Youth is indeed a wonderful thing and may be wasted on the young, as British author George Bernard Shaw said sometime before he died at age 94.
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But glory, in many cases, is an altogether different matter.
Claude Monet didn’t even begin his famed water lilies series until his 70s. Verdi composed the opera “Otello” at 73 and “Falstaff” at 80. Sophocles completed the final plays of his “Oedipus” cycle well into his 80s. Shaw himself won the Nobel Prize in literature at 69.
Then again, it’s hard to imagine Nadia Comaneci, who won the women’s all-around gymnastics gold medal as a 14-year-old at Montreal in 1976, scoring a perfect 10 on the balance beam in Atlanta this summer. Or Bill Gates dreaming up his “computer on every desk and in every home” concept (which grew into monolith Microsoft Corp.) as a retiree.
Clearly, Orson Welles was at his peak at 26, when he created the most popular movie ever made: “Citizen Kane.” He spent the rest of his life chasing–and failing to recapture–that youthful inspiration.
As Chicago is witnessing in the National Basketball Association playoffs between the Bulls, the oldest team in the league, and the Orlando Magic, one of the youngest, there is always a tension between the advantages of youth versus those of age and experience.
The intriguing part is that throughout history and in a range of human endeavors, youth has clearly been the prime factor in achievement in some instances and age obviously has had the edge in others. The tricky part is knowing when and how to capitalize on the strengths of each.
Today, the age-old question is playing out in politics, as Bob Dole seeks to use his experience as a foil to the relative youth of Clinton–who is, of course, trying to use youth to his advantage against Dole. Meanwhile, U.S. employers are try to justify getting rid of older workers as an even trade for the less-expensive, more flexible younger work force.
It even filters down to everyday issues such as child care: Do I get the 21-year-old former camp counselor who can play tag with the kids but also likes to stay out dancing until 4 a.m.? Or the 65-year-old widow who raised six kids of her own and is more responsible than Mother Teresa but likes to knit while the kids watch TV?
As for basketball players, of course, no one, except maybe some Orlando trash talkers, considers the likes of Michael Jordan (33), Dennis Rodman (35) and Scottie Pippen (30) ready for the easy chair. It’s simply that there are certain advantages to being 24 or 23, like Magic stars Shaquille O’Neal and Anfernee Hardaway.
“It takes longer for an older athlete to recover from a game or hard workout,” said Michael Pollock, director of the Center for Exercise Science at the University of Florida in Gainesville.
“Another factor is staying injury-free, which is easier for the younger athlete whose muscles and ligaments tend to be more flexible and able to bounce back easier.”
Jordan’s personal trainer has asked his famous client to face the physiological facts and has encouraged Jordan to work out harder and earlier each day.
“We changed the order of exercises and how much time Michael has to rest between sets,” said Tim Grover, who has supervised Jordan’s training since the glory years of the early 1990s.
Still, exercise scientists contend that an athlete may actually be stronger in some ways in his 30s than 20s.
“There is growing evidence that muscle endurance peaks in the 30s if elite-level training is continued,” said William Evans, director of the Noll Physiological Research Laboratory at Penn State University and members of several blue-ribbon task forces for the National Institute on Aging. “Players like Jordan and (Dennis) Rodman can be in better shape to handle a long, hard game running up and down the court than anyone else on the floor. Marathon runners don’t run world-record times until their mid- to late 30s.”
Evans said most NBA players, by about age 30, will lose a measure of quickness because of reduced “fast-twitch muscle fibers.” That’s why most sprint records in track are set by athletes in their 20s. However, physical conditioning helps retard the process. Grover said Jordan worked out more intensely than ever during this past offseason.
Nolan Ryan, who followed a strict exercise and diet plan during his 25-year baseball career, threw his seventh no-hitter when he was 44, striking out players who weren’t even born when he broke into the major leagues as a pitcher. George Foreman shunned his beloved cheeseburgers and sought the services of a battery of personal exercise consultants long enough to win the heavyweight boxing championship at 46.
There’s also something to be said for experience under pressure, said Evans.
“An NBA player isn’t likely to peak as a complete player until his late 20s or early 30s,” he said. “It takes that long to get your body strong enough to withstand the long grind of a season, but more importantly to hold up under the psychological stress.
“There’s a wisdom in knowing what your body can do, whether you should slam the ball or hit the fall-away jump shot, that comes with maturing. Older players are much better at being able to look beyond a loss and be mentally prepared for the next game. Younger players tend to dwell on the defeat and that affects the signals from the brain to the muscles.”
This competition–pitting the younger against the older–has bedeviled the human race for millennia, running through politics, business, academia, science, art and, of course, sex.
Older men have dated younger women since, well, Adam and Eve. Nowadays, some may consider such a linkage a tradeoff, of female sexuality for male success and stability.
“A girl has to be crazy these days to go out with a guy under 30,” a University of Texas junior named Laurie recently complained on the Internet. “It’s a drag when a guy is still living with his parents, still in school and broke all the time. Men over 30 are better lovers. They know what they’re doing.”
As for pursuits in which youth has the distinct edge, consider chess and mathematics in which, for reasons not yet fully understood by neuroscientists, youngsters have a mental agility to solve complex problems that cloud the minds of their elders.
Bobby Fischer, born in Chicago in 1943, was, at 15, the youngest chess player in the world ever to attain the rank of grand master.
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At 29, when he beat world champion Boris Spassky, 35, of the Soviet Union, Spassky complained about Fischer’s monomania.
“I have a wife and a child. I read Tolstoy. I cannot play with Fischer,” Spassky moaned. “All I want to do, ever, is play chess,” retorted Fischer.
One of the world’s greatest mathematical minds, Srinivasa Ramanujan, born in southern India in 1887, started teaching himself at age 12 by borrowing books from older students. Obsessed, young Ramanujan used unorthodox means to produce an incredible outpouring of mathematical proofs that still influence fields as diverse as computer science and modern numbers theory.
Ramanujan died at 32, burned out by bad diet and working 24 hours at a stretch.
Alexander the Great was 20 when he became king of Macedonia. By 32, he had conquered the known world. Lamentably, he suffered from another excess of the young: partying. He died 10 days after what historians politely call “a prolonged banquet and drinking bout.”
The modern world has not dulled youth’s pursuit of this particular excess, but some of today’s college students are also acquiring cutting-edge skills that set them apart from graduates of even a decade earlier.
“It used to be older employees were the ones with experience,” said Eric Greenberg, director of management studies for the American Management Association. “Now it’s the ones coming out of college with computer knowledge that have the advantage. They are bypassing the managers in the workplace who handwrote their college term papers.”
Greenberg said the best managers–young or old–are “multi-specialists,” such as an information specialist who can help run a business.
“Michael Jordan is a multi-specialist,” said Greenberg. “He is an all-star on both ends of the court, while Shaquille O’Neal hasn’t learned defense well enough to dominate the way he should with his superior body. But he’s young and he can learn.”