Woods forgets what Christy knew too well
It wasn’t the kind to make the world stop like some of his admissions last year; in fact it had nothing to do with his personal life. Instead, Tiger simply manned up that in recent years he hadn’t been practicing enough, especially his putting.
It was hardly a shock if you think about it; there are only so many hours in the day and with that well-documented, hectic sex life of his, something more than his marriage was bound to give. But still, it came as something of a surprise. Here was a sportsman who had prided himself on his work ethic, who would deliberately stamp golf balls into bunkers, maybe 200 times in one practice session, all for a shot he might play three times a year in competition. Yet even he had temporarily succumbed to the idea that putting was something that he just “had” a “gift” for.
We’ve all made that mistake at some stage or another. We in the media are especially fixated with this romantic notion of “natural talent”; even the top sportswriters routinely refer to “naturals”.
While Pádraig Harrington had to work so hard on his game, Tiger’s was “instinctive”, “blessed”, “prodigious”, just like his buddy Michael Jordan was another “genius”, like Mozart before them.
Turns out our friend Amadeus wasn’t a “natural talent”. His father was an exceptional teacher of music and a hugely demanding one too; it’s estimated that by the time Amadeus was six, he had already clocked up 3,500 hours of practice. And yet it took until Mozart was 21 — long after he’d passed the golden 10,000 hours mark — before he wrote what’s universally acknowledged as his first masterpiece.
Tiger’s “gift” didn’t come from on high either, or from a lot of practice either. It was a particular kind of practice — deliberate practice, as the experts call it. As a kid he would place the ball three feet from the hole to see how many putts in a row he could make; eight hours later he’d often still be there.
As Matthew Syed observed in his insightful book, Bounce: How Champions are Made: “Child prodigies amaze us because we compare them not with other performers who have practiced for the same length of time but with children of the same age who have not dedicated their lives in the same way. We see their little bodies and cute faces and forget that, within their skulls, their brains have been sculpted by practice that few people accumulate until well into adulthood, if then.”
Their brains are literally shaped by this practice. One of the most fascinating breakthroughs in performance science in recent years has been the discovery of this little white substance in the brain called myelin and its relationship with deliberate practice. Basically, myelin is like an insulator that wraps around our nerve fibres which trigger every skill, every movement we make. The thicker the wire, the more established and consistent the skill. And that only comes from repetition and deliberate practice, which goes a long way towards explaining the phenomenon of that “natural”, Tiger Woods.
As Dr Douglas Fields, the foremost expert in the area of myelin put it in Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code: “That guy has got a lot of myelin.”
So did Christy Ring, even though he would never have heard of the thing. Like Tiger and Amadeus, we tend to summarily conclude that he was a “natural”. A Des Powell certainly did, writing in Gaelic Sport magazine over 50 years ago, “How does he do it? It is impossible to tell. Perhaps even Christy himself cannot explain it for the impetus of genius is indefinable. But who wants to probe the mysteries of a legend? Who wants to analyse the magic?”
Actually, I did, and in recent weeks read again Val Dorgan and Tim Horgan’s fine biographies of the man, this time with the fresh perspective of the concept of Syed and myelin. And guess what? Ring’s genius was not “indefinable”.
His brother Willie John recalled that a young Christy “found no problem coping with four or five hours’ training every day” out the back in Spillane’s field. And as Willie John observed: “This was not just a puck around the field. It was first-time pulling on the ground, doubling on the ball in the air, sideline cuts and free pucks. Relaxation never entered Christy’s mind while training. All through his career he firmly believed in practice.” Deliberate practice.
That outlook never changed as he famously always brought a couple of hurleys and a ball with him going around in his lorry or car with work, constantly learning and trying out new skills and then sealing them up with myelin. To read about Ring again is to have a much greater appreciation of the man and marvel at him, not for his “exceptional gift” but for his exceptional mindset.
It’s one we could all learn from, even Tiger, as he goes about insulating that proper putting stroke again.
* Contact: kieranshannon@eircom.net
