The Pentathlon Mindset

George Patton nearly drowned in the swimming leg.

It was July 1912, the Stockholm Olympics, and the twenty-six-year-old Army lieutenant was competing in the first modern pentathlon ever held at the Games. He had already fired his pistol, fenced, and ridden an unfamiliar horse over obstacles. Now he was in the pool for the 300-meter swim, and by the time he touched the wall, he was so spent that officials had to pull him from the water with a boathook. He went on to run the 4,000-meter cross-country course anyway, staggered through the last fifty meters, and collapsed at the finish line. He finished fifth overall, behind four Swedes, in a field of thirty-two competitors from ten nations.

Nobody remembers who won that race. Everyone who knows the story remembers Patton.

Baron Pierre de Coubertin 

Baron Pierre de Coubertin was a French educator who believed that athletic competition could do what diplomacy often could not — build character across national lines and give nations something better to do than go to war with each other. He spent years lobbying the international sporting community before finally reviving the ancient Olympic Games in Athens in 1896, the first modern Olympics in fifteen centuries. He ran the International Olympic Committee for nearly three decades after that. By 1912, when Stockholm hosted what many considered the first truly successful modern Games, Coubertin had both the credibility and the platform to introduce a new event built entirely around his own philosophy of what an athlete should be. He designed the modern pentathlon with a specific soldier in mind, not the best marksman in the army, or the fastest runner, or the most decorated equestrian. He wanted to test what he called the complete soldier: the officer who could ride an unfamiliar horse into enemy territory, fight his way out with a sword, shoot his way clear with a pistol, swim a river, and run the rest of the way to deliver his message on foot. The whole package. No single skill wins. The whole package wins.

Coubertin's phrase for the ideal athlete was débrouillard, the resourceful one, the person who figures it out. Not the best at any one thing. The one who handles whatever comes next.

I have thought about that word most of my adult life without knowing it had a name.

I got to see part of the actual Modern Pentathlon competition at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, when the events were held in Coto de Caza in Orange County (where I lived at the time). I was already fencing epee in college, so I went in with some passing knowledge of at least one discipline. That day at the Olympics is what hooked me, and it left me with the kind of confidence only a young man has: the thought that I could pick up the other four disciplines easily enough and make my own run at the Games in 1988. A few real attempts to combine riding, shooting, and swimming with fencing and running at that level knocked that confidence down fast. Each discipline alone took years to master. Doing all five well enough to compete internationally was never going to happen for a guy who'd picked up the sport as a college sophomore.

The ambition faded. The pull toward the event itself never did.

A few years back, an online dating questionnaire asked what Olympic event I would most want to win a gold medal in. My answer, without hesitation, was the modern pentathlon. My reasoning was, and remains, straightforward: I like that it is eclectic and not a traditional American team sport, that it rewards both physical and mental discipline simultaneously, and that its jack-of-all-trades aspect remains very appealing to me. I wrote that I'd done some pistol shooting and was a decent cross-country runner in high school, but I had also played lacrosse, hockey, and baseball, two of which aren't even Olympic sports (yet), so they were all ruled out.

Re-reading that answer now, I think I was describing something deeper than an athletic preference. I was describing the way I am wired.

I did not plan to spend my career in higher education fundraising. I arrived at UCI in the mid-1980s planning to be an aerospace engineer, changed my major to political science and economics my senior year, moved from California to Boston, then to the Midwest, eventually back to California, and back to the East Coast again. I turned down a policy analyst position in Sacramento because the pay was untenable, and ended up taking a job in the development office at UCI because a man I met in an interview saw something worth trying. That first position required me to understand the university's mission well enough to determine how strangers' interests relate to the mission, manage relationships with very different kinds of people, and solve organizational problems with no obvious precedent. None of those things were on my engineering syllabus.

What followed was twenty years of adding legs to the pentathlon. I managed IT departments, special events teams, accounting staff, and alumni communications under the same organizational umbrella. I coached youth baseball while leading a Scout troop. I flew small planes for a while and sailed when I could. I read history for pleasure and studied it seriously enough that it changed how I think. None of these things appear on the same résumé line. All of them turned out to matter.

The pentathlon athlete cannot afford to love any single discipline so much that the others suffer. The fencer who trains ten hours a day and neglects the swim will finish well down the leaderboard, no matter how elegant his footwork. The same goes for the manager who knows his software cold but cannot read a room, or the parent who coaches flawlessly but forgets to just sit with his kid.

There is a particular frustration that comes with this kind of mind, and I should be honest about it. Specialists get to be the best at something. The person who does one thing with total dedication eventually becomes the authority, the go-to, the name people call. The generalist is rarely that person. He is usually the one called when the specialist's answer does not quite fit the problem.

That is a harder identity to carry. It requires making peace with being very good at a wide range of things and probably not the best at any of them. If you are wired to achieve, to produce, to check the box at the end of every day, the pentathlon mindset can feel like a permanent state of almost. Five disciplines, none of them mastered.

My son Teddy is wired the opposite way, and I say that with nothing but admiration.

From the time he could grip a bat, baseball was it. He played Little League, Babe Ruth, travel ball — spring, summer, fall, and winter which is entirely possible when you grow up in Southern California. He messed around with a soccer ball for a season or two and picked up one of my lacrosse sticks a handful of times. But he always came back to the diamond. It was neither indecision nor a lack of curiosity. It was love. Pure, durable love for one thing.

He was good enough that the choice paid off. Not just statistically good, but genuinely good. The kind of good that comes from ten thousand hours freely given because the ten thousand hours never felt like work.

In his senior year of high school, he mentioned for the first time that he wished he had tried another sport competitively. By then, the calendar had run out on that particular door. I understood the feeling, the wistful glance at the road not taken, but I never thought he had made the wrong call. He had found his discipline early and gone deep. That is its own form of courage.

I have thought about that difference between us more than once. He was built for the pentathlon, no more than I was built for one event. We are just built differently. Neither of us had it wrong.

Patton apparently felt this acutely. After Stockholm, he threw himself into fencing with obsessive focus. He hired a French maître d'armes for private instruction and trained harder than anyone on the post. His fencing improved dramatically. What he could not do, what the pentathlon's design would not allow, was let that improvement define him at the expense of everything else. The event kept pulling him back to the whole.

Thirty years later, the pentathlon mindset showed up in a Belgian crossroads town called Bastogne.

It was December 1944. The Germans punched through Allied lines in the Ardennes in what would become the Battle of the Bulge, encircling the 101st Airborne Division and threatening to split the American and British forces. When Eisenhower convened an emergency commanders' conference at Verdun on December 19, most of the men in the room were still trying to understand what had happened. Patton was not. He stood up and told the assembled generals he could attack with three divisions in forty-eight hours. Eisenhower's deputy barely suppressed a laugh. Omar Bradley told him to give himself some leeway. Patton said he could start as soon as he left the meeting.

He kept the promise. Within forty-eight hours, he had wheeled the entire Third Army, more than 250,000 men and hundreds of tanks, ninety degrees from an eastward campaign in the Saar, over icy roads in the worst winter weather in fifty years, and driven north into the German flank. His 4th Armored Division broke through to Bastogne on December 26, ending the siege. By January 16, the Bulge was sealed.

What made the promise credible, even though it sounded like theater, was that Patton had seen it coming. His intelligence officer, Colonel Oscar Koch, had briefed him on December 9 about a suspicious concentration of German panzer divisions that had gone quiet on the Third Army's front. Koch told Patton the enemy was favored if they struck. Patton's response was to keep his Frankfurt offensive on track and quietly order his staff to begin sketching contingency plans for exactly this scenario. When the Germans hit on December 16, Patton already had the maps drawn. The pivot that stunned every other commander in Europe had been sitting in a folder for a week.

Patton understood something about the men around him that made the whole thing possible. He said it plainly: "Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity."

Koch had surprised him. Given a mission and the latitude to pursue it, the colonel found what no other Allied intelligence officer was looking for — and handed Patton the week he needed.

That is not battlefield improvisation. That is the débrouillard in full: see the whole board before anyone else does, run the scenarios while others are still focused on the objective in front of them, and be ready to deliver the message on foot when the horse goes down.

I took a professional strengths assessment a few years ago, the kind that identifies where your natural talents cluster. My top five came back: Strategic, Achiever, Ideation, Responsibility, Intellection. Three different domains represented in five results. My mind apparently investigates possibilities, produces output, generates connections between disparate things, takes psychological ownership of commitments, and keeps a constant internal hum of reflection running in the background.

Reading those results, I recognized the pentathlon immediately. Not one domain. Not one discipline. Five distinct capabilities from three different areas, all pulling toward the same finish line.

The Gallup description of Ideation stopped me cold. It said people with this talent are fascinated by ideas because they can find connections between seemingly disparate phenomena. That is the pentathlon in a sentence. The whole sport exists because a 19th-century Frenchman looked at shooting, fencing, swimming, riding, and running and saw that they were not five unrelated things. They were one thing: soldiers who could handle whatever came next.

I think about this when I think about what I want to pass along to my grandchildren. The world they are growing up in is ferociously good at identifying and rewarding specialization early. Schools sort children by aptitude. Algorithms serve them more of what they already engage with. Travel teams recruit eight-year-olds and develop that one skill relentlessly.

What I hope for them is not that they resist any of that. If one of them finds a diamond the way Teddy did, I want them to run toward it with everything they have. I hope they get enough exposure first. Enough different horses to ride, enough cold rivers to consider, so that when they do commit, they know it is the right thing and not just the first thing.

Some of them will go deep. Some will go wide. The pentathlon does not require everyone to compete.

Patton collapsed at the finish line in Stockholm. He got up. He went to France. He won the war.

The pentathlon did not beat him. It made him.

That is what I hope for my grandchildren. Not a finish line where one skill wins, but a life with enough legs under it that when something knocks them down, they get up anyway.

The Right Galaxy for the Right Movie (REVIEW)

The Mandalorian and Grogu
Directed by Jon Favreau

My rating: 3¾ of 5 stars

My step-daughter gifted me the ticket. She knows I am a fan of old-school Star Wars and figured I'd appreciate the excuse to go. She was right. To be honest, after The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker, I have felt like Disney Star Wars has something to prove to me. The good news is that I just needed a good seat so they could show me the proof.

Favreau and Filoni earned real goodwill with the first two seasons of The Mandalorian on Disney+. They took a franchise that had lost its footing and reminded everyone what Star Wars could feel like when the people making it cared about character. Season three was uneven. The show spread itself thin and lost the intimacy that made the early episodes work. But the foundation they built was solid. I walked in with that history in mind.

The movie delivers. However, if you read the critical reception, you'd think that was somehow a problem.

The complaints run together after a while. Too simple. Low stakes. Doesn't advance the larger story. My answer to each: that was the design. This film wasn't built to carry franchise weight. It was built to spend two hours with characters audiences already love and give those characters something worth doing. Judging it against The Empire Strikes Back is like penalizing a relief pitcher for not throwing nine innings. He came in, threw strikes, and did the job he was asked to do.

The sequel trilogy is worth a brief detour, because the contrast matters. Those three films were genuinely trying to move the story forward, to land a forty-year franchise, to satisfy an impossible set of competing demands. Together they felt like a franchise committee that couldn't agree on a direction. The seams showed badly. The Mandalorian & Grogu carries none of that. It knows what it is.

Pedro Pascal plays Din Djarin with the same constrained warmth that made the first two seasons work. Favreau pushed him further here, and the physicality shows. Where Din Djarin operates from stillness and economy, the Hutt Twins fill every room they're in. Jabba's cousins, massive and imperious, they operate from a palace on Nal Hutta with the casual cruelty of people who have never once doubted their own importance. Their scheme is a double-cross layered inside a favor. They send Mando to rescue Rotta while planning to have him deliver the boy straight into a trap. When that unravels, they don't rage. They pivot to humiliation, forcing Din's helmet off in front of his captors because they know exactly what it costs him. It's a deliberate act, and it hits harder knowing that Season 3 was largely about Din redeeming himself for a previous helmet removal. That's smart villain writing. They're not just obstacles. They understand their enemy well enough to hurt him in the right place.

Favreau built the entire film for the largest available screen, designing shots using an Apple Vision Pro app that simulated the full IMAX aspect ratio on set. It shows. AT-ATs on an ice planet. A gladiator pit on Nal Hutta. Over half the film expands to fill the IMAX frame, and those are the sequences that justify the trip to the theater. Then there's Sigourney Weaver. She plays Colonel Ward, a former Rebel Alliance fighter pilot now operating inside the New Republic, and she hadn't even watched the show before Favreau called. She watched it, fell in love with it, and signed on. That matters. Weaver built her career on the best science fiction has produced: Alien, Avatar, Galaxy Quest. Serious actors don't attach themselves to projects they don't believe in. Favreau knew exactly what her presence would signal. When someone with that résumé shows up in your Star Wars movie, it tells the audience that the people making it are trying to get things right.

The part that stayed with me came in the second act, when Mando is poisoned, and Grogu takes over.

Three seasons of television, four if you count The Book of Boba Fett, built on one dynamic: the Mandalorian protects the child. Din Djarin finds Grogu, loses him, gets him back, and spends most of the series putting himself between that small green creature and everything trying to harm him. Then Mando takes a wound from a Dragonsnake and tells Grogu to leave. Grogu doesn't. He stays behind, hides his father, and goes looking for a remedy on his own, finding it through a stranger willing to help. When the roles reverse, and Grogu has to show up, to act, to refuse the order to go, the film earns something no plot mechanic could manufacture. Favreau and Filoni built toward that moment across two seasons. The movie is where it lands.

Grogu's growth doesn't feel sudden. It feels accumulated. He's been learning slowly over years of storytelling. The second act isn't a twist. It's a recognition. You're watching a character arrive somewhere he's been heading for a long time.

There's something familiar in that feeling. Pride mixed with surprise when someone you've watched grow up handles a hard moment without being asked. The relationship between Din Djarin and Grogu has always been built on a sense of parenthood more than anything else. When Grogu refuses to leave, you recognize something true: you don't raise someone and then get to be surprised when they show up.

Any parent watching that second act knows exactly what Favreau is reaching for. You spend years being the one who protects. Then the child grows into someone who protects back. Judge a thing for what it set out to do. That's always been my rule. But this film reminded me it applies to people too. Not an accident. That's the whole point of raising someone.

Is The Mandalorian & Grogu a great film? No. The plot is thin in places, but it doesn't pretend otherwise. However, it's a solid one. The bar was a summer movie that rewards years of investment in these characters. It clears that bar.

For most of the critics who've piled on, that wasn't enough. I think they were judging the wrong thing.

The Mandalorian & Grogu set out to make you care about two characters you already loved, earn a moment of real growth, and send you back into the summer heat feeling like it was worth your afternoon. This blog has always been about showing up: for the people you love, for the stories worth telling, for the moments that matter even when nobody's keeping score. Grogu showed up for his father when it counted. That's the whole point.

Read more of my reviews.

The Principle We Keep Forgetting

Birthdays have a way of making me philosophical, whether I want them to or not. This one, I'm sitting in my office on a Friday, the building is quiet with almost no one here, and I can't shake the feeling that the number on my cake keeps pulling me toward a harder question about the country we're living in right now.

We're in a semiquincentennial year. In less than three months, America turns 250. There are parades being planned, a Navy fleet review scheduled for New York Harbor on the Fourth of July, baseball's All-Star Game booked for Philadelphia, the cradle of the whole thing. The bunting is going up. The speeches are being written. And underneath all of that, if you're paying attention, a harder question keeps trying to get a word in edgewise.

What, exactly, are we celebrating?

On June 4, 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower stood before the graduating class of the United States Naval Academy and said something that, in a different era, might have seemed too obvious to bother saying. He reminded those young officers, men who had deliberately chosen a life of service, that American democracy rested on three things: personal liberty, human rights, and the dignity of man.

Three things. Not a party platform. Not a policy agenda. Three principles that Ike believed were so foundational, so basic (to use his word), that they were the binding matter of our entire civilization.

That quote has been following me around. The third one is what stops me.

The dignity of man.

Liberty gets the speeches. Rights get the lawsuits. But dignity? Dignity just quietly sits there, the least defended of the three, and the one we seem most willing to erode without even noticing we've done it.

What gives that observation its weight is what Eisenhower had actually seen. He commanded armies against a regime that had decided, systematically and with great bureaucratic thoroughness, that certain categories of people did not possess dignity. That those people's lives did not have weight. That their suffering was acceptable, or irrelevant, or frankly useful. He had walked through what that looks like at the end: the liberated camps, the skeletal survivors, the scale of what happens when the dignity of man is removed from the list of non-negotiables. And then he went home, became president, and thirteen years later stood in front of a graduating class and said: remember, this is basic. This is the foundation. Don't lose it. He wasn't being rhetorical. He was being precise. The man had receipts.

I've visited the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas, with my daughter. Two self-avowed history nerds on something close to a pilgrimage, en route to Philadelphia, where she was starting medical school. I remember standing in front of a display about Ike's farewell address and feeling the particular weight that comes from being in a place where someone's actual life is laid out in front of you. His letters. His mother's Bible. His uniform. The library sits right there in Eisenhower's hometown, modest and serious, very much like the man it honors.

What struck me then, and what strikes me even more now as this anniversary year unfolds, is the gap between the man and the moment we're living in. Eisenhower was not a perfect president, and he would have been the first to say so. But he understood something that feels almost quaint in the current political climate: that the people on the other side of an argument are still people. That disagreement doesn't require dehumanization. That you can fight hard for what you believe and still, at the end of it, extend the basic courtesy of acknowledging another person's dignity.

I don't think that's where we are right now.

This spring, the United Nations' top human rights official issued a formal warning about what he called the "growing dehumanization" of migrants in the United States. Federal agents are conducting immigration enforcement operations in hospitals, schools, and churches. Parents are detained without information about where they're being held, leaving children at home uncertain whether they'll come back. The UN High Commissioner described his astonishment at the "routine abuse and denigration" that has become, in his words, normal. Amnesty International, preparing for the World Cup that comes to this country in June, characterized what it found here as a "human rights emergency."

I'm not going to turn this into a policy argument. That's not what this is. You can hold a dozen different views on immigration law and enforcement and the proper role of the federal government, and reasonable people do. What you can't do is look at a child wondering where their parent is and conclude that the person who was taken doesn't possess dignity. That their suffering is an acceptable variable in someone else's political equation. Eisenhower had seen that logic carried to its endpoint. That's why he stood up in front of those officers in 1958 and said: remember, this is basic. Don't lose it.

And yet that's the direction the drift seems to be going, and not just on immigration. Freedom House just recorded the nineteenth consecutive year of global decline in democratic freedom. Politicians now aim the word "enemies" at fellow citizens with increasing ease. People get sorted into categories of the worthy and the unworthy, the real Americans and the not-quite-Americans, with the line shifting depending on who's drawing it that week. We're preparing to celebrate 250 years of a republic built on the proposition that all men are created equal, and the conversation underneath the bunting has a very different character.

Years ago, I lost someone I cared deeply about to a sudden illness. Yoko had been my assistant for nearly a decade: my partner, my protector, my work mom, and my dear friend. When she died without warning, the absence she left was enormous, and one of the things I kept bumping into in the grief was how much of what she gave me was simply the daily, unremarkable gift of being treated with dignity. She saw the whole person, not just the professional. She anticipated what I needed before I knew I needed it. She made room for me to be a complete human being at work, flawed and tired and occasionally very wrong about things. I remember one afternoon, in the middle of a stretch when I was running on empty and short with everyone around me, she set a bottle of Coke Zero on my desk without a word and closed the door on her way out. No commentary. No judgment. Just the quiet signal that she saw what was happening, and it was okay. That's what dignity looks like when it's not performing.

That's a small-scale version of what Eisenhower was describing. Not grand declarations, but the practice of it. The daily decision to treat the people around you as people, not as obstacles or instruments or demographic categories or enemies, but as human beings who possess the same irreducible worth you'd like to think you possess yourself.

When I think about what made Yoko extraordinary, it wasn't that she agreed with me. She didn't, plenty of times. It's that she never let a disagreement become a diminishment. There's a whole leadership philosophy hiding in that sentence, and I've spent years trying to live up to it.

Eisenhower was speaking specifically to officers, men who would spend their careers ordering others into harm's way and, when necessary, being ordered there themselves. The military understands that the person beside you, the person under your command, is not interchangeable. Their life has weight. Their suffering is real. Mission, hierarchy, and discipline are all essential, but they function, at their best, in service of people. Not the other way around.

On this birthday, I think about what I've tried to pass on. Not the obvious lessons, which are easy to name. The quieter ones. The ones I hope stick, even though I'm never quite sure they did.

When Ted was pitching Little League one afternoon and struggling, I walked out to the mound in the wrong mood and said exactly the wrong thing. I was so focused on the performance that I momentarily forgot the person. He knew it. I knew it. We've laughed about it since, but the lesson went in deep, into me more than into him. Parenting teaches you, over and over again, that dignity isn't a reward you hand out when someone has earned it. It's the starting condition. You begin from a place of respect and work from there, through the hard conversations and the disappointments and the long silences and the sudden unexpected moments of grace.

That's what I want my kids to understand, and what I've tried to model, not always successfully. That dignity isn't something you perform for an audience. It's something you practice when no one is watching. When it's inconvenient. When you're losing the argument. When the other person hasn't, by your estimation, done anything to deserve it.

We've become quite skilled, as a culture, at winning arguments. We're much worse at keeping the person intact while we do it. The argument can be correct, and the relationship still irreparably damaged. We announce our commitments to human rights while treating the specific humans before us as props in our own narrative.

Ike's three principles are worth reading in order. Liberty is what we're free to do. Rights are what we're protected from. But dignity is what makes the other two mean anything at all. Without it, liberty becomes license and rights become weapons. Dignity is the premise, the thing you have to believe about a person before any of the rest of it holds.

In three months, we're going to stand in Philadelphia and celebrate 250 years of a country founded on the idea that certain truths are self-evident. That all men are created equal. That they are endowed with rights that can't be taken away. That's worth celebrating. It's also worth asking, on a birthday in a semiquincentennial year in a spring that feels more complicated than most, whether we still believe it. Not as a slogan. As a practice. As a daily choice about how we treat the person in front of us, regardless of where they came from or what side of the line they're on.

I drove through Abilene on a hot July afternoon with my daughter, taking photos as memories, and I lingered in the room with Eisenhower's letters longer than she probably wanted to. There's something in those letters, in the care of the language and the attention to the person being addressed, that you don't see much of anymore. A five-star general writing to a grieving mother with the same deliberate respect he'd bring to a letter to a head of state. He called it basic. He was right. It's also, apparently, the hardest thing in the world. 

But it's not nostalgia. It's a standard. One we set for ourselves once, and can set again.

—

"Basic to our democratic civilization are the principles and convictions that have bound us together as a nation. Among these are personal liberty, human rights, and the dignity of man."

— President Dwight D. Eisenhower, U.S. Naval Academy Commencement, June 4, 1958