Canada, for instance, is predictably cluttered with hockey players, but significant concentrations also pop up in Sweden, Russia and the Czech Republic. The United States accounts for many of the top players in women's golf, but South Korea has just as many. Baseball stars are generously sprinkled across the southern United States but the postage-stamp-size Dominican Republic isn't far behind. In women's tennis, we see a dispersal around Europe and the United States, then a dazzling, concentrated burst in Moscow.
The pattern keeps repeating: general scatterings accompanied by a number of dense, unexpected crowdings. The pattern is obviously not random, nor can it be fully explained by gene pools or climate or geopolitics or Nike's global marketing budget. Rather, the pattern looks like algae starting to grow on an aquarium wall, telltale clumps that show something is quietly alive, communicating, blooming. It's as though microscopic spores have floated around the atmosphere in the jet stream and taken root in a handful of fertile places.
A quick analysis of this talent map reveals some splashy numbers: for instance, the average woman in South Korea is more than six times as likely to be a professional golfer as an American woman. But the interesting question is, what underlying dynamic makes these people so spectacularly unaverage in the first place? What force is causing those from certain far-off places to become, competitively speaking, superior?
In early December, I traveled to the heart of one of those breeding grounds, the Spartak Tennis Club in Moscow. Russia is the birthplace of a group of athletes who have affected the World Tennis Association rankings in the same way that zebra mussels have affected the Great Lakes — which is to say, pretty much clogged them. The invasion happened swiftly: at the end of 2001, Russia had one woman (Elena Dementieva) in the W.T.A. Tour's top 30. By the start of 2007, Russian women accounted for fully half of the top 10 (Dementieva, Maria Sharapova, Svetlana Kuznetzova, Nadia Petrova and Dinara Safina) and 12 of the top 50. Not to mention 15-year-old Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, who was the International Tennis Federation's No. 1-ranked junior and who was joined in the top 500 by five countrywomen also named Anastasia.
Spartak, usually preceded in the tennis press by the word "famous" or "legendary," had produced three of the top six Russians (Dementieva, Safina and Anastasia Myskina), along with Anna Kournikova, now retired. Tournament pairings regularly became all-Spartak affairs, most memorably the 2004 French Open final, Myskina over Dementieva, the continuation of a rivalry the two began at age 7. To put Spartak's success in talent-map terms: this club, which has one indoor court, has achieved eight year-end top-20 women's rankings over the last three years. During that same period, the entire United States has achieved seven.
"They're like the Russian Army," says Nick Bollettieri, the founder of the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy in Bradenton, Fla., and the former coach to Sharapova, Andre Agassi and other top-ranked players. "They just keep on coming."
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"It is very beautiful in summer," Rybina assured me as we passed a pond frosted with green scum. "But Spartak, I must warn you, is not so nice."
"What do you mean?"
Rybina lighted a Davidoff cigarette and raised her eyebrow into a Gothic arch. "Spartak is not exactly like a palace."
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"We are lucky," Rybina whispered. "The heat is working." When it doesn't, the kids play in their coats.
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The students formed a circle on one side of the net and started to stretch. I watched, scoping for telltale signs of überkinder superiority, but saw nothing of the sort. The Little Group proceeded to hustle energetically through a 15-minute set of calisthenics worthy of Jack LaLanne: jumping jacks, hops, crab walking, bear walking, skipping, sidestepping, zigzagging through a line of orange cones. I was half expecting them to pull out medicine balls, when they actually did pull out medicine balls, passing them back and forth earnestly like so many extras in a Rocky movie.
"All the motions," Preobrazhenskaya would tell me. "It is important to do everything, every practice."
The Little Group paired off with rackets and began imitatsiya — rallying with an imaginary ball. They bounced lightly from foot to foot, they turned, they swung, the invisible balls flew. Preobrazhenskaya roamed the court like a garage mechanic tuning an oversize engine: realigning a piston here, tightening a flywheel there. Several times, she grasped their small arms and piloted their bodies through the stroke. Thus the lesson began, and with it the unspoken implication: the great, rusty Spartak machine was coming to life, carrying its cargo of mini-geniuses another step closer toward inevitable glory.
As I pictured the scale of the David and Goliath phenomenon this unlikely scene embodied, the question arose: how does Spartak do it?
Explanations were not in short supply. I'd heard plenty from American tennis coaches, a nicely bulleted list that included a Slavic gene pool that produces a seemingly inexhaustible supply of tall, fast, strong kids; the economic and cultural gateway that opened with the 1991 collapse of the Communist government; the former Russian president Boris Yeltsin's enthusiastic (if at times klutzy) love for the sport; and the potent catnip effect of Kournikova, the former top 10 player who, though she never won a singles tournament, provided an escape-hungry generation of girls (and, more important, their parents) with vivid proof that tennis success equaled glamour, fortune, fame.
Watching the Little Group play, I, too, felt a strong urge to bellow my share of theories: it must be the medicine balls! The discipline! The lack of Game Boys! I was particularly struck by the kids' obvious enjoyment of the lesson. One of the mothers told Preobrazhenskaya that her daughter, Gunda, had awakened early that day, unable to sleep. "Today is my day with Larisa Dmitrievna!" Gunda had said. "It is today!"
In sum, there are a lot of explanations, some better than others. For instance, is the Russian gene pool really that innately superior to that of Ukraine or Slovenia or Southern California? If Kournikova inspired so many Russians, then where were the German stars inspired by Steffi Graf? But ultimately the theories fall short because they don't explain the principles underpinning Spartak's success. Indeed, seeing the place up close made me wonder if there were any principles. Spartak radiates the glow of happenstance, the diamond in the trash heap. (This impression is apparently shared by the Russian Tennis Federation, which has been content to allow Spartak to remain with its single indoor court.)
So even here, at the core of one of the globe's brightest talent blooms, the question of that talent's source remains enigmatically tangled, perhaps as much of a mystery to those who nurture these athletes as it is to the rest of us. It's enough to make you wish for a set of X-ray glasses that could reveal how these invisible forces of culture, history, genes, practice, coaching and belief work together to form that elemental material we call talent — to wish that science could come up with a way to see talent as a substance as tangible as muscle and bone, and whose inner workings we could someday attempt to understand.
As it turns out, that's exactly what's happening.
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"Everything neurons do, they do pretty quickly; it happens with the flick of a switch," Fields said. "But flicking switches is not how we learn a lot of things. Getting good at piano or chess or baseball takes a lot of time, and that's what myelin is good at."
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Back at Spartak, the Little Group lined up outside the service box, rackets at the ready. Preobrazhenskaya stood at the net, a shopping cart of balls at her hip. She waited for silence, then started: forehand, backhand, back to the end of the line. One by one, the kids took their swings — to my eye, pretty nice-looking swings. But not to hers. Preobrazhenskaya frequently stopped them, had them do it over. More follow-through. More turn. Watch. Feel.
Pravil'no, she said. Correct.
Molodets. Good job.
If Preobrazhenskaya's approach were boiled down to one word (and it frequently was), that word would be tekhnika — technique. This is enforced by iron decree: none of her students are permitted to play in a tournament for the first three years of study. It's a notion that I don't imagine would fly with American parents, but none of the Russian parents questioned it for a second. "Technique is everything," Preobrazhenskaya told me later, smacking a table with Khrushchev-like emphasis, causing me to jump and reconsider my twinkly-grandma impression of her. "If you begin playing without technique, it is big mistake. Big, big mistake!"
I thought of something Dr. Fields had said: "You have to understand that every skill exists as a circuit, and that circuit has to be formed and optimized." To put it in Spartak terms, myelin is a slave to tekhnika — and so, in turn, was the Little Group. Preobrazhenskaya didn't instruct them on tactics or positioning or offer any psychological tips; rather, every gesture and word was funneled to teaching the elemental task of hitting the ball clean and hard. Which they did, one by one. A few of the kids had located that magical-seeming burst of leverage that makes the ball explode off the strings with a distinctive thwock.
What do good athletes do when they train?" George Bartzokis, a professor of neurology at U.C.L.A., had told me. "They send precise impulses along wires that give the signal to myelinate that wire. They end up, after all the training, with a super-duper wire — lots of bandwidth, high-speed T-1 line. That's what makes them different from the rest of us."
"It's one of the most intricate and exquisite cell-cell interactions there is," Fields said. "And it's slow. Each one of these wraps can go around a nerve fiber 40 or 50 times, and that can take days or weeks. Imagine doing that to an entire neuron, then an entire circuit with thousands of nerves."
So each time Alexandra or Denis or Gunda swings the racket properly — or, for that matter, each time we practice a chip shot or a guitar chord or a chess opening — those tiny green tentacles sense it and reach toward the thousands of related nerve fibers. They grasp, they squish, they make another wrap, thickening the sheath. They build a little more insulation along the wire, which adds a bit more bandwidth and precision to the circuit, which translates into an infinitesimal bit more skill and speed. Myelin is both practice and mastery, cause and effect. As Bartzokis had said: "Myelin is our Achilles strength, and it's our Achilles' heel. It's what makes us human."
The rise of the South Korean golfers, who won almost one-third of the events last year on the Ladies Professional Golf Association Tour, has usually been explained by citing two factors: the country's formidably driven parents, and the rock-star status of Se Ri Pak, who has won 23 tournaments and is one of the nation's biggest sports celebrities. Yet the logic of this formula has always been confounded by a puzzling fact: South Korea happens to be a nation where it is singularly difficult for a young person to play golf. There are only 200 golf courses in the entire country, compared with 17,000 in the United States.
Viewed through the prism of myelin, however, the situation makes more sense. The lack of public courses sends golf-hungry parents and kids to South Korea's abundant driving ranges, which are Elysian fields of myelination compared to the relative randomness of course play. Were South Korea to increase access to courses, it could be argued, the country might wind up producing fewer top golfers.
Then there's the Dominican Republic, which has historically produced more Major League Baseball players than any other country outside the United States. Conventional wisdom holds that this remarkable record arises from the fruitful collision of a baseball-mad culture and grinding poverty. The equation is undeniably true, but it's also true of several nearby countries that don't achieve a fraction of the Dominican Republic's success.
There is one way, however, in which the Dominican Republic is historically unique. It's the first place where Major League Baseball teams built training academies — two dozen of them, starting in the mid-1970s. While academies provide players with obvious advantages like good nutrition and housing, not to mention regular exposure to scouts, they also provide a daily structure of drills and practices that, like the South Korean driving ranges, would presumably be a ripe environment for building myelin.
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Dementieva told her story. Surprisingly, she had been rejected by several other clubs as too slow before landing at Spartak. She spoke fondly, if a little vaguely, of her days at the club: dodging stray dogs, washing dirty tennis balls in the sink, doing homework on the long subway ride. Her first instructor was the renowned Rausa Islanova (the mother of Dinara Safina and of the men's 2000 United States Open winner, Marat Safin), who was known for her strictness and her elimination system in which students competed for a constantly shrinking number of slots. Dementieva's group started with 25 students; within a year it was down to 7. Of those 7 kids, 4 became world-class players (Myskina, Kournikova and Safin were the other 3).
Spartak was good for me, I think," Dementieva said, squinting as if she were peering into her hazy past. "I always had a feeling that I was going forward, getting better technique.
When Dementieva took the court to practice, she began with a set of those Jack LaLanne-style warm-ups — sidesteps, jumping jacks, high steps. She looked as if she were still a member of the Little Group, so much so that, watching from the bleachers, I was momentarily unsure whether it was her or some beginner. Dementieva did imitatsiya; she practiced each stroke in slow motion. Then, when her male sparring partner showed up, she proceeded to hit the ball so hard, accurately and consistently that it seemed she was playing a sport I'd never seen before. Again and again, her body rose to the ball in a twist of ballistic force, the power betrayed only by the snakelike rise of her thick blond braid. The ball hissed.
Trying to wrap my head around the metamorphic process through which a too-slow kid could become . . . her, well, it left me utterly at a loss, able only to fumble for such useful scientific terms as "magic" and "miracle."
Fortunately, there are more rational people to consult, and perhaps the most rational is K. Anders Ericsson, who has devoted much of his life to studying phenomena like Dementieva and Spartak. Ericsson, a native of Sweden and a professor of psychology at Florida State University, is co-editor of "The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance," published in 2006. If talented people can be thought of as a singular species, then Ericsson is its John J. Audubon, and the handbook is his painstakingly annotated field guide.
The handbook runs to 901 pages, so, in the interest of time, allow me to sum up. Every talent, according to Ericsson, is the result of a single process: deliberate practice, which he defines as "individuals engaging in a practice activity (typically designed by teachers) with full concentration on improving some aspect of their performance." In a moment of towering simplification, "The Handbook" distills its lesson to a formula known as the Power Law of Learning: T = a P-b . (Don't ask.) A slightly more useful translation: Deliberate practice means working on technique, seeking constant critical feedback and focusing ruthlessly on improving weaknesses.
"It feels like you're constantly stretching yourself into an uncomfortable area beyond what you can quite do," Ericsson told me. It's hard to sustain deliberate practice for long periods of time, which may help explain why players like Jimmy Connors succeeded with seemingly paltry amounts of practice while their competitors were hitting thousands of balls each day. As the tennis commentator Mary Carillo told me, "He barely practiced an hour a day, but it was the most intense hour of your life."
'Ericsson also discusses the Ten-Year Rule, an intriguing finding dating to 1899, which shows that even the most talented individual requires a decade of committed practice before reaching world-class level. (Even a prodigy like the chess player Bobby Fischer put in nine hard years before achieving his grandmaster status at age 16.) While this rule is often used to backdate the ideal start of training (in tennis, girls peak physically at around 17, so they ought to start by 7; boys peak later, so 9 is O.K.), the Ten-Year Rule has more universal implications. Namely, it implies that all skills are built using the same fundamental mechanism, and that the mechanism makes physiological demands from which no one is exempt.'
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1. Driven Parents. The hunger and ambition of Russian parents is uniquely strong, particularly when one considers how hard life is in Russia right now and also that the patron saint of Russian tennis parents is the ex-Siberian oil-field worker Yuri Sharapov, who came to America with less than $1,000 and his 7-year-old daughter, Maria, who now earns an estimated $30 million a year in endorsements. On the other hand, while they are intense, Russian parents aren't all that different a group from the parents in Serbia, the Czech Republic or Mission Viejo, Calif.
2. Early Starts. The kids here start young and specialize early. They are tennis players, and not much else competes for their attention (only a handful owned video games, according to my informal poll), and they also benefit from a Russian culture that's built to select athletes and shield them from academic pressures. Incidentally, there were indeed elite athletic genes floating around at Spartak: Alexandra's parents were famous figure skaters, and another kid was Myskina's cousin. So good genes probably play a role, or (just as likely, to my mind) there's a beneficial effect to growing up in an environment of working athletes.
3. Powerful, Consistent Coaches. Most tennis coaches I saw were treated with a respect reserved for university professors. The tennis clubs I visited were patrolled by a squad of Brezhnev lookalikes who offered advice that seemed hewed from stone. Their institutional specialty is biomechanics, but the point is perhaps not so much in the details of that coaching, but rather in the passion, rigor and uniformity with which that coaching is delivered. This, incidentally, is the opposite of the entrepreneurial system in which many American tennis coaches operate, as they often compete with one another, relying on their ability to sell their services to sometimes anxious parents. American coaches have to be unique to survive; Russian coaches are mostly the same.
4. Cultural Toughness. As poets have pointed out, the intrinsic hardiness of the Russian woman is legendary. Historically, this might have something to do with the hardships of life under Communism and the loss of 11 million soldiers in World War II. Whatever the cause, the immediate effect is a tangible mental toughness and a work ethic second to none. After all, at Spartak, they don't speak of "playing" tennis. The verb they like to use is borot'sya — to struggle.
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If I gave in to the uncontrollable Ericssonian urge to put Spartak's success into a formula, it would read something like:
Intense Parents + Young Kids + Rigorous Technique + Toughness = Talent
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But in the end, as I look around the court, it can't come down to a formula because formulas are rational, and whatever Spartak is, it isn't entirely rational. It's a bunch of kids in a dumpy club who are burning to be here, for whom every swing is meaningful, who wake up in the morning and say, "Today is my day with Larisa Dmitrievna!" It's deeply and purposefully irrational, because it's built on a love of sport and country that can't be explained but holds everything together anyway. Spartak is not science; what happens here is not analogous to what happens in a factory or a laboratory. It's closer to what happens in a garden, a forgotten, rundown garden that somehow produces marvelous tomatoes, summer after summer.
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Thwock . . . thwock . . . thwock . . . thwock.
The Little Group was smacking it now, the balls zipping over the net and ricocheting off the far wall. Preobrazhenskaya, the gardener, watched with a smile, occasionally correcting a backswing or a grip, nudging the kids on with a murmur of praise and instruction: "Clever boy." "Good girl." "No." "Correct." "Not there." "That's it."
On my last day at Spartak, I met one more player. Her name was Kseniya; she was 5, and she'd come for a tryout. Her parents, an upscale pair, ducked through the low door and asked Larisa Dmitrievna if she might have a moment. Kseniya had black pigtails held in place with pink ribbons. She wore new silver tennis shoes. She walked solemnly, one step behind her parents, carrying a tiny pink racket. Something in the precision of her walk, in her air of self-possession, reminded me of my daughter Zoe.
Preobrazhenskaya put her arm on Kseniya's shoulder and walked her to the corner of the court, out of the parents' earshot. The girl looked up into the coach's face. "She has good eyes," Preobrazhenskaya said later.
Preobrazhenskaya rotated Kseniya's arms in a wide circle, feeling for looseness in her muscles, which she regarded as a good sign. Preobrazhenskaya then showed Kseniya a new tennis ball, and told her what was about to happen. Kseniya listened closely, and nodded. Then the coach tossed the ball lightly, and Kseniya, her small body coming alive at once, ran to catch it.
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