becoming part of, I guess, what's called the first super team, could you just tell us a story about coming to Miami? Yeah. During basketball, you have what's called a free agency period. And myself,

LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, amongst others, an incredible pool of players that could choose anywhere they wanted to go. Before that time, no three all-stars, superstars, whatever you want to call them, had chosen to sign at the same time to the same place. We chose to go to Miami, and we all chose to go there in very dramatic fashion. People didn't appreciate that. And it kind of set off this storm. Just to describe to those who don't know, we pretty much had what was called a parade before winning a championship. Here's another passage from Letters to a Young Athlete. From the day LeBron and I signed and joined forces with D-Wade, we were the biggest focus of attention, hate and criticism in the league.

It wasn't just the hate I got from fans and random people on social media. It was from some former players too. Old school guys would say stuff like, I would never join those other two guys. I would try to beat them. Here I was averaging eight rebounds and almost 19 points a game and I just felt like s**t sometimes. I felt like I deserved the criticism. The worst part was knowing that even though I changed my team, I hadn't changed as a player. I was still hitting the gym, still attacking the game humbly, still working to mesh with my teammates. Getting caught up in a media-driven narrative like that can be shocking if it's never happened to you before. You feel the same on the inside and yet suddenly you're the bad guy.

And maybe this sounds dumb in retrospect, but it really blindsided me. I thought people were going to love watching us play. Oops. Throughout the book, you talk about ego as an enemy. You talk about the difference between ego and confidence. Can you say a little bit more about what you mean? So when you work hard, when you put time into something, that's where confidence comes from, because you've prepared your body, your mind to go through whatever situation

you're supposed to go through. Ego is the complaining that comes in your ear. A lot of people say, oh man, you need the ego. Well, I think sometimes that can kind of get confused. You want to be confident for sure, but that comes through having respect for your situation, respect for your teammates. I am confident because we, as a team, put in the preparation. Ego is more like, oh yeah, I'm going to get the shot in the last minute without even going through the steps to get there. I wonder at what point you figured out the difference between ego and confidence.

I mean, if I met 20-year-old Chris Bosh, would I think you were an arrogant little, you know, upstart? Or would you say that you had this intuition from very early? I've probably figured it out in my mid-20s when I got to Miami. And I was never an arrogant player. I've had my flashes of arrogance. And it never worked out for me. It never felt good. Don't get me wrong. I try, you know, you go on a little power trip. You're 19, 20 years old. You think you know the world. It's hard to imagine not, right?

Yeah, exactly right. I mean, it's really hard to imagine not. Yeah, that's really the main difference. I've been knocked on my butt so many times. So any arrogance that I had was already beaten out of me. So talent is something I study as a scientist. And you write about it in nearly every chapter in one way or another. You say, for example, a talent isn't enough or, you know, that it can be a curse almost to have the blessing of talent early in your life and to think that you should be expecting everything to come easily. You know, I have to wonder, how early did you know that you were talented? I was in the fourth grade. That's when I started playing organized basketball. I was 10 and under at a place called St. Phillips in South

Dallas. And I just loved the game. And, you know, I started making the all-star team and stuff like that. And did you just beat everybody from the very beginning? Not like you'd think. My thing was always a continuous climb. Even if I did have success back then, our team wasn't very good. Like I would cry after every game. I know my parents thought something was wrong with me, but, and we lost a lot of games. We weren't the worst team, but we were the second to the worst team. That's almost worse, right? Yeah, almost worse. Can't even be the best at being the worst. Yeah but we were the second to the worst team. That's almost worse, right? Yeah, almost worse. Can't even be the best at being the worst.

Yeah, we could win two games because we could beat the worst team twice. But that was like my introduction, just always aspiring for more. And do you feel like your talent, was it physical, mental, both? Tell me about what the signs were that you, you know, it wasn't just that you were tall, I guess, right? Because, I mean, you're tall, but you're not that tall. I wasn't crazy tall. I wasn't even the tallest in my middle school. And after I got to high school, that's when I really, after my freshman year, that's when I just started shooting up.

It got ridiculous. I probably went from 6'3 to 6'10 in about three years. Holy schmoly. If that. It probably was quicker. And I was obsessed with the game. I would sit there and watch college basketball and try to draw plays. After school, I'm trying to get to the gym. I was always just trying to play ball and then turned into more. And then I started growing and matching what I saw in my dreams because I'm like, yo, you got to be tall. Here's another excerpt from Letters to a Young Athlete.

When I was in high school, it was the comfortable, even spoiled kids that we carved up. We ate their lunch up and down the court because for all their natural gifts, all their top flight training and facilities, we had something really hard to manufacture. We had real hunger. To be great, you have to be hungry. You have to stay hungry. When it comes down to pulling in that last defensive rebound after you've been sprinting up and down that court for the better part of an hour, winning has to mean something. When it's crunch time, when your body is screaming at you to stop pushing, the pain of losing has to be

greater than the pain of crashing the boards or diving for a loose ball one more time. When you think about the greats who can feel the pain of losing or the joy of winning so deep in their gut that it's almost a physical sensation, realize that their hunger is just as important to their success as their height or their lung capacity or their 40 time. I know you've read Grit and I will tell you, Chris, there's one chapter I didn't write, but I believe that it's important. And it was on, I guess you called hunger, I would call it ambition or drive, right? Yeah. The reason I didn't write a chapter on it is I wanted to only write about things that I could give advice about how to improve.

You talk about hunger as a gift. Can you make someone hungry? It can definitely be a muscle that can be developed for sure. And it's just like the talent thing, right? Some have it more than others. I think for me personally, hunger was more so something of just wanting to be the best, wanting to get the best out of myself, regardless of what just happened. You can relax. You can have a day off. But when you're on the field, when you're on that court, it's all business.

You're there to push yourself. And doing that continuously over and over and then afterwards not being satisfied with the result, always searching to get better. I always knew that there was somebody out there better than me. If you're not enthusiastic, if you're not coming with some passion, with some intensity, then those who are are going to be a little bit ahead of you. When you feel that pain of being disappointed, that'll get rid of all those excuses. You know, in 2011, we lost to the Dallas Mavericks in the NBA finals. We thought we were going to win. We thought we were going to be able to do it and we weren't able to do it. And all I could think about was those times when it's like, man, yeah, that day off. Yeah. You remember?

Was that where your mind went? Yeah. A hundred percent. You go to all the places like, man, because it's nothing we could say. We lost to a superior team. They were a better team. They beat us fair and square. You know, it is what it is. And that was the lesson for us to say, oh, okay, I got it. I don't want to feel that again.

Let's go hard. I thought I was hungry. Oh, boy, now, now I'm hungry. After the break, Chris Bosch faced his biggest challenge when in 2016, his career abruptly ended because of a blood clot, and he was forced to start a whole new life. You get into the real world and you're psychologically tormented.

And people are telling you, ah, you good. More Chris Bosh and letters to a young athlete after this. Now, you've probably guessed that there's a big irony here. I've spent all this time telling you about durability, and I spent all of the time in my career working to make my body more durable, and yet my career came to an end because of a medical issue I couldn't control. I wasn't able to play into my 40s, or to be a contributor on a championship team well into the twilight of my career.

In one sense, I wasn't able to reap the rewards of all the work I put into maintaining my body. So was it all a waste? You know, there's something that struck me as a psychologist reading this book. It reminded me of this research on delay of gratification, which I think you've heard a little bit about. You know, one of the things in developmental psychology that we do with little kids is we give them the marshmallow test. So they can either have one marshmallow an hour or two marshmallows. I knew you would know about this. Two marshmallows later. What strikes me is that you were able to wait for the second marshmallow.

But even if the second one didn't come, you were okay. Yeah. This is me speaking years later. I want a full disclosure. You know what I mean? Older and wiser. Yeah. I had to get to that point. I mean, I never got to live that part of my career. And at the time I felt it was unfair, you know, and I was able to watch two of the greatest players to ever play the game and LeBron and Dwayne and even Ray Allen and just see their secrets and the way that they take care of their body. And I started getting better with it to get more out of my career and to be sidelined by something like blood class. I was just left with more questions and more endless thoughts, you know. I was the one to go to the hospital and say, hey, my calf is sore.

So I'm also left with the thought of saying, okay, well, if I wouldn't have went to the hospital that day, I could still be playing. But then again, I'm left with the other thought like that might have been the one that got me, you know. I'm pretty sure it was a good thing to go to the hospital that day. It was a good thing because the first time was so horrific. Can you just tell the events that led up to you discovering that you had this blood clot problem? Yeah. So have you ever had a rib cramp when you run? Yeah. Probably not like a real athlete does, but I've had a stitch. Yeah. A little stitch. That's what it felt like at first

in my rib. It was two instances. The first time was horrific. I had a pulmonary embolism, which turned into a pulmonary infarction. I was in the hospital for almost two weeks. So you just collapsed during practice or something? Yeah, I was playing. I played the All-Star game. And then probably 24 hours later, I was like, man, yo, I got to go to the hospital. I'm in a tremendous, tremendous amount of pain. My whole left side of my body was just, I couldn't move. And so I went to the hospital and then, you know, I went from chest x-ray to, oh, you need to go here. Then CT scan and they took me to the emergency room.

Then they checked me in the hospital and I was there five days. And then when I thought I was leaving, they, you know, hey, Mr. Bosch, yeah, we got another complication. They had to admit me in the surgery and clean out my lungs pretty much. Well, my left lung. Right. Like roto-brutor your lungs. Yeah. I had built up some gelatinous fluid from the infarction. So I had my lungs drained, which sucks. Oh my God, it's terrible. They got that long needle and they just poke it in there and then they didn't drain the whole thing. And I was still short of breath. So that's when they told me, yeah yeah we got to go in there and so I had tubes in my chest for a little over a week I want to say it was a very terrible process then the next season you know came back returned to all-star level form by the

grace of most high and uh I had a sore calf before All-Star break. It's around the same time. It's almost like a horror movie. The same exact thing is happening. So I didn't freak out or anything. I just went to the hospital like, hey, let me make sure just to be safe. And then that's when they told me,

hey, yeah, okay, it's a blood clot. And then after that happened, that just set off a chain of events with doctors, lawyers, and the team, and agents, and managers. And yeah, that was the last time I played the game. Yeah, so it just pretty much ended abruptly. I found this story to be even more poignant because you wrote about how you were so driven by the desire to prove people wrong at times. So I guess you felt like at the time that this all

happened, you were still in the, I've got something to prove here. Like, I want to show you. Yeah, I felt we could compete for a championship. I'm in that third phase of my career trying to prove myself. That hunger, that ambition. LeBron had went back to Cleveland and he was playing there. And this was my opportunity, me and Dwayne, to still prove that we're elite players on an elite team and an elite organization. And the plug just got pulled right then. To go from, oh, yeah, hey, man, we can't wait for you to play to being radioactive. It was quite an experience. To give you some context about retirement in the NBA, Dwayne Wade bowed out at 37. Michael Jordan retired for the second time at age 40. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

was 42. And Chris Bosh, when he played his last game, he was just 31. Here's another excerpt from his new book. I thought the hardest thing I had ever done was win an NBA championship. It turns out that winning a championship was much, much easier than coming to terms with the fact that I'd never play basketball again. It was like a part of me died. It was like a piece of my life was cut from me, stolen, taken before its time. And on top of that, while we're dealing with this, my wife had just had twins. Oh, my goodness. But, you know, I give my compliments to women.

You guys are strong. We are definitely the stronger sex. If it was up to men to continue the population, we'd be in trouble. Oh, 100%. Not even a question. Oh, my goodness. Well, you know, maybe it was a blessing in a sense. I mean, I do wonder about like the end of people's careers in professional sports is not always like a fairytale ending.

Ninety nine percent of them are not. Yeah, I was going to say, tell me because because, you know, right. I mean, I don't need a statistic, but like what happens to players after they retire from the NBA? So I was having a conversation with a buddy of mine. I said, it didn't end the way it's supposed to end. He said, it never does. It never does, man. That last lap around, that doesn't happen. It happens every so often. And that's what I had to learn. Oh, this is what an athlete does. We crash and burn. Athletes should prepare themselves for that. And then you get into the real world and you're psychologically tormented and people are telling you, yo, how long have you been playing basketball at a serious level? Like hours a day. He thought about it. And I think he's about 36. He said, okay, yeah, easily 18 years. I said, bro, that's more than half your life. We don't even know who we are.

We have to take time to get to know ourselves, know our family, know our situations, even know the real world. You got to go to the grocery store. You got to go get some keys made. You know, you got to go vote. We have to catch up with the rest of the world. And even in that, we have to know ourselves and know our interests and know what we like. Many high performers that I study, athletes and non-athletes, they want habits and they're very intentional about them. I am a habitual person for sure. That was one of the things that helped me

in transferring to this other life because I was like, man, why am I so cranky? Why am I so mad at the world right now? Okay, I'm used to having a 10 o'clock bus and a 12 o'clock lunch. And I'm back at the gym by 5 o'clock so I could play at 7 o'clock. So at 9.30, we could be out of there. So by 10, I could be in my dinner reservation and then be in the bed so I could be back up at 9.30 to do it all again tomorrow. It's about as regimented as the Marines, it sounds like. Yes. It's crazy.

You miss your regiment, you get fined. You know, hey, 3 o'clock bus. They are not joking. And if you're late, you're holding up the whole team on the way to go perform in front of 20,000 people and many more watching on TV. It's big business, you know. What's your mindfulness routine? Mindfulness is something I have not yet made a habit. I just sit down, and it doesn't have to be very long, 10, 20 minutes.

And that's usually the first thing I do in the day. I'll sit down, have a coffee, and just look at the trees. I think sometimes mindfulness can be intimidating and be too much of a thing. Sometimes just taking the time for yourself, no phone, just being present. Or sometimes mindfulness could be if I'm in the middle of work and my son or my daughter comes and say, hey, dad, I want to show you something. No, let me get up. And, you know, let me be mindful and get up and be present because this is going to make their day. Sometimes me and my wife will do it at the same time, especially in the evening after we've put the kids to bed. We'll sit up and just

look at the stars and just sit there, hear each other's silence and just be in that space. And I think that should be included as well. That was Chris Bosh in conversation with Angela Duckworth. His book is called Letters to a Young Athlete from Penguin Press. Audio excerpts are courtesy of Penguin Random House Audio, read by the author. If you want to hear more episodes of the Freakonomics Radio Book Club, including a pair of exclusive brand new episodes that you can't hear anywhere else, go to your favorite podcast app and get the Freakonomics Radio book club.

Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio, and it's part of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which also includes No Stupid Questions, Freakonomics MD, and people I mostly admire. This episode was produced by Brent Katz. Our staff also includes Allison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, Joel Meyer, Trisha Bobita, Zach Lipinski, Ryan Kelly, Mary DeDuke, Emma Terrell, Lyric Bowditch, Jasmine Klinger, Eleanor Osborne, and Jacob Clemente. Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by

The Hitchhikers. The music for this episode was composed by Luis Guerra, Michael Riola, and Stephen Ulrich. As always, thanks for listening. or if your phone goes off. So my phone has been on silent man for almost 20 years. The Freakonomics Radio Network. Stitcher.