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 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.

A few years back, an online dating questionnaire asked what Olympic event I would most want to win a gold medal in. I answered the modern pentathlon without hesitation. My reasoning was straightforward: I liked that it was eclectic, not a traditional American team sport, that it rewarded both physical and mental discipline simultaneously, and that the jack-of-all-trades aspect was very appealing to me. I wrote that I fenced in college, liked cross-country skiing, and had been a decent runner, but I had also played lacrosse, hockey, and baseball, which were team sports, so I ruled them 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 was 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, 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 were 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 had 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 entirely. 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 couple of 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: a soldier 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. What I hope is that 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.