Archive for Sports Psychology
Learning From Bubba
Posted by: | CommentsIf you are into golf at all, you had to love the final round of the Masters yesterday. I was bummed that I missed it, because I really enjoy watching Bubba Watson play. He plays the game of golf the way I like the game of basketball to be played – aggressive, free-flowing, fun. His shot from the woods in the final playoff hole was a perfect reflection of that.
From all accounts, he is a different character and a Christian. He doesn’t take lessons or have a particular instructor. His swing isn’t ‘perfect.’ His game certainly unconventional. And yet, he is good. And when he wins, he is humble and full of joy. Really, he seems like a guy who is refreshing and easy to root for.
I was actually thinking about this before he even won the tournament, but wouldn’t Tiger Woods do well to learn from Bubba? (And not just Bubba I should add, but many others on the tour.) If you watched Tiger golf this week, you have to know what I am referring to. For unlike Bubba, Tiger was an absolute mess. He wasn’t free-flowing, but clearly over thinking things and putting way too much pressure on himself to perform. I don’t think I saw him relaxed one time the entire weekend. Everything was forced. Nothing flowed. Mentally he looked like a wreck. And his game reflected that.
Naturally, Tiger will say that is because he wasn’t playing well. But I would beg to differ. I think it is the other way around, particularly when you are as good as Tiger. When you have the physical tools to perform, it is the mental that most often holds you back. As concerns Tiger in this year’s Masters, I could tell from his very countenance that he wasn’t going to play well. You could see the tension, the pressure, the need to win.
And in sports (and especially in golf) this is a recipe for absolute disaster. For the more you worry about winning, the more you increase your chances of losing. The best way to win is to lose yourself in the joy of the game. To go out and delight in the gift of play. I am sure Bubba doesn’t do it perfectly by any stretch. But he certainly did it much better than Tiger this past weekend.
I tell people often that as a basketball player, I can’t focus on making shots. I just practice and when game time comes, all I can do is take them. If I worry about making them, I will inevitably shoot poorly. Of course, there is a certain extent in which you can be so good that you can make up for some of this tension. I think Tiger often does this. But only to a certain degree. At some point, you just stifle your ability to reach your potential.
And that is the saddest thing to me when I look at Tiger’s golf game. He is holding himself back. And in so doing, keeping even us from the joy of watching him be at his best. He would do well, in my opinion, to learn a little from Bubba. To get a little free-flowing back in his game. But isn’t that true for us all?
Deliberate Practice
Posted by: | CommentsAnother good book that focuses on the topic I have addressed the past few days is Geoff Colvin’s Talent is Overrated. In it he says,
The factor that seems to explain the most about great performance is something the researchers call deliberate practice. Exactly what this is or isn’t turns out to be extremely important. It definitely isn’t what most of us do on the job everyday, which begins to explain the mystery of the workplace -why we’re surrounded by so many people who have worked hard for decades, but have never approached greatness. Deliberate practice is also not what most of us do when we think we’re practicing golf or the oboe or any of our other interests. Deliberate practice is hard. It hurts. But it works. More of it equals better performance. Tons of it equals great performance.
He naturally goes into greater detail on what ‘deliberate practice’ actually consists of. Before breaking in down in detail, he summarizes deliberate practice in this way:
Deliberate practice is characterized by several elements, each worth examining. It is activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher’s help; it can be repeated a lot; feedback on results is continuously available; it’s highly demanding mentally, whether the activity is purely intellectual, such as chess or business-related activities, or heavily physical, such as sports; and it isn’t much fun.
I think both he and Malcolm Gladwell are right on in their books. They are both good reads, no matter what your area of expertise may be (or whatever it is you may want it to be).
Ten Thousand Hours
Posted by: | CommentsMy beautiful wife is currently reading through Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. It’s a great book, and one that has application to what I wrote yesterday. She reminded me of this quote,
The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.
“The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associate with being a world-class expert – in anything,” writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin. “In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice-skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again. Of course, this doesn’t address why some people get more out of their practices sessions than others do. But no one has yet found a case in which true, world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.”
As Gladwell makes plain in his book, this isn’t the whole story, but it is certainly a big part. At the very least, it makes me feel better about shooting those long-distance threes.
7 – Emphasize the Importance and Rewards of Practice
Posted by: | CommentsI have gotten away from my series for the past few weeks, Passing on the Game. So by way of reminder, my focus in this series is how we can love something and, in a healthy way, seek to pass on that love to our children. In my circumstance, I am talking about basketball, but my hope is that these principles will apply to many other things as well.
You can check out the outline here. Today we move on to point #7:
Emphasize the Importance and Rewards of Practice
I suppose I could say that as a professional basketball player, I have a somewhat unique style of play. At least on the offensive side of the ball, I tend to be effective, but usually not in the typical fashion. I score, but the way in which I score usually isn’t ‘normal.’ Oftentimes, I score in transition or make shots that most players won’t normally take. I might take a three from 28 feet, for example, or shoot a fadeaway jump shot off one foot.
Because I play this way, I often get some very interesting reactions from fans and even coaches. Oftentimes people have said, “I love to watch you play, but I do think you are a bit crazy!” Or my coaches may say, “That is never a good shot.”
The interesting thing about these statements (and the thing that applies to our point here), is that there is usually a thought process behind them that forgets about the importance and the rewards of practice. For more often than not, people assume a certain shot is crazy (and not a good one) simply because most players don’t shoot that kind of shot. They don’t ask themselves how much I have practiced that shot or for how many years I have been doing it. They just think, “I haven’t seen that much before, so it must be crazy.”
Naturally, I think this is a mistaken view of things. So if I have the chance to respond, I usually say, “I know it might seem crazy, but I don’t think you would think it so crazy if you could have seen the thousands and thousands of times I have made that shot before. Or if you considered the fact that I have been shooting many of those shots on a consistent basis for 18 years of my life. I agree it might be crazy for some people to shoot those shots. But that is because they never practice them. From my vantage point, I would be crazy not to shoot such shots, for I have been practicing them for years!”
More often than not, people will say, “Huh, I never thought about it that way before.” (Though coaches aren’t so quick to come around!) It’s an honest and faithful reply. And a very human one. For somehow, someway, we as human beings oftentimes forget the law of sowing and reaping. Especially, when it comes to sports, we often see only the reaping and thus, forget the thousands of practice hours that were invested into the few hours of play.
And our children do the same. At least when it comes to my children, they don’t naturally ‘get’ the law of sowing and reaping. Or they don’t want to. So I make it a point to emphasize time and again the importance and rewards of practice.
I might do it more than I need to, but I do not want my children to watch any sort of sport or listen to any musician and think only, “My, how gifted they are.” True as it may be, it is certainly not the whole truth. For often enough there is more talent sitting on a couch somewhere watching the same game. While recognizing the gifts, I also want them to recognize the hours of practice that went into developing those gifts.
So when a big free throw in made at the end of a game we are watching, I turn to my son and ask him, “Elijah, why did he make that free throw? Why was he prepared to do well in that moment?” He knows the answer, so he smiles and says, “He practiced.” Or when he watches Lionel Messi (the best soccer player in the world) score some incredible, even outrageous and unique, goal, I ask him the same. And he responds, “Practice.”
And so it goes for sports or math facts or music or whatever. I am desperate for my children to understand that if they want to reap well, they better sow well. If they want to enjoy the pleasures of greatness (or proficiency), they better practice.
But there is one more thing: I want them to understand that although there are many rewards to practice, proficiency really is one of the best. I want them to realize that if I am viewing things rightly, I practice with a view towards more pleasurable play. I want them to realize that when all is said and done, greater freedom and joy in playing the game can only be found when you put in the practice.
That makes sense right? Shooting a basketball is more fun when it actually has a good chance of going in. Playing a game (or an instrument) is more fun when you don’t have to think about what you are doing. You can just play. And guess what? You won’t have to think much if you put in good practice. Practice serves the pleasure of proficient performance (say that 10 times fast). Joyful play is the end goal. The pleasure of knowing God’s pleasure is what it is ultimately all about. Or at least what it should be about.
O how desperate we are for a generation of kids who will understand the importance and rewards of practice (in every area of life)! Let’s serve them well by emphasizing this point the way we ought.
Competition and the Pursuit of Playful Pleasure
Posted by: | CommentsI enjoyed Matt Reagan’s post over at the Desiring God Blog entitled March Madness, Athletic Achievement, and Christians in Competitive Sports.
It’s a solid and compact overview of some essential points regarding a Christian view of sport and competition. As such, it naturally served to stimulate a few thoughts from me. But there is one main point I want to comment on.
I realize Matt didn’t dive completely into his summary thoughts on competition (the second part of his post), but from my vantage point, he missed (or at least didn’t state) the vital connection between competition and the true joy of free play. Check out his fifth point:
5) Our enjoyment of God in the midst of athletic achievement is a critical component of his glorification.
So if we run fast and enjoy it, which we should, we should enjoy it the way the first frog did. According to Chesterton, the riddle goes like this: “What did the first frog say?” “Lord, how you made me jump!” Jumping and running are enjoyable because they give us the capacity to participate in the beauty and power of God, and they are always gifts from him. As Eric Liddell memorably said in Chariots of Fire, “God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run, I feel his pleasure.” Perhaps this would be the only legitimate reason for it to be more enjoyable for me to make a jump shot, or run fast, than to watch my friend or teammate do it — just as the Apostle Paul gloried more, it seems, in his experiential participation in the lives of new believers in the early churches than in just hearing about it.
I love this point. And I would liked to have seen Matt draw the connection between this point and his points on competition, because I think it is the biggest key to seeing competition in its proper perspective. After all, if Eric Liddell is anything like me, he felt God’s pleasure most when he was ‘forced’ by his fellow competitors to run fastest. That is, it wasn’t just running itself that made him feel the highest heights of ‘God’s pleasure,’ but the running fast. And in order for him to run fast, he needed someone fast enough to challenge him. He needed a worthy competitor.
It is my belief that in order to view competition rightly, we must realize that there is a clear and very vital connection between competition and the pleasure of play. Seen in its proper perspective, I believe competition is supposed to serve, not pride, but pleasure. For if playful pleasure if found by losing yourself in the game, you need someone to push you to wholehearted effort and investment into the game itself. Again, you need a worthy competitor.
From a personal standpoint, I can say that as a professional basketball player there is a certain degree of pleasure I can find by going out to a YMCA league and joining in the fun. But honestly, it’s not much. In fact, boredom would inevitably arise. Why? Because little is being demanded of me. I can’t ‘run fast’ without ruining the ‘race’ for everyone else. Sure, I can find joy in serving others in their pleasurable play, but I can’t really find the joy of free play myself, for there isn’t really any competition.
At this point of my life, pleasure in play can only really be found at the professional level (or in some very good pick-up games). For it is at this level that the game demands my highest attention and energy. And it is only when I am forced to invest much (or to stick with the Liddell quote – ‘to run fast’) that I can really feel the greatest degree of ‘God’s pleasure.’ It is only then that I can get ‘lost in the game’ and know the utmost freedom and joy of free play.
So in that respect, I think we can say that if play is a gift from God, good competition is a means of receiving that gift. If we are thinking rightly, competitors should be cooperating with one another in the pursuit of playful pleasure. Indeed, though pride is often the primary motivator of today’s competitors, I would argue that it is ultimately a poor (or at least sub-par) motivator because it doesn’t line up with God’s design. Pride may by nature be competitive, but it is competitive in the wrong way, because it ultimately seeks to serve oneself. As I can personally attest to, this pride may take you to some great competitive heights, but it won’t be the kind of heights you are really longing for. It won’t take you to the pleasure that Liddell spoke of. And that is the pleasure that really counts.
