Admit to having choked and then move on, Rory
Johnny Miller knows that. The former US and British Open champion’s first broadcast as an NBC commentator featured his close friend Peter Jacobson on the 72nd hole facing a downhill lie, 225 yards from the pin, over water, to close the tournament.
“This,” said Miller, “is absolutely the easiest shot to choke I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Jacobson nailed the shot to win the tournament but was so livid that Miller had used the C word, the pair of them didn’t talk for almost a year.
“The way some players react to the suggestion they choked,” Miller would observe years later, “you’d think they’d run out of a burning building and left their family behind. My feeling is there is a lot to be learned by studying choking.”
Rory McIlroy certain could. It’s one of the cruellest and most pejorative expressions in all of sport — ‘choke’, along with ‘choker’, often because they’re seen to go hand and hand. There’s a big distinction between the two, however, and the best way McIlroy will become a major champion rather than a major choker is to unashamedly accept he choked.
He’s in good company, for starters. It was mentioned last Sunday that Charl Schwartzel’s victory coincided with the 50th anniversary of countryman Gary Player’s win at Augusta. But Player didn’t so much win; Arnold Palmer blew it, double-bogeying the last. Andre Agassi was ridiculed for losing his first three Grand Slam finals. Mickelson, Jordan, Federer, O’Driscoll and his Leinster ‘ladyboys’; virtually everyone we now view to be the picture of mental toughness were once ‘slackers’, ‘losers’ or ‘chokers’.
Choking invariably happens when an elite sportsperson is facing a career-defining moment. The classic case is Jana Novotna in the 1993 Wimbledon final against Steffi Graf. In the last set she was serving at 4-1 and 40-30, when she unravelled, committing a series of mistakes that would embarrass a novice. What happened? At first it was a classic case of thinking outcome rather than process; instead of just focusing on the next play, she pictured the prize and all it would mean. Then she went to the other extreme, explicitly thinking of how to toss the ball, throw the ball, meaning her play went from being fluent to being devoid of all touch.
You can bet the same thing happened to McIlroy. As relaxed as he tried to stay last Sunday, watching Ulster-Northampton with friends, the chant from the Ulster supporters of “We’re going to win the Masters!” and all those wishes and tweets meant he was inevitably thinking more of winning the event, or of not losing it, than of playing well, which may not have guaranteed victory but would have greatly increased the chances of it. It was maybe no coincidence that he unravelled at the 10th, the start of “the back nine on a Sunday in Augusta,” the place he had talked about wanting to be. Lee Westwood once said, “When he’s feeling under pressure, Rory has a hooked shot in his locker”, and it was duly unveiled. After that he was either thinking of his last shot, or thinking too much over the next.
Sian Beilock, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, has written the book on all this — aptly called Choke — and found that novice golfers play better when they consciously reflect on their actions, just like a learner car driver does when they explicitly think of where to move the gear stick. But when top golfers thought about their putts they “just screwed up”.
“When you are at a high level,” she says, “your skills become somewhat automated. You don’t need to pay attention to every step in what you’re doing.”
What serves you well as a beginner, your explicit learning system, is the very thing that will destroy you as an elite performer. A couple of Australian psychologists performed a similar study of experienced golfers, telling the players first of all to focus on specific components of their swing, such as “hips” or “straight wrist”. Then in the next part of the experiment the players were to come up with a “cue word” which, rather than contemplating the precise position of their elbow, they were to have a descriptive adjective like “smooth” or “balanced”. The golfers concerned with the details of their swing hit consistently worse shots, while those who just zoned in on keeping “loose” performed under pressure.
Novotna would eventually win Wimbledon. She had learned that in ‘93 she’d tried too hard to breathe properly. By ‘98, she had a range of breathing exercises to call on, just as Phil Mickelson would incorporate smiling into his play every Sunday in the majors to loosen up and overcome his choking tendencies.
Rory never moved on from the 10th hole last Sunday, but if he learns from Novotna and Mickelson and Professor Beilock too, he will — and win majors in the process.
* Contact: kieranshannon@eircom.net
