Word: gamesman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Michael Maccoby '54 is a psychologist living in Washington, D.C., and author of the 1976 best seller, The Gamesman. He was president of The Crimson...
...American Football League into parity with the National Football League. But like Ali, Namath's lasting imprint in memory involves certain splendidly perfect moves: his flickingly fast release of passes, his clairvoyant readings of defenses and where his receivers would be. Like Ali, Namath could be an arrogant gamesman: he preposterously predicted that his 17-point underdog Jets would beat the Baltimore Colts in the 1969 Super Bowl-and they...
...flaw in Maccoby's book is that he does prcisely what he scores his subjects for doing. By abstracting business from the unavoidable reality of money, common ambition and greed, he becomes too cerebral. By dealing solely with psychological impulses, he over-analyzes as badly as the Gamesman who cannot allow compassion to enter his own careful cost-benefit analyses. Perhaps this was intentional--the Gamesman Maccoby portrays is certainly an interesting figure, and interesting figures sell books--but more likely it was simply the product of an understandable enthusiasm to make a careful scholarly presentation as entertaining as possible...
...matter what the reason, the reader should take what Maccoby says to heart. Even if the Gamesman were an exaggeration of a type, there is still enough truth in the rumor to make the average person tread carefully. It was the Gamesman, after all, who made it to the top of the business pile just in time to get the call to Washington and Camelot from the greatest gamesman of the all--President John F. Kennedy '40--and who stayed on to overanalyze the country into its most agonizing decade. Sound business tactics and calculated risks brought America into Vietnam...
...gamesman, a high salary is important mainly because this is the way the game is scored, and he doesn't want to fall behind the others. He sees his salary not in terms of becoming rich, but in comparative terms of staying ahead of others in his peer group...