Iain Dowie coined the word bouncebackability in the 2003-04 Premier League Football season when describing how his Crystal Palace team had gone from the fringes of relegation in December to winning promotion through the play-offs in May.
The capacity to overcome setbacks and to bounce back is rightly held up as a virtue but it's often talked about over longer periods of time. Coming back from losing a game in sport, having an injury, being fired from a job, navigating a failed relationship and so on. However, this trait is equally if not more powerful when applied in the moment.
Like with many traits, sport is one of the best mediums to convey and obverse them in their more raw and overt forms. That might indeed be one of the main reasons sport is so captivating to so many people. In a team sport even the star player can sometimes fall into taking their foot off the gas, taking a day off and not bringing 100%. When it comes to one-on-one competition this is more difficult to do. There is no one to hide behind since you take almost all the blame for your failures. No other sport forces this level of intensity more than fighting.
There are occasions when a fighter gives up in a fight. Perhaps they've been injured, beaten down, perhaps their stamina is failing them and they feel like they're drowning under the spotlight and the pressure. But quite commonly they will give up for psychological reasons. Specifically when they feel like they’re outgunned by their opponent. If multiple rounds have passed where they have been outclassed and even embarrassed then the thought of continuing in that vein would be humiliating at best and extremely painful at worst. But these are precisely the moments where being able to reset your mind is a superpower. Much of this comes down to the human brain’s tendency to see things in terms of trends, stories and narratives. The person is not thinking about the present moment, they are thinking about the story of the fight, and that story is a graph moving swiftly downwards. Rather than seeing the trend line though, it’s better to see it simply as an isolated point, one without a backstory or series of events leading to it.
Fostering and fuelling momentum is tantamount to tightrope walking: it’s delicate and tenuous, like the shaking steering wheel of an ever accelerating car. To stumble or falter is not simply to slow down, but to crash. Bouncing back from minor setbacks that dent your momentum is therefore essential. To enter each round anew, to exist in each sequence, each stanza, each sentence of a conversation even after stumbling over your words prior to that, these are the constituent parts of Bouncebackability.