Nick Westby: Only hours of practice can make you a natural-born sportsman

I love it for its stories, unpredictability, emotion, action, drama, intrigue, personalities, remarkable feats and a myriad other reasons.

But I also hate sport because I am no good at it, and at 33, am unlikely to ever improve.

I was rubbish at football growing up despite many hours spent blissfully unaware that the practice I was partaking in was not doing me any good at all, and soon realised I should give up the ghost.

So I bought some golf clubs and hit the fairways. Hand-eye co-ordination, though, has never been a strong suit, and a jarring technique in what I would call a swing and others would call a hack, meant I never got any lower than a handicap of 18.

The first time I played rugby at school, a full-back the size of a wrecking ball raced at me and ran straight through me, his knee connecting with my lip and busting it wide open.

Through teary eyes, I looked to the touchline for the man with the magic sponge only for the shout from the teacher to be: “Run it off, lad.”

Lord knows how you run off a fat lip, but it was another way of ramming home, quite brutally I thought, the point that I was never going to be any good at sport.

So, convinced I didn’t have the natural co-ordination, physique or flair for a career as a sportsman but was still in love with all things sport, I decided to do the next best thing, and write about it.

Yes, very funny, I have no natural flair for that either!

However, it’s what I do. And as well as write about sport every day, report on it most weekends and watch it in my spare time – yes, the wife loves that – I also read a lot of sports books.

Whether it be a tale of triumph over disaster, one sporting star’s climb to the top step of the podium or the problems of drugs in sport, I find sports books to be entertaining and enlightening, uplifting and evocative.

Recently, though, I read a book that turned my longheld beliefs about sport upside down.

Bounce by the Times sports journalist Matthew Syed is a thought-provoking essay that blows the myth of natural talent wide open. Syed argues that there is no such thing as someone being born with talent.

Through research that carries him further afield than competitive games, even to the doorstep of master composer Mozart, Syed says that 10,000 hours of practice, which translates roughly to 10 years, is required to get a person to the levels of superiority that we see in the sporting domain.

Furthermore, that practice has to be purposeful, whereby a sportsman sets himself targets each and every day to ensure he is progressing.

The mental approach is also vital, with all that dedication and practice largely irrelevant if the person does not have the growth mindset, which relates to motivation and productivity.

Syed, who was an Olympic table tennis player, says he only got to that stage because he grew up on a street where a national coach lived, and his brother and another friend were constant training partners from a young age.

Reading the book got me harping back to last summer and the memories our Yorkshire Olympians created.

Of all the county’s medallists, from the big-name stars like Jessica Ennis to the unheralded team members like equestrian Nicola Wilson, the 10,000 hours theory seems to bear fruit.

People look at Ennis and automatically think natural talent. But since the age of 13 she has been tirelessly working to a peak she did not reach until she was 26.

Likewise the Brownlee brothers. How could two men from the same family be the best in the world at triathlon, a primarily individual sport?

Answer: because they were running, swimming and cycling before the age of 10; because they train more hours than any of their rivals; and because in that training they are pushing each other hard for every session. Ten thousand hours? Those boys are probably closer to 15,000.

The only exceptions to the rule I can think of from Yorkshire’s London 2012 elite are Lizzie Armitstead and Katherine Copeland. Otley’s Armitstead was 22 when she won road race silver, seven years after she took up cycling seriously.

Middlesbrough’s Copeland was 21 at the time of striking gold in the lightweight double sculls, again seven years after she first stepped in a boat.

This theory of hard work extends beyong individuals to team sports.

Barcelona are widely regarded as the most naturally gifted team in all of football, but that stems from the fact that they graft more vigourously than anyone.

“They work harder than anyone else without the ball and they work harder than anyone else when they’ve got the ball,” argued Harry Redknapp recently when he was trying to inject a bit of urgency into his ailing Queens Park Rangers.

Bayern Munich humbled Barca recently thanks mainly to how hard they worked. Yes, they are all talented players, but invariably you don’t get very far by just waiting for the ball to come to you.

Switching sports to golf and the best two players in the world are Rory McIlroy and Tiger Woods, men who have magic in their fingertips... seemingly. Not necessarily so. A couple of years ago whilst covering the Open I ventured onto the practice ground in the late afternoon and saw two men, their rounds finished, still hitting balls, tweaking and finalising. They were McIlroy and Woods.

Even as I write, adding my own evidence in support of Syed’s, I still find it hard to embrace the theory completely. I still feel there has to be some initial ability on which to build. I do, though, subscribe to the belief that talent is not born within, it is earned through the endless application of productive practice. I only wish I’d have known this when I started out as a budding sportsman.

and another thing...

Having used this slither of last Monday’s column to bemoan the dearth of golf tournaments in Europe, and indeed Britain, this summer, it is only fair to point you all in the direction of the one big one on our doorstep this coming week.

The BMW PGA Championship begins on Thursday with the biggest names in Europe descending on the luxurious stretch of real estate that is Wentworth Golf Club.

Luke Donald defends a title he has won for the last two years and even Rory McIlroy is heading back this way.

Flights from Bulgaria, where a number of this week’s Wentworth visitors were playing in the latest European Tour stop, and also from Florida, where some of the big names in European golf now reside, will be over-subscribed with British players heading home.

Okay, fair enough, most of them now have their own private jets.

But if we feel hard done to that we do not get to see our top guys as often as we would like, these men like Ian Poulter, who inspire us every second autumn with their Ryder Cup feats, it would be foolish to then squander the opportunity go and watch them for the one and only occasion they are in England this golfing year.