“My goal in life,” says Malcolm Gladwell in an interview with Bill Simmons on ESPN, “is to get to the place that I can take the same idea and just repackage it over and over again, like Bruce Willis did with “Die Hard,” or Bill O’Reilly does with the whole thing about being rich, white, male and entitled.”
Gladwell, author of Outliers, The Tipping Point, Blink, and countless New Yorker articles, has made a career out of tearing apart the idea that people can “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” in the way we’re all accustomed to thinking about it (for more on this, see The Rumpus’ interview with Gladwell). He is kidding about the repackaging, of course, but talking to Simmons seems to bring out something new in him, something fundamentally un-New Yorkerish, something akin to watching one of the best minds of a generation argue with a stranger at a bar after three or four beers. The result is that he’s more brilliant. He still wants to look at what surrounds those who are deemed “great,” but in this setting, he relishes gossiping about their personalities, which is somehow more informative.
Here’s an example: Simmons argues that the boxer Larry Holmes failed to be great largely due to being sandwiched in time between Muhammed Ali and Mike Tyson. Gladwell isn’t having it. Holmes failed to do anything great for the sport of boxing because he kind of sucked as a personality, ” (T)his is a man who spent almost all of his boxing winnings acquiring real estate in Easton, Pa. … Is there anything more depressing than people with money but no imagination?”
Gladwell offers Rick Faldo as an example that might work in place of Larry Holmes, but it’s because of his personality. Faldo was a golfer from around 1990 who had no great rivals but whose “ex-girlfriend once destroyed his Porsche with a 9 iron” and whose favorite band, Gladwell guesses, would be Joy Division. If he, says Gladwell, could have gone up against Tiger Woods (favorite band: Hootie and the Blowfish) in the late 90’s, “all of a sudden Faldo gets immeasurably magnified by the comparison.” Faldo would be a “foil,” and by being a “foil,” he could become great.
He also talks about getting hit on by Jennifer Aniston, but you probably wouldn’t care about that, would you?
