Do you want to be right or successful?

All presidents and strategists have their particular manuals to beat their rivals, some, if you will allow us, loaded with enormous symbolism and great singularity.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
30 January 2023 Monday 06:04
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Do you want to be right or successful?

All presidents and strategists have their particular manuals to beat their rivals, some, if you will allow us, loaded with enormous symbolism and great singularity. The story that we are telling you below was revealed by one of the best tennis players of all time, the American André Aggasi, almost two years ago. At the end of the eighties, the German Boris Becker was not only the reference to beat in world tennis, but also one of the best servers of all time. His serve was so out of the ordinary for speed, direction and power that taking it back for any top ten player was a nightmare.

Their first three clashes ended with victories for Boris and with moral damage, as happens in defeats without reasons, for André. After those three consecutive defeats he felt anxiety, restlessness, anguish and fear. Boris was definitely the perfect match for him. The resistance of the system. How to measure it? His brilliant tennis reasons were not enough against the German and he therefore obsessively decided to watch videos and more videos about him. These were not the current times, the viewing exercise over and over again, as many will remember, was carried out on VHS tapes. That took up a lot of time. Rewinding movements back and forth in those analog times required great determination, even manual. Nothing comparable to these times of artificial intelligence and ChatGPT (are you sure that no one is already using it in Spanish politics?).

Agassi had reached that stage in which reason (or the demoscopia or the program) does not give more of itself. But in tennis as in politics, pessimism is always rude. For this reason, he tried to find that inspiration, like any president or strategist these days before the municipal, regional and general elections, which revitalizes the state of mind and opens a new path from which to grow again and overcome a blockade. He watched over many days and long hours as Becker served in three different ways. All of him had an imperial execution, but suddenly he noticed that Boris was making a tic with his tongue. Identical movements, same routine, and yet, before hitting the ball, there was the tongue. And that 1% that you have to know how to find and that, as in the political strategy through the analysis of maps, themes and the fight of phrases, changes absolutely everything: just about to hit the ball, when the tongue was in the center of the lips, served the center or the body; when the tongue was, on the contrary, in the left corner of the lips, the ball went to the outside on that side.

Agassi's plan after the find was structured in three steps: 1) To arrive on time you have to arrive early, keep reviewing videos to have the best starting point and govern any scenario; 2) Let no one know that I have gotten the hang of it, pretend, disguise and, if necessary, emulate. Overcoming the (difficult) temptation to successfully subtract most serves; and 3) Choosing the moment, the calendar is everything, and the concrete points choosing the few real battles to fight that determine everything. Agassi thus achieved eight consecutive victories over Becker. The German came to declare publicly that André had read his mind.

Becker's language and not his tennis, his political reasons, were the road to success. It will not be easy to decipher in this 2023 election the language of each of the participants. We do know that the economy will not be the tic that decides the general elections as, on the other hand, has been the usual trend in the previous 13 electoral processes, except in 2011. A political question will once again be the trigger. What we can, as the Wimbledon tennis classics say, is offer them a clue: in professional politics, the problem often lies in the fact that we think one thing, feel another, and then say the opposite. Do you want to be right or successful? Talking about regeneration is not the same as talking about democracy. It is not the same to talk about government than about people. It is not the same to talk about Spain than about a great country. Find Becker's tongue.

Many goalkeepers and midfielders, usually political advisers, would like Agassi to find that tic in several players. There is an equation that does not fail: if a message does not arrive, the problem is always with the sender, never with the receiver. Only if you find the core in the public issues that are debated and achieve purity in your message, you have guaranteed success. But for this you have to know the issues in all their details, legal and political. Here, as Enric Juliana would say, we have come to study. Elbow oil.

He was a Basque Minister of the Interior, but for many Basques –even those of us who did not know him– he will be remembered as a great strategist and statesman. Nice words from Patxi López in El Socialista after his death that synthesize the figure of his friend and his courage against the ETA monster. For this reason, as Rodolfo did with Rubalcaba, it is fair to dedicate the same words to him in his farewell that he wrote for Alfredo: one does not completely die as long as they remember him. In this Spain of his, ours, Rodolfo Ares Taboada will continue to be alive.