Heroes and villains

DAVID AND GOLIATH: UNDERDOGS, MISFITS AND THE ART OF BATTLING GIANTS

By Malcolm Gladwell

305 pages

Available at National Book Store

Underdogs. People love ‘em. They love stories about underdogs even more. (Manny Pacquiao is perhaps the most cherished local example, though now he’s officially a top dog.)

Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, David and Goliath, is framed around Western culture’s most enduring “David and Goliath” story: namely, the story of David and Goliath.

You know the story. Poor Israelite shepherd David is recruited to battle the Philistines’ most intimidating warrior, Goliath. Except we know what happens: David fells him with a single flung stone to the head. A man four times the boy’s size. David is the classic underdog we root for.

Hollywood is rife with underdog stories; from Rocky to Slumdog Millionaire, the plight of the underestimated hero is reliable box office gold. In fact, stories of underdogs are so prevalent in movies, songs and popular culture that we might forget they actually exist.

Gladwell’s research turns up quite a number of interesting real-life tales, and, as usual, the stories serve to bolster his argument, via inductive reasoning — not 100 percent scientifically valid perhaps, but convincing on a human reasoning-and-feeling level.

Gladwell is now the master of counterintuitive argument. Coming up in the era of Freakanomics, the New Yorker writer made us think differently about intuition (Blink), and how businesses succeed (The Tipping Point), and how certain people succeed while others fail (Outliers).

In David and Goliath, like the rest of his books, he operates from a counterintuitive premise — that the stronger opponent doesn’t always win every battle. Yet is this premise really so mind-blowing? It is so alien from our expectations? We’ve had a generation of Americans viewing the Vietnam War as proof that massive bombing and military spending won’t necessarily defeat a bunch of tunnel-dwelling guerrillas. The very fact that “a David and Goliath situation” even exists as a metaphor means underdog stories are very much the common currency in our culture; we almost crave to hear them. So what’s news here?

In the case of David and Goliath, Gladwell breaks it down like this: people shouldn’t have laid bets on Goliath in the first place, because Goliath was part of a stationary, close-combat fighting force, while David was part of an elite group of marksmen — trained to hit targets at great distances. In military technology terms, David already had the upper hand: he could target a bird — or the center of a giant’s forehead — at 100 meters. Not only that, science tells us that someone of Goliath’s height may have suffered from acromegaly, a condition caused by a benign tumor in the pituitary gland. It caused Goliath’s unusual height, and it may have also caused double vision or partial blindness in the giant. No wonder he had to call David over to fight him up-close! He was practically blind!
This is all conjecture, of course. But Gladwell means to show that what we think of as a natural advantage can be a disadvantage — and vice versa.

His examples, as always, make for compelling reading. There’s the Mumbai-born coach of the US National Junior Basketball league, Vivek Ranadivé, who takes his team of misfits and short kids to b-ball victory by exploiting one of the strategies of the game that, before coaching, had been totally alien to him: the full-court press. Instead of deploying his team at the defensive end whenever the opposing team got the ball, Ranadivé would tell his much-shorter girls to get right in the taller girls’ faces, block every pass they could, steal the ball whenever possible, and shoot layups. It was a percentage strategy — not unlike the one used in Moneyball — in which coach Ranadivé ignored his team’s natural disadvantage — their lack of height and experience — and focused on something they could take advantage of: speed and aggressiveness. His team won the National Junior Basketball championship.

Other tales explore how dyslexia might conceivably be an advantage for CEOs and Hollywood executives (like Brian Grazer, who co-produces movies with Ron Howard). Because of their cognitive impairment, Gladwell finds, they had to learn to listen harder and argue more convincingly. One need only look at Tom Cruise as proof that someone with dyslexia can overcome great difficulties and become a top movie star; but the question is, what percentage of that is actually raw ambition, what percentage is talent, and what percentage stems directly from overcoming dyslexia? It’s a difficult thing to prove or disprove.

And while it is possible to show numerous examples of those without power managing to prevail or topple those in power, history paints a rather different picture: of the rich getting richer, the poor staying poor (or growing poorer), and the haves continually manipulating the rules and the playing field. David and Goliath stories might just be exceptions that prove the status quo.

While Gladwell shows again and again that what we see as advantage is often a disadvantage — such as the rich having kids who are less ambitious and resourceful than their parents — the bulk of the book focuses on underdog cases — people like Jay Freirich, a Chicago doctor who had a very difficult, deprived childhood; yet Gladwell would say this very deprivation allowed him to persevere in treating childhood leukemia, which claimed thousands of kids yearly up until the 1960s. Freirich had a real stubbornness that people saw as a lack of empathy: he didn’t care if kids screamed while he drew bone marrow samples from their legs; he reasoned that they were going to die anyway, so maybe the research would help someone. It did. He developed a method of blood sampling that identified leukemia cells more accurately, and an aggressive cocktail of drugs and chemotherapy that successfully defeated leukemia. Gladwell argues it’s the unlikeliest among us who are often heroes.

From the common Londoners who survived massive German bombings during World War II only to become stronger and more “exhilarated,” to those who took on Sheriff “Bull” Connors’ attack dogs during civil rights marches in the ‘60s, Gladwell tells us history is full of unexpected turnabouts. In case after case, disadvantage hardens people to become more effective coping machines. One need only look at the poor of the Philippines, their easy smiles and self-reported happiness levels, to believe that this is true.