LockerRoom: George Plimpton, whose wry, elegant style illuminated his many and amusing ventures into participative journalism, once wrote a book which he called The X Factor. His mission was to locate, isolate and define that elusive ingredient which makes winners different from also-rans. The difference would be the X Factor.
If you could bottle the X Factor, you would have the ingredients for a Michael Jordan, a Pele, a Wayne Gretsky, a Seán Óg. You would have that precise alchemy of physique and mentality and will with which to make not just a winner but an enduring champion.
Plimpton's book was a fascinating investigation into that little-explored inner space of sporting greatness.
At high altitude, where the air is thin, the nerves are jangling and the limbs are dog-tired, what is it that makes some players fluff it every time but allows others to see everything as if it is happening in slow motion?
Preparation? Practice? Genes? Obsession? Focus? Environment? Some combination of all those things.
Regrettably, when Plimpton passed away, he, like Bono, still hadn't found what he was looking for.
Like Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, the X Factor was rumoured to exist but could never be found. The difference. The edge. The X Factor. Whatever title coaches and athletes gave it, nobody was even sure if it existed.
Now, years too late for Plimpton, the burgeoning sports science industry has come up with an answer to the other side of the X Factor equation.
Recent findings could change not just the way in which we look at sport, but also the way in which we look at sports cheating. If science has, as claimed, located the X Factor, will doping and drug cheating as we have come to understand and loathe them become things of the past? Is it possible to clone the X Factor, to market it commercially, to provide enough for everybody?
First, the disclosure. What is the X Factor? Apparently it is a white-haired man with a tracksuit and a water bottle. Mick Byrne.
A jarring current of cynicism ran through lay circles this week when it was revealed by those close to the Irish soccer team that having a Mick Byrne jumping up and down at the end of your bed in the morning is actually far superior preparation for international football than discussions of tactical formations or watching videos of the other side playing.
Fascinatingly, empirical testing being carried out seems to suggest that having a Mick Byrne jumping up and down on your bed in the morning while shouting "get up the yard" is an adequate and time-saving substitute for stamina training.
Niall Quinn noted in the Guardian last week that Mick Byrne has probably been the single most influential figure in Irish soccer in the last 20 years.
Niall would do well to keep his voice down. The thought of David Beckham walking up the steps in Berlin this July to receive the World Cup trophy with a Mick Byrne draping a hug around his neck all the way would be difficult for many in this country to take.
Yet we shouldn't be surprised if it comes to pass. First, Byrne is promiscuous to the point of sluttishness when it comes to hugging. Second, there is some form here.
Running a patient finger through the history of sports reveals a pattern. Start, for argument's sake, in that same spot in Berlin 70 years ago. Would Jesse Owens be anything more than a curious footnote in the histories of both sport and race relations if he hadn't been inspired by that jovial rendition of You've Got to Accentuate the Positive by Broadway Mickey Burn, his beloved rub-down man?
Even Hitler was said to have been so charmed by the little fella's winning soft-shoe shuffle that he later lamented that the war might have gone differently if he'd had somebody to sing The Bear in the Big Blue House to his troops during those cold Russian winters.
In Holland, it is the genial kitman Michael van de Burneus who is credited with being the father of total football, the conceptual style of play which was revealed unto the Dutch squad in the spring of 1973 when, in a dressing-room in Amsterdam, Van de Burneus cleverly flicked Johann Cruyff's left buttock with the corner of a damp towel and roared, "Yo, stinger!" Almost instantly, Van de Burneus flicked Cruyff's other buttock and shouted "Who's your daddy? Who's your daddy?" The rest is football history.
Mike Tyson? His corner man's incessant knock-knock jokes are said to have fired many of his meanest performances, and video footage of Tyson's title fight with James "Bonecrusher" Smith in March 1987 shows him battering his victim while corner man Mick "The Lip" Byrne calls out "Knock Knock, Mike?"
"Who'th there?" lisps Tyson through his gumshield while delivering a shocking left.
"Ice cream!" roars Byrne as Tyson follows with a combination to the ribs and kidneys.
"I thream who?" says Tyson, pushing Bonecrusher away for the set-up.
"Ice cream of Jeannie!" shouts Byrne, but it is Bonecrusher who suffers the punchline, a straight right to the head.
For many observers, it was Byrne's fatal decision in the middle of the James "Buster" Douglas fight to experiment with a Yo Mama-style joke which brought about not just the beginning of the end of his relationship with Tyson, but also the beginning of the end of Tyson's career. The joke ("Yo Mama's so big and hairy Big Foot got a picture of her in his wallet") induced an untimely bout of melancholia in Tyson while spawning a mini-industry of theses and opinion columns as to the appropriateness of such a joke being made to a man who grew up in an orphanage.
Douglas, by contrast, claimed he thought the joke was meant for him and it being, as he has said, "so damn true", credited the joke with inspiring that famous victory in Tokyo.
Bjorn Borg is said never to have played a Wimbledon final without first having indulged in a game of kiss-chasing around the outside courts with his racket-mender, the indefatigable Mikes Bjurn. Sports historians who have written about Michael Jordan's famous buzzer-beating shot in Game Six of his final NBA championship with the Chicago Bulls have been increasingly fascinated by the significance of a surprise "super atomic wedgie" delivered to Jordan during a time-out early in the fourth quarter by the team's kitman.
Interestingly, the Bulls' coach at the time, Phil Jackson, himself a devotee of native American mysticism, had always been inclined to deny the influence of inappropriate practical jokes on the career of his greatest player. But later, while coaching the Los Angeles Lakers, he sought to kick-start his team into turning over a four-point final-quarter deficit by starting an atomic chain wedgie with four minutes of the game left.
So it goes. Vince Lombardi, the doyen of sports coaches (and of coach-related epigrams), once said, "When the going gets tough you can't beat a good fart joke".
Popular scientist Malcolm Gladwell is working on a book dealing with the matter. The Hugging Point will have has its central thesis the notion that all disagreeable things in life can be made easy with a bit of craic.
Gladwell is awaiting the outcome of experimental work in the Irish health service involving the correct slagging of patients admitted to A&E wards and the hugging (under general anaesthetic) of those who think they are having delicate transplant operations.
