The Right Call

Sally Jenkins, a veteran sportswriter who has covered major sporting events for the Washington Post, Sports Illustrated, and ESPN, draws on decades of close observation of elite athletes and coaches to argue that their methods for making decisions under pressure are transferable to any profession. Her father, Hall of Fame sportswriter Dan Jenkins, taught her that wasting potential is a kind of sin and that some people are afraid to win, lessons that shaped her conviction that high performance is learned rather than innate. Jenkins identifies seven interconnected elements: conditioning, practice, discipline, candor, culture, failure, and intention. Together, these principles amount to a coherent way of being that can help ordinary people perform at high levels under stress.

Jenkins opens with a scene from January 19, 2020, when Kansas City Chiefs head coach Andy Reid faced a fourth-down decision while trailing the Tennessee Titans 10–0 in a playoff game with a Super Bowl berth at stake. Rather than settle for a safe field goal, Reid called an audacious pass to tight end Travis Kelce. The play succeeded, sparking a momentum shift that carried the Chiefs to a 35–24 victory. Reid later said the call was not difficult because he knew what he was doing and why. Jenkins uses this moment to frame her central question: How do elite performers cut through pressure and act with clarity? She contrasts the transparency of athletic decision-making with the invisibility of corporate leadership and argues that sports offer a uniquely accessible laboratory for studying decisions under duress.

The first element Jenkins examines is conditioning, which she defines not as mere muscle building but as a way to sharpen cognitive function. She profiles Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, who swam five miles a day, six to seven days a week, for 20 years. His coach, Bob Bowman, understood that relentless laps trained Phelps's brain as much as his body, grooving stroke mechanics so deeply that they would hold up under extreme fatigue. At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Phelps pursued an unprecedented eight gold medals. When his goggles leaked during the two-hundred-meter butterfly, prior visualization exercises allowed him to stay calm and win. In the one-hundred-meter butterfly, exhausted, Phelps made a split-second decision to take a shortened half stroke, known as a "chop," and won by one one-hundredth of a second. Jenkins extends the conditioning argument to other fields, noting that world chess champion Magnus Carlsen trained at Norway's Olympic center because fatigue-caused mistakes decided long matches, and that big wave surfer Laird Hamilton developed a training program using breath work, underwater exercises, and extreme temperature exposure to build tolerance for stress.

Jenkins distinguishes practice from conditioning as strategic, targeted work aimed at refining specific skills. She recounts the Indianapolis Colts' "wet ball" drill under coach Tony Dungy, in which quarterback Peyton Manning practiced with water-soaked footballs despite playing in a dome. When unprecedented rain struck the 2007 Super Bowl in Miami, Manning's preparation gave the Colts an advantage in their 29–17 victory. She examines the New England Patriots' 20-year dynasty under coach Bill Belichick as a case study in meticulous rehearsal: The team practiced minute details such as handing the ball to the referee between plays to save fractions of a second, producing fewer penalties, fewer turnovers, and over 1,000 points scored off opponents' mistakes. Manning's off-season habit of reviewing every interception on film, grading each as avoidable or unavoidable, and creating targeted drills illustrates what researcher K. Anders Ericsson called "deliberate practice," focused work on weaknesses rather than repetition of strengths. Jenkins also draws on cognitive scientist Sian Leah Beilock's research on "choking," the phenomenon in which performance anxiety causes skilled people to impose conscious monitoring on actions that should be automatic. Beilock found that simple distractions could restore well-practiced automatic performance.

On discipline, Jenkins argues it is not imposed obedience but a voluntary framework of self-regulation. She contrasts the failed authoritarianism of Detroit Lions coach Matt Patricia, who tried to import Belichick's system through degrading methods and was fired after two and a half years, with Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski's handling of guard Grayson Allen. Allen repeatedly tripped opponents despite being an excellent student and team captain, and public pressure demanded harsh punishment. Krzyzewski suspended Allen for only three games, treating the discipline as a developmental bridge to maturity. Jenkins presents University of Tennessee women's basketball coach Pat Summitt, winner of eight national championships, as the ideal. Summitt described discipline as an internal mechanism and relied on peer accountability rather than punishment. Her player Nicky Anosike wrote a team contract that all players signed, and Anosike's own effort earned teammates' respect. Jenkins also cites New York Yankees captain Derek Jeter, who went to bed two hours after every game for 20 seasons, as embodying how daily discipline produces predictable, favorable outcomes.

Jenkins argues that candor, honest and clear communication, is what truly transforms performance. She narrates distance swimmer Diana Nyad's record-setting 2013 crossing from Cuba to Florida, a 110-mile swim requiring nearly 53 continuous hours, as a communications challenge. Nyad and her team director, Bonnie Stoll, established strict rules: no sarcasm, only Stoll communicates with Nyad, and no one reveals distances or elapsed time. On the successful fifth overall attempt, Stoll broke the distance rule to tell Nyad how far she had come and that she would never have to wear the protective jellyfish suit again, providing the right information at the right moment to recharge Nyad for the final 15 hours. Jenkins also profiles former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Steve Young, who early in his career deflected blame after interceptions by citing receivers' mistakes. When Young shifted to accepting full responsibility, his teammates began doing the same, and the team's culture of accountability strengthened.

On culture, Jenkins traces Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr's process of building a championship environment. Before his first season in 2014, Kerr visited Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll, who dismissed strategic schemes as secondary and urged Kerr to identify his core values. Kerr reflected on the cultures he had experienced as a player, including Phil Jackson's philosophically rich Chicago Bulls and Gregg Popovich's family-centered San Antonio Spurs. Kerr identified "joy" as his defining value and built a culture of playful practices with music, varied activities, and inclusive playing time. The Warriors broke the NBA record for most wins by a rookie head coach and won their first title in 40 years, beginning a run of three championships and five straight Finals appearances. Jenkins also profiles Tommy Amaker's cultural transformation of Harvard basketball. Hired in 2007 as the university's first Black varsity head coach for a program that had never won an Ivy League title, Amaker merged athletic and academic ambition and led the Crimson to seven Ivy League titles in 14 years.

Jenkins argues that failure is an essential precondition for success. She returns to the Kansas City Chiefs, whose four-inch offsides penalty in the 2019 AFC Championship Game cost them a trip to the Super Bowl. Coach Reid told the team they all could have been four inches better, a mantra that drove a year of incremental improvement ending in a Super Bowl victory. Jenkins also profiles U.S. women's soccer coach Jill Ellis, who overhauled an aging national team after a 2016 Olympic quarterfinal loss, experimenting with 60 different players and enduring veterans' petitions for her firing before winning the 2019 World Cup. She cites Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos's philosophy that failure is inseparable from invention and concludes that winning and losing are deeply intertwined.

The final element is intention, the conscious decision to craft one's own identity rather than accept external judgments. Jenkins traces Tom Brady's career from a draft evaluation that called him "poor build" and unable to drive the ball downfield, through relentless self-improvement, to his move to Tampa Bay at age 43, where his daily intentionality transformed the Buccaneers' culture and produced a Super Bowl victory. She contrasts leaders with good intentions, such as Tony Dungy, the first Black head coach to win a Super Bowl, whose patient coaching helped transform Peyton Manning from a league leader in interceptions to a quarterback who threw a career-low nine in the Colts' 2006 championship season, with those whose selfish motives provoke rejection. Jenkins profiles Jacksonville Jaguars coach Urban Meyer, who called his own coaches "losers" and was fired after 13 games, as an example of what anthropologist Christopher Boehm calls "leveling mechanisms," the ways followers remove intolerable leaders.

Jenkins concludes that the seven principles must be activated by a deeper purpose: love of one's work. She returns to Summitt's 2004 season, when the loss of starting point guard Loree Moore to a knee injury threatened a championship run. Summitt asked each player to contribute small improvements, converted a forward to point guard, and called an all-in defensive trap in the final seconds of a tied Final Four game against Louisiana State University, producing a steal and buzzer-beating layup. Jenkins found Summitt afterward struggling to breathe from heart arrhythmia, yet prouder of that team than almost any other. The episode captures Jenkins's central conviction: The "athletic heart" is not about winning every time but about the courage to commit fully and the love that makes the effort worthwhile.