The Fine Art of Cocksurety

Piece Of Cake. When I suggested to Playboy that I write a piece about cocksurety, I had complete confidence. Not that Playboy did: The editors worried that I was inexperienced, likely to turn in something beneath their standards. I said, "Hey, Muhammad Ali was inexperienced when he fought Sonny Liston." They worried that I wasn't a "big name" writer. I said, "Once the word gets out on this story, I will be."

Meanwhile, I was wondering whether or not the Pulitzer people might extend their usual award categories to include magazine essays. I knew they'd want to once they read this, but tradition is hard to fight. I wrote them a letter so they'd have time to get the wheels rolling before the article appeared.

With a three-month deadline, I went right to work. First, I bought a motorcycle with the money Playboy had promised to pay me if they liked the story. Beautiful machine; you should have seen it. I discovered, though, that pulling wheelies at 85 mph on the boardwalk in Atlantic City is not generally a great idea. Too bad about that video arcade. Maybe I can put the damages on the expense account. I took the rest of the three months off to relax, keep out of the spotlight and shop around for a new bike.

Now that I'm down to the kind of one-day deadline I like to work with, I'm ready to talk about cocksurety.

Cocksurety is a glorious thing to see, a beautiful tool, the closest thing to immortality. It is simply--and this is straight from the dictionary--feeling perfect assurance, sometimes on inadequate grounds. Moreover, it is the unabashed confidence of the underdog, the utter presumptuousness of the man who doesn't give a damn that all the odds are against him. It is the demented give-me-freedom-or-give-me-death mentality that drives a man to attempt outrageous acts because the alternative, mediocrity, is unacceptable.

When I think of cocksurety, one case comes to mind as the quintessential example. It's a sad commentary on American cocksurety that this episode involves a Frenchman, since only 100 years ago, Mark Twain justifiably wrote of the French, "What is the meekness of the rabbit to the meekness of the Frenchman?"

Still, for daring, state-of-the-art, degree-of-difficulty-3.0-with-perfect-ten-for-artistic-impression cocksurety, no one has yet approached the performance of Albert Spaggiari. Pay attention, and keep an eye on his unparalleled talent for not neglecting the details.

Spaggiari is an ex-society photographer, a former paratrooper in Vietnam who, when he was 22, went to jail for four years for stealing the money from the till of a Saigon brothel. That was only one of his 23 jails. Much later, on a Friday evening in July 1976, Spaggiari, then 43, and several accomplices tunneled from the sewers of Nice into the (continued on page 124) Cocksurety (continued from page 85) neighboring subterranean vaults of one of the largest banks in France. Once there, they spent the entire weekend looting. They escaped with as much as $12,000,000 in gold ingots, cash and jewels. The French papers called it "Le Fric-Frac Du Siècle," the heist of the century.

Spaggiari's planning was brilliant; the follow-through was a bit weak. Within months, the team was in jail. On March tenth of the following year, Spaggiari was transferred from prison to be questioned by the magistrate in Nice's Palace of Justice. In a second-floor office where he was giving his deposition, he paused in midsentence, ran to the window, opened it and jumped. He landed on the roof of a car, hopped onto the back of a waiting motorcycle and sped away, slowing only long enough to yell "Au revoir" and thumb his nose at the judge.

A few days later, Spaggiari mailed $625 in cash to the man whose car roof had been dented in the escape. Later that year, still facing 20 years in jail if he were caught, Spaggiari wrote his autobiography, titled Sewers to Paradise. By 1982, the French police were insisting that he was dead--otherwise they would have caught him, n'est-ce pas? To put the rumors to rest, Spaggiari had his picture taken in Rio de Janeiro. He was smiling. And just so there would be no confusion, the photographs were mailed to the French newspapers. Morceau de gâteau. The man is a thief, a gangster, a terrorist and maybe even a murderer, and you've got to admire him. This is cocksurety.

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We hate show-offs, but we end up loving the cocksure. That is the power. They're the ones who prove that, at least for a short time, reality and mortality are just states of mind. They may be arrogant, but they back it up. The cocksure believe that if there is a judgment day, the Lord will throw wide the gates of heaven before them. Although they may not have been meek enough to please some, they gave Him a good show, and, after all, what else is there?

As far as I'm concerned, in this world you've got to be good, because nothing else is worth the price of admission. So why not let on? If it turns out you're wrong, you can always leave early and beat the rush. Maybe this is "that confidence of success that often induces real success" that Freud talked about. Or maybe it's just a way of raising the stakes in life so that you take a few more risks, try a little harder, get a little farther, have the courage to move on.

Take Bill Johnson, for example. At the 1984 winter Olympics, he was an unknown. Just days before the downhill ski event, he told the world, "This course was designed for me, and everyone else is here to fight for second place." Then the ex-car thief--he once "borrowed" a '56 Chevy for its engine--went out and blew the mountain away. Aced it. Afterward, when reporters asked him what the gold medal meant to him, he replied honestly: "Millions! We're talking millions."

Or consider Joe Namath. Diehard N.F.L. fans still won't forgive him for what he did in the 1969 Super Bowl. Before the game, he guaranteed that his 7--1 underdog Jets would win; he is said to have told his teammates that he'd reimburse them all if they lost money betting on themselves. Then, with millions of people waiting breathlessly for Bubba Smith to bury him six feet beneath the Jets' goal line, Namath played as though, in one writer's words, he had some "kind of moral ascendancy over all around him, some extrasensory dominance of friend and foe alike--that the Jets, as a result, could not possibly lose this one...." They didn't.

And, of course, there's Ali. In his prime, he taunted boxing fans, dared them to deny his talent, and then finally got the whole world to admit that he was the Greatest. When he said, "It's hard to be humble when you are as great as I am," we had to agree, because his boxing was such a god-awful beautiful thing to watch and because he was the eternal underdog, playing his own game no matter how badly people wanted him to be white. He bragged with style and never let on whether or not he was taking himself seriously.

In the past 20 years, though, American cocksurety has been diluted, dissipated and, more than anything else, sold out and cashed in. And that's too bad, because this country was born out of flaming cocksurety. As you'll remember from your history books, we took on the whole sun-won't-dare-set-on-it-if-it-knows-what's-good-for-it British Empire, and we did it with a goddamned farmer, George Washington, leading the way. The British had Hessians and trained soldiers and cannons and this invincible navy, and we had rubes with homemade rifles. First we declared to the world that we were independent, "Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown." Then we fought--and won.

But today, that natural, native cocksurety has been undermined by the readiness of Hollywood and Madison Avenue to dump large quantities of money onto anyone (except, as far as I can tell, writers) who shows talent and the slightest sign of cocksurety. The cocksure have never been motivated primarily by money, though it does sometimes enter their minds. Imagine Washington: "Gentlemen, if we beat the British, we'll make more money than Michael Jackson." We'd all be singing God Save the Queen before baseball games.

No, the cocksure are in it not for the money but for the thrill, the excitement, the risk, the challenge--and maybe for the glory. Of course, if someone is cocksure enough to make a name for himself, he's likely to be offered several billion dollars just to wear running shoes with slashes on the sides and several billion more simply to be seen drinking diet cola for seven seconds on a one-minute TV commercial. Such riches tend to confuse even the purest of cocksure competitors. Let's face it, God probably didn't get this kind of money for creating the universe. After several minutes of thought, the cocksure begin competing for the money first and the thrill second. And instead of cocksurety, we're suddenly confronted with 17-point marketing plans and personal managers from the Harvard Business School.

Look at Carl Lewis, maybe the fastest man in the history of the planet. "I must be sooo spectacular for people to say the things they do about me," he once said. Nice kid, but instead of being cocksure, he's the crown prince of hype. "I'm willing to wait for the so-called big bucks," he says. And he has a manager who instructs him to do such things as "emote openly" after victory to ensure his popularity. Emote openly!

So what happens? In the Olympics, Lewis wins his four gold medals but backs out of the one risky challenge he faces--to break the long-jump record. He doesn't even try, says he's feeling a little bit sore. Then the press compares him to Jesse Owens.

Even in business, you find that the cocksure have a passion for something other than profit margins. Because cocksurety inevitably clashes with corporate bureaucracy, today's cocksure business types tend to play in such wild, outlaw arenas as venture capitalism. That's where ideas that promise higher-than-average returns go eyeball to eyeball with higher-than-average risks, and the ultimate cocksure venture capitalist is a guy named Fred Adler. Adler won't consider any scheme that doesn't promise to bring him home ten times as much money as he is risking. (continued on page 149)Cocksurety(continued from page 124) Still, he says, the great venture capitalists don't do it for the money: "It's in their blood. They smell a new company to build, they scratch the ground with their hooves and they're off trying to do it again."

Unfortunately, when people think of cocksurety today, they think of "cocky little bastards" and of arrogance and conceit or, worse, that smug, overweening attitude that slick operators have when they're in a position of power. You know, these are the people who believe that they can insult our intelligence, stomp on our dignity or jaywalk through our lives because of a perverted sense of entitlement--people like John De Lorean.

As a young auto executive, De Lorean had cosmetic surgery to improve his standing among the jet set and then married a beautiful model 20 years his junior. Later, he started his heralded automobile company, watched it roll into bankruptcy and produced a $25,000 gull-winged rattletrap in the process. Then, when he was trapped by narcs in a drug deal--video-taped examining a suitcase filled with $24,000,000 in cocaine--he hired the best lawyers in the country and came out an innocent victim of Government oppression. Finally, redefining the word gall forever, he took out a newspaper ad asking the public to help him pay his legal fees.

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The best way to glean the rudiments of the fine art of cocksurety is to observe the masters. Unfortunately, those whom we would expect to be cocksure in America--how does a man get to be President, for instance, without a good dose of cocksurety?--are all too often of the De Lorean school. It has become the American way.

For too long a time, America learned about cocksurety from Richard Nixon. He had all the markings of a truly cocksure politician. He lost elections and then ran again as if he were unfazed by defeat. On occasion, he attempted admirably cocksure acts: In 1964, while a private citizen, he caught a train from Finland to Moscow in the middle of the night because, on a whim, he had decided to talk with Nikita Khrushchev. Nixon actually got there and knocked on his door. So what if Khrushchev wasn't home? Later, Nixon went down saying such things as "I am not a crook" and "When the President does it, that means it is not illegal." By the time he had buried himself, the public was confused about cocksurety and even feared it. Why do you think we voted for Jimmy Carter?

As for Ronald Reagan, he has unparalleled chutzpah, but he suffers from what might be called Nuclearophilic Insecurity Syndrome. He holds a press conference, pre-empts Magnum, P.I. and Real People and then tells the country, without even being asked, that we have enough nuclear weapons to blow up half the galaxy--but if we were to go to war with the Russians, we would get our ass kicked. (Unless, of course, he thinks the microphone isn't on, in which case he acts cocksure and jokes that the bombing starts in five minutes.) This is not cocksurety. A cocksure President would squint at the Russians, rest his finger on the button and say something like "Go ahead, make my day." Isn't that what Kennedy did? The truly cocksure don't care how big the other guy's gun is, because they know they're going to win anyway.

Further muddling the state of American cocksurety is that species known as the new male, the quintessential realization of Emerson's claim that "society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members." New men are fond of savoir-faire and nouvelle cuisine and--here the bells begin tolling--sensitivity. No one who is sensitive enough to be a new man can possibly claim to be the best or even very good; he can't even hint it, because that would be construed by his truly sensitive friends as a claim of superiority, an insensitive thing to do.

See, women don't particularly want men to be cocksure. They find the cocksure man intriguing and exciting but threatening. He may do anything: disappear for a year so he can climb K2 in his bare feet, because it's never been done, or quit his $100,000-a-year job on Wall Street to become an itinerant poet, because he's always wanted to be a poet. Most women think such things are foolish. As one female friend of mine put it, "Since you can't create life, you have to go out and prove that you can."

Nevertheless, the only way to get anywhere worth going--if you weren't born there--is to be cocksure. And if you want to be cocksure, you've got to be able to recognize cocksurety when you see it. Here are a few clues.

The cocksure, believe it or not, don't go blowing their mouths off until they are asked. Namath once said in response to accusations of immodesty, "Hell, somebody asked me a question and I told them the truth." Compare that with Hollywood Henderson, who wasn't cocksure but was a self-promoter. Before the 1979 Super Bowl, the Dallas Cowboys linebacker searched out reporters and said such things as "It's time to talk and I'm talking"; a tactic that works only in professional wrestling. Today, Namath could play a drag queen on Broadway and Archie Bunker would still bet on him to come out on top. Henderson is in jail for sexual assault involving a pair of teenagers and then trying to bribe them not to testify. The IRS auctioned off one of his Super Bowl rings to cover his back taxes.

The cocksure, when they are asked, tell the truth. When a journalist asked Babe Ruth how he felt about getting paid a higher salary than President Hoover, Ruth replied, "I had a better year than he did."

When a reporter asked Muhammad Ali whether or not he believed all men were equal, he replied, "If you want to be equal with me, you can get your own Rolls-Royce, your own house and your own million dollars." Hard to argue with that.

The truly cocksure don't ridicule the competition after they've won. When Dwight Stones won the Olympic high-jump trials in 1976, he told reporters that his competition had choked. "We got rid of the riffraff at 7'1"," Stones said. Then he went on to Montreal, wrapped one hand firmly around his throat and choked. He came in third. When he made a comeback eight years later in L.A., the press uncharacteristically treated him kindly, gave him another chance and again he choked.

The cocksure don't believe in false modesty. When Winston Churchill was once accused of being an egotist, he replied, "Of course I am an egotist. Where do you get if you aren't?" He once called one of his peers "a sheep in sheep's clothing" and "a modest man with much to be modest about." Without him, the English would now be singing Deutschland, Deutschland über alles before cricket matches.

The cocksure don't make excuses when they lose. Roberto Durán--who epitomizes Hispanic cocksurety, which is to the American version what mezcal is to light beer--was humiliated in the ring by Sugar Ray Leonard. Duran quit and walked away--total disgrace. Still, his trainer had to talk him into claiming he had a stomach-ache so that the entire nation of Panama wouldn't lynch him on his return. As far as Duran was concerned, first he should party and try to forget about it, then deal with the Panamanians. He knew he'd be back.

The cocksure don't apologize to their fans when they lose. When Gerry Cooney went 13 rounds with Larry Holmes and got taught a boxing lesson but did not disgrace himself, he told the 32,000 fans after the fight, "I tried with all my heart. I love you. I'm sorry." Sorry for what? For losing? For not trying hard enough? God knows how much money Cooney could make if he had even the slightest case of cocksurety.

The cocksure don't equivocate. Ted Turner took a run-down billboard company and built it into a communications empire with $224,000,000 in sales. His motto: "Lead, follow or get out of the way." George Steinbrenner took a baseball team overloaded with talent and ran it into the ground. His motto: "Lead, well...follow...well, no, go ahead and lead...um...get out of the way...no, no, definitely lead."

The cocksure know that accomplishments speak for themselves. When Charles Lindbergh landed in Paris after spending 33 hours and 29 minutes alone over the Atlantic Ocean, he climbed out of the Spirit of St. Louis and said softly, "Well, here we are. I am very happy." Emoting openly never entered his mind.

The cocksure are willing to bet it all when the odds are in their favor. In 1980, a man walked into Binion's Horseshoe in Vegas with two suitcases--one empty, the other containing $777,000. He bet all the money on one throw of the dice, won, filled the suitcase with his winnings and walked out. "I reckoned inflation was going to eat that money up anyway, so I might as well double it or lose it all," he said.

The cocksure are willing to chance sensational fuck-ups if the payoff is high enough. Said John Kenneth Galbraith, a Harvard economist who by definition has been wrong more often than right and has to be cocksure even to begin to think he can make sense of the economy, "If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error."

And a friend once said of Churchill, "Winston was often right, but when he was wrong, well, my God."

The cocksure hate to lose, but they know that losing is almost as easy to do as winning. Nietzsche once wrote, "Timid, ashamed, awkward, like a tiger whose leap has failed: This is how I have often seen you slink aside, you higher men. A throw you made had failed. But what of that, you dice throwers!... If great things you have attempted have turned out failures, does that mean you yourselves are--failures?" (Of course, philosophers were generally full of shit but were cocksure in a cerebral way. Sartre wrote 800 pages on being and nothingness and assumed that because he had written it, people would read it. And what's truly incomprehensible is that a lot of people did.) Dice throwers know that if you could beat the odds every time, in a short while the management would change the odds--or check the dice.

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In essence, the cocksure believe that they have whatever it takes to win. And because they've always had it in the past, they'll have it in the future.

But the cocksure are also all too aware of hubris. In Greek mythology, that was the most pernicious sin of all. When you got so full of yourself that the gods got a little put off, they might decide to rearrange your priorities, so to speak. Transmogrification would be in order: They might turn you into a spider or a pig or, if they were feeling unimaginative, simply fry your ass with a lightning bolt. The cocksure know that they have to work like hell to be the best, because as soon as they just assume that that's the case or neglect to give credit where credit is due...zap!

Psychiatrists, of course, would frown upon everything I've said. A psychiatrist would get some cocksure daredevil on his couch, eye him quizzically and say something like "Obviously, you were too attached to your mother as a child and, hence, have an overabundance of confidence. Of course, it is equally possible that you were neglected by your mother as a child and, hence, are exceedingly insecure and need constant attention." For $60 an hour, he could cure the patient of his cocksurety, provided he see him three hours a week for ten years--with time off for August.

But the cocksure would look at the psychiatrist as if he were crazy. "Cure me?" he'd say. "Cure me? Why would I want to be cured?"

Obviously, the answer to that question is that someday, the cocksure will run out of challenges or, worse, will finally lose. This seems to be one of those unfortunate side effects of life. Like Icarus, the cocksure tend to wing it too close to the sun. At best, they can land softly; at worst, they crash and burn. Still, at some time or another, the cocksure have decided that they would rather crash and burn than never fly.

As far as I'm concerned, the first step toward cocksurety is to ignore any and all risk if confronted by a payoff worth writing home about. The next step is to take a soldering iron and burn three simple rules into your subconscious:

First: Get in over your head, and then worry about whether or not you can swim.

Second: Convince yourself that it's better to have tried and failed than never to have tried at all.

Third: Don't fail.

As for me, I admit to having been a little worried at times that Playboy might not like this piece. So I called my mother. She said she was sure it must be a fine story. Like I said, piece of cake.

"We hate show-offs, but we end up loving the cocksure. That is the power."

"The best way to glean the rudiments of the fine art of cocksurety is to observe the masters."