Mind Gym: An Athlete's Guide to Inner Excellence by Gary Mack & David Casstevens

Author:Gary Mack & David Casstevens
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
Published: 2002-06-02T14:00:00+00:00

BETWEEN THE EARS

What you are thinking, what shape your mind is in, is what makes the biggest difference of all.

—WILLIE MAYS

Competitive golf is played mainly on a five-and-a-half-inch course: the space between your ears.

—BOBBY JONES

Oftentimes an athlete will go into a performance nosedive. In sports psychology, one means of investigating what happened and why is to retrieve the equivalent of the black box and voice recorder.

I slid the video into the slot and pressed the play button. The major league pitcher seated in my office recognized the figure on the big-screen TV—it was himself. As he stood on the mound and delivered a warm-up pitch, then another, the sights, sounds, feelings, and emotions of that unpleasant day began coming back to him. On the screen, the leadoff batter stepped lightly into the box. Settling in, bat waving back and forth, he turned his eyes toward the figure sixty feet, six inches away.

I then asked the pitcher what he was thinking at that moment, just before the game began.

“I didn’t have very good stuff in warm-ups,” he began. “I was thinking ‘I hope I don’t walk this guy.’”

What else?

As he spoke I almost could hear the dread rising in his voice, like water in a flooding basement. “He’s really quick. If he gets on, he’ll probably take second. Our catcher’s arm’s not that great. If he steals second there’s a good chance they’ll score, and we haven’t been very good coming from behind …”

“Listen to yourself. Listen.”

The pitcher grinned sheepishly. At the time, he hadn’t been aware of his negative thinking. Now he was hearing himself, in his own words, laying out a scenario for defeat. And he hadn’t thrown his first pitch! Is it any wonder he performed poorly?

Then, I asked what he could have been thinking.

The pitcher studied his image on the screen. “I’ve got good control of my fastball…” One positive thought led to another. “Even if I walk him, I can keep the ball down and get the next guy to hit into a double play … Don’t worry about the batter … One pitch at a time … Just focus, relax. Hit the mitt…”

We all have conversations going on inside our heads. I call it self-talk. Every athlete hears two competing voices. One is a negative critic, and the other is a positive coach. Which voice we listen to is a matter of choice.

Golfer Arnold Palmer kept this saying in his locker:

If you think you are beaten, you are

If you think that you dare not, you don’t

If you’d like to win, but you think you can’t,

It’s almost certain you won’t.

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