Since this question is difficult to answer in GQ, I am putting it in IMHO instead.
If an NBA player played in only 10 games in his entire career, he’d probably vividly remember every single game for many years to come.
But a very good NBA player might play 1,000 games in his career (if a career lasting well over a decade, with 82-game seasons, plus playoff games.)
Is he capable of remembering every single game he played in, with a fair amount of detail? Or would his memory banks, at a certain point, just tune out most games and only remember the most memorable games?
Don’t know about NBA players, but I can only remember a few high and low points of a few days after 35 years working.
I’d expect a pro athlete can recall the magic moments; the highest highs and lowest lows. And probably almost nothing of the rest of those games, much less every bit of all the other routine games.
Yeah, but Ted Williams only struck out 709 times in nineteen seasons of play. Considering that to have the dropped third strike rule in effect, first base has to be unoccupied or occupied with two outs, and the catcher has to fail to catch the ball cleanly, that may be the only time that ever happened. I’ll bet it didn’t happen 10 times in his whole career.
'zactly. Now if Billy had asked Ted what happened 2 at-bats later the answer would’ve been crickets. That was a famous at-bat and Billy was very far from the first person to ask Ted about it. Maybe not even the first person to ask that month.
I lived in STL during McGwire’s glory years. I saw his home run #60 from good seats on the first base side. I remember it well. I suspect McGwire does too. His next at bat? Not so much.
Nah, the Ted Williams story is impressive. I wouldn’t expect him to remember that even if it was the only time a catcher ever tagged him on a dropped 3rd strike, which I doubt to be the case. And I don’t think it was a particularly famous strikeout, either.
I’d never expect an NBA player to rattle off his stats or even one memorable moment from every one of a thousand games. Especially not several years after the fact.
Although extremely rare, some regular people do have savant-like individual date memory-recall abilities. Famously, actress Marilu Henner*!* :eek: (saw this when it first aired…)
I recall reading, back in the 80s, an article about Jimmy Connors in which the interviewer/journalist insisted that Connors could remember the details of every match he had ever played.
I once heard a story of famous bridge player who, during a tournament, called the director to say that he had played this exact hand several years earlier and proceeded to name correctly each card in each of the hands. I can assume only that whoever had prepared the boards had prepared this one to see what would happen.
Once Pete Rose was asked which NL player hit the highest percentage of fly balls. He thought about it for a few seconds and then correctly named him.
Why limit the question to pro athletes? I’m sure recall varies a great deal by individual, but I have played organized baseball/softball since I was 5 years old. I can clearly recall some moments from games that I played 40+ years ago but not all the details of any individual game I played last season. I think that is pretty much standard.
Marilu Henner is full of shit. I saw her on a TV show long ago say that someone taught her the trick. That was well before she started claiming she had eidetic memory, which is another load of crap. The trick is that you make shit up because no one is going to be able to prove what you did on a particular day 40 years ago.
There’s just no telling. SOME athletes forget games completely, as soon as they are over, and are exasperated by fans who expect them to remember epic moments as if they happened yesterday.
Meanwhile, other athletes seem to remember every pitch they every swung at, every shot they ever took, and every block they ever threw. I mean, if a writer said to Ted Williams, “I saw you strike out once, with the bases loaded, against Eddie Lopat,” Williams was liable to interject, “I remember that- it was the fifth inning at Yankee Stadium, in 1952. On a 2-2 count, Lopat threw a floater way outside, and the ump called a third strike. I couldn’t believe it.”
I’ve seen clips of her talking about it and she seemed pretty convincing.
A lot of those with eidetic ability like to claim they can tell you day of the week from any random date as Marilu does in the link above.
That’s nothing more than memorizing the perpetual calendar which I’m sure -if one wanted to- could be done by just about anybody.
When put to the test, I’ve seen Marilu recount what she did on a particular date with remarkable clarity. Now as you say it’s somewhat difficult if not impossible to definitively suss out whether what she claims actually happened as she said it but it convinced me.
On a clip from 60 Minutes, they interview others with the capacity and some said they would make a conscious effort to *file *the memories so to speak. I guess that could be the “trick” aspect of it.
I watched the clip linked above and others just now. On almost every occasion, the interviewer asked Marilu about a date on which something memorable happened. Elvis died, LA earthquake, Taxi won an Emmy award, and so on. And not that that makes it any easier, because she has to remember the date of every slightly memorable thing.
You can ask me where I was when the OJ Simpson verdict was announced and I could tell you. But I couldn’t say what I was wearing or exactly who was in the room with me (it was a classroom) or even what the date was.
Jerry Lucas, a great college and pro basketball player in the 1960s, might be one of the few who could remember many individual games. He has written a book on memory training and recited chapters from the Bible and pages of Manhattan telephone numbers to audiences.
Bill James for a while did some tracers on baseball stories told by various people. Basically these guys didn’t remember things. Basically everything becomes more vivid: it’s bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, two men out, down a run and you get a home run off Walter Johnson. The truth is more mundane. Whitey Ford did remember correctly he gave up a home run to Billy Martin after the Yankees traded him to Kansas City but he is wrong about when that game happened.
I don’t often remember much of anything mundane in the past, but when I do remember something, it’s in absurd detail. Like down to what I ate, or which direction I was facing, and things like that.