The Best American Sports Writing 2011 (41 page)

Think Picasso, Hemingway, Dvorak. Think Laird Hamilton, Chuck Yeager. And, yes, think Tyson. Consider the likelihood that these men don't possess qualities the rest of us lack, but instead have within them intense voids, empty and expansive chambers of possibility. Maybe these voids—which the men fill with what can only be called art—are innate, or maybe they're the result of damage or sacrifice or failures the artists have endured. The origin doesn't matter. Nor does the medium. True, this is a story of how much abuse the body can transcend, but it's also the story of pushing not merely the limits of skateboarding but the boundaries of the human spirit, the soul. What's most inspiring—and intimidating—about Danny has little to do with his greatness or resilience or the sheer ballsiness of his life; rather, it has everything to do with his ambivalence toward those things. While the rest of us stand in awe, rooted in the past and arrested by timidity, he climbs back to the top of the ramp. He adjusts his pads, hangs his wheels over the edge, and drops in. He throws his weight forward, leaning into gravity again and again, trying to gather the speed he needs.

FROM
WIRED.COM

Late in May 2008, perched in superb seats a few rows behind home plate at Chicago's Cellular Field, I took in a White Sox-Indians game with Sian Beilock, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago who studies what is surely, other than serious injury, the most feared catastrophe in sports: the choke.

Beilock, who not long ago played some high-level lacrosse at University of California, San Diego, traces her own interest in choking back to high school, when she discovered that during the tense, game-beginning face-offs, she more often gained control of the ball if she sang to herself, "to keep me from thinking too much." Later, in grad school, it occurred to her that if you could avoid choking by engaging your brain with singing, it followed that choking must rise from what neuroscientists like to call mechanisms—that is, systematic, causal chains of brain activity.

She has spent much of her time since then exposing and exploring those mechanisms. Her labs include a putting room where she can find a way to make virtually anyone screw up putts that were easy just moments before. Her work has brought her absurdly early tenure, a rain of prizes and grants, and a flashy book contract. She is a kind of queen of choke.

Which is what brought us to Cellular Field. I'd hate to say we were
wishing
for someone to choke; more like waiting. And given that baseball offers a hundred openings for pressure's effects, and that this was a tense game between teams vying for first place—the White Sox led their longtime division rivals, the Indians, by a game and a half—we could wait in confidence, knowing that at some point a player would "suffer," as Beilock politely phrased it, "a decrement under pressure."

The game did not disappoint. Through seven innings the pitchers dominated, and the pressure slowly rose. Then, in the eighth, the White Sox, leading 2—1, got a chance to put the game away when the Indians' pitcher C. C. Sabathia finally tired and was replaced by Jensen Lewis, a rookie, just as the White Sox were sending up their best hitters.

Lewis, perhaps suffering a bit of a decrement himself, walked the first hitter and then surrendered a double that left runners at second and third. When White Sox slugger Jim Thome, who had already homered once, came to bat, Lewis, on orders from the bench, walked him intentionally to get to the next batter.

A certain weight—the weight of great opportunity—falls upon any hitter who steps to the plate with the bases loaded. It falls heavier when the pitcher has just intentionally walked the previous batter.

Feeling this weight now was Paul Konerko, the Sox first baseman. Konerko generally hits well with runners in scoring position, batting a few points higher than his lifetime average, and he could do so in big moments: he had won Game 2 of the 2005 World Series, in fact, by homering with the bases loaded.

But Konerko was also a streaky hitter, and lately he had run cold. In fact he was having a terrible season. He was hitting just .212, and he had not homered in weeks. Now, however, he had a chance to break open an important game.

Though I was there to see a choke, I was pulling for the guy. But he had a horrible at-bat.

It was one I could relate to, for I had endured an at-bat remarkably similar to his the week before. (I play in what my wife calls "geezerball," an amateur league for those over 35.) With two runners on and my team trailing by a single run, I had done everything wrong: I took a hittable fastball for strike one, chased an unreachable curveball outside, and then stood frozen as strike three—another fastball, which you should always be ready for with two strikes—split the plate.

Now I watched with amazement as Konerko did much the same.

He had enough sense to swing at
his
first-pitch fastball, only he missed it. But after that it was carbon copy: he chased a curveball outside, then stood frozen as a heater blew by for strike three.

Now, I don't want to say Konerko
choked,
because (a) he was facing major league pitching, which is incomprehensibly nasty, and (b) I met Konerko later, and he's a tremendously likable guy, and I'd hate to hurt his feelings. Yet it seemed clear that if the tremendous pressure of this crucial at-bat had not exactly destroyed Konerko, it had affected him enough to produce a subpar performance. So I don't want to say he choked. But he gagged.

But what, really, did this mean? What had transpired in his skull to make this feared major leaguer bat like an amateur?

Even the greatest athletes sometimes choke. Take Derek Jeter. Jeter's hitting generally holds steady or even improves under pressure; he bats as well or better as strikes, outs, and base runners accrue, and his .309 batting average in postseason games is impressively close to his lifetime .317. Yet during the epic 2004 American League Championship Series, as his Yankees won the first three games and then
dropped four in a row
to allow the Red Sox to reach the World Series, Jeter hit barely .200.

Or consider Ben Hogan, one of golf's steadiest great players. On the final hole of the 1946 Masters, Hogan needed only to sink a two-foot putt to win. He completely missed the cup. In another notorious golf gaffe, Arnold Palmer, known for playing well in tight spots and being untouchable once ahead, choked the 1966 U.S. Open twice: he blew a five-stroke lead in the last four holes of regulation, and in the playoff the next day, he blew six strokes in the final eight holes, losing the tournament.

Collapses like these—classic chokes—appear to arise from the process known colloquially as "thinking too much" or "paralysis through analysis," and among cognitive scientists as "explicit monitoring." Explicit monitoring, says Beilock, is "conscious attention to normally automatized physical operations that destroys the athlete's normal fluidity."

This is the micromanaged putt, the aimed pitch, the overdirected free throw. This is the screwup your brother is trying to induce when he asks you, as you tee up, "Do you inhale or exhale on your backswing?" By consciously trying to direct a physical action that you've practiced until it's automatic, you botch it.

Bounteous research has confirmed that for polished athletes, the explicit monitoring of performance destroys performance. Beilock, for instance, demonstrated this by asking expert college soccer players to keep track of which side of which foot was contacting the ball as they dribbled through a series of pylons. When they did, they moved through the pylons more slowly and made more mistakes than they did normally. She regularly gets similar results when she asks good golfers to monitor, say, how far back they take their backswings.

"You need to monitor these mechanics while you're learning an action," Beilock notes. "But once you've learned it, you've got to leave it alone."

The classic advice for avoiding thinking too much is to "not think about it." But this is not easily done. You're better off, says Beilock, if you find something else to think about—a useful distraction, some simple mental task that occupies the mind enough to keep it from meddling.

Rob Gray, a professor of psychology at Arizona State University, demonstrated this a few years ago with an elegant two-stage experiment he conducted with high-level college baseball players in a batting cage. In the first part of the experiment, he asked the batters (whom he had already watched hit in order to establish a baseline performance) to listen for a tone while hitting so they could report where their bat was in the swing when the tone sounded. Unsurprisingly, this explicit monitoring made them hit worse. They missed more often, and their swings got measurably slower and more choppy.

Yet it was not the listening that messed them up; it was their attention to the swing. For when Gray asked the hitters to listen for a tone while batting and report merely whether the tone was high or low in frequency, the hitters swung as fluidly and hit as well as usual. Their bodies knew the hitting process well enough to do it with a distracted brain. But explicitly monitoring the process gummed it up.

Since then, Gray, Beilock, and others working such "dual-task" or "healthy distraction" experiments have shown that attending to a modestly demanding outside mental operation can reduce explicit monitoring and alleviate choking. Beilock has found, for example, that golfers under competitive pressure can prevent decrement by counting backwards to themselves while they putt.

"It's what I was doing when I sang during face-offs," says Beilock. "The simple mental task lets your body do what it already knows how to do."

Such findings have made explicit monitoring the blanket explanation of choking in sports. It's as if everyone agreed that while a bit of smarts can serve well at times—mostly for catchers, point guards, and quarterbacks—jocks had generally best leave their thinking brains in the locker.

Perhaps because she is both brain and jock, Beilock received this wisdom skeptically. As a grad student looking at choking research, it struck her that the prevailing model of performance under pressure rose from experiments that look almost exclusively at physical actions.

"Yet choking," as she points out, "is so clearly mental. If you study golf and study only the strokes, you'll have only one idea about how skills fail. But there are crucial skills in sports that rest on processes less physical. Part of sports is thinking." And there are chokes, she asserts, that arise not from overthinking but from poor thinking.

She offers evidence both anecdotal and experimental. For anecdote, consider golfer Colin Montgomerie in the 2006 U.S. Open. Montgomerie, 42 at the time and burdened with the unofficial title Best Golfer Never to Win a Major, began the tournament's last hole having just taken the lead with a gorgeous 50-foot putt.

To take the trophy he simply had to par the 18 th. He put his drive in the middle of the fairway, leaving himself a straightforward 170-yard approach shot to the green. But after pulling a 6-iron from his bag—his usual club for a 170-yard shot—he suddenly worried about hitting too long.

He put back the 6 and pulled out the shorter 7- iron—and hit short. The ball landed in deep rough. His chip landed 30 feet from the hole, and he three-putted to lose by a stroke.

An even clearer example comes from the 1993 NCAA championship basketball game. University of Michigan star Chris Webber gained possession of the ball with 11 seconds left and called a time-out—only to discover that his team had no more time-outs. The resulting technical foul helped seal Michigan's elimination.

Beilock contends that such failures come not from unwelcome attention, as explicit monitoring does, but from a deficit of needed attention. "Sports aren't cognitively static," says Beilock. "Situations change, and you need to track things and make decisions. You can't just
not
think. There's a whole skill involved in knowing not just what not to think about, but when to attend to things that need tending. You've got to be able to control what you're attending to."

At the Sox-Indians game I saw with her, this made perfect sense. A typical at-bat requires coming to the plate with a plan of attack based on the hitter's skills and the pitcher's strengths and proclivities. Most batters focus on a hittable area of the strike zone they suspect the pitcher will find at least once with a particular pitch: fastball outside, perhaps, or slider in tight. As the at-bat progresses and the hitter gains or loses advantage by getting ahead or behind in the count, he must shrink or expand his swing zone.

When hitters step out of the box between pitches, it's usually to perform this recalibration: they zoom out from their deep focus to check the count, regauge their swing zone, then step in and zoom in again. If they don't do this or they think poorly or second-guess, they're more likely to get surprised—and to swing at pitches they should take or take pitches they should swing at.

Beilock holds that such faulty thinking amounts to a different sort of choke: a disruption of quick but vital data-checks, calculations, and recalibrations that the athlete must perform to play at optimum level. It's a failure of cognition. Call it a cognichoke.

Is that what was going on with Konerko? And how did it work?

Sports psychology goes back to 1898, when psychologist Norman Triplett found that cyclists ride faster in groups than they do alone. Since then, sports psychologists have had the arena of performance and its decrements largely to themselves. No one outside jock psych seemed terribly interested in what made people screw up.

This began to change, however, in 1995, when a Stanford psychology professor named Claude Steele, working with graduate student Joshua Aronson, published a study titled "Stereotype Threat and the Intellectual Test Performance of African Americans." The paper described how Steele and Aronson knocked down by a whopping 50 percent the scores of black Stanford undergrads taking sections of the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) simply by telling them the test measured intelligence.