There are times when even the best sportsmen fail not for want of talent, pride, serious application and commitment. They fail even though ability and willingness to work hard and eagerness to do well are by no means lacking. When such failure occurs, often suddenly, it is astonishing and seemingly inexplicable. We may be inclined to think it denotes some frailty of character. Not so. There is a good, scientific reason for such collapses.
At 4-1, 40-30, and serving in the deciding set in the l993 Wimbledon final Jana Novotna looked invincible against Steffi Graf. She had just hit a perfect, skimming backhand winner. The packed crowd was ecstatic, royalty looked down applauding, as Novotna prepared to serve. Then something happened. Her service swing collapsed – double fault. The next point she missed an easy high forehand volley and then lost the game with a simple overhead smash into the very bottom of the net. Graf then won the next game to love. Novotna served again and double faulted three times. Graf won another service game again to love. By now Novotna was unrecognizable, a beginner again. She lost her third service game in a row easily, once mistiming an ordinary backhand so badly that the ball sailed off her racket handle. At match point she put up an absurd looking, shallow lob and Steffi Graf put her out of her misery with an emphatic smash. At the awards ceremony immediately afterwards, in a memorable Wimbledon moment, Novotna broke down and sobbed on the shoulder of the Duchess of Kent.
What happened? She had crumbled under pressure but exactly why was as incredible to her as it was to all the spectators and, of course, much more painful. Pressure is supposed to bring out the best in champions. They try harder. They concentrate better. They get an adrenaline boost. They care more because the moment is so important. So what happened?
Malcolm Gladwell, in his article “Why Good Men Sometimes Fail,” explains in fascinating detail what is involved. He shows why the best of human beings sometimes falter under pressure. In the glare of really tense competition, basketball players suddenly cannot find the basket, golfers cannot find the pin, batting teams collapse for a hundred. When that happens we say they have, in sporting terminology, “choked,” The term is pejorative, accusatory. To choke is considered as bad as to give up. But this is quite wrong. All forms of failure are not equal. We should try to understand the difference.
Gladwell explains. Psychologists use a primitive video game to test motor skills. They sit you in front of a computer with a screen that shows four boxes in a row, and a key board that has four corresponding buttons in a row. One at a time, x’s start to appear in the boxes on the screen, and you are told that every time this happens you are to push the key corresponding to the box. If you are told ahead of time about the pattern in which those x’s will appear, your reaction time in hitting the right key will improve dramatically. You will play the game very carefully for a few rounds, until you have learned the sequence, and then you will get faster and faster. This is “explicit learning.” But suppose you are not told that the x’s appear in a regular sequence, and even after playing the game for a while you are not aware that there is a pattern. You will still get faster; you will learn the sequence unconsciously. That is “implicit learning” – learning that takes place outside of awareness. These two learning systems are quite separate, based in different parts of the brain.
When you are first taught something – say, to hit a cover drive or play a backhand volley in tennis – you think it through in a very deliberate, mechanical way. But as you get better the implicit system takes over: you start to hit the stroke fluidly, without thinking. The basal ganglia, where implicit learning partially resides, are concerned with force and timing, and when that system kicks in you begin to develop touch and accuracy, the purely reactive ability to hit a bowler bowling at ninety miles per hour and swinging the ball. This happens gradually. You go into the nets a thousand times alone or with a coach. After a while you may still be attending to how you are making the shot, but not very much. In the end the best players don’t really notice what they are doing at all.
Under conditions of great stress, however, the explicit system sometimes takes back control. That is what it means to choke. When Jana Novotna faltered at Wimbledon, it was because she began thinking about her shots again. She lost her fluidity, her touch. She double-faulted on her serves and mis-hit her overheads, the shots that demand the greatest sensitivity in force and timing. She seemed like a different person – playing with the slow, cautious deliberation of a beginner – because, in a sense, she was a beginner again: she was relying on a learning system that she hadn’t used to hit serves and overhead smashes and volleys since she was first taught tennis.
Choking is about thinking too much. Choking is about loss of instinct. Choking is about caring too much. Choking is about going too far back to basics, back to the slowness and plod of explicit learning, thus losing the stored grace and spontaneous vitality of implicit learning. (Panicking, by the way, is something entirely different, though it may seem very much like choking. Panicking is about thinking too little. Panicking is about reverting to instinct).
This is the fate of countless good, even great, sportsmen. Greg Norman, the No. 1 golfer in the world at the time, leading Nick Faldo by six strokes at the start of the final round of the Masters championship in 1996, suffered the most terminal kind of choke and ended up losing to Faldo by four strokes.
There is a special kind of pressure which is called by psychologists “stereotype threat.” For instance, it has been found that groups of qualified women given a maths test and told it would measure their quantitative ability compared with males do much worse than equally skilled men, yet presented with the same test simply as a research tool they do just as well as the men. In that “stereotype threat” condition, the women say to themselves, “Look I’m going to be especially careful here. I simply can’t mess things up.” But the more they do that the more they get away from the intuitions that would help them, the quick processing.
In such situations, unfortunately, the automatic reaction to the failure is to urge those failing to work harder, dedicate themselves more diligently, appreciate more deeply the importance of what they are doing. But the fact is that those involved are working very hard, they so appreciate the supreme importance of what they are doing and what they represent, they really are trying their utmost to do well. And the more they are doing all that the more at crisis times they are getting away from the quick processing, which helps them to perform. They fail because they are good at what they do: only those who care deeply that they should perform up to their ability ever feel the pressure of stereotype threat. The usual prescription for failure – work harder, take the test more seriously, be more committed – only makes the problem worse.
As Malcolm Gladwell reminds us, this is a hard lesson to grasp but we must learn – with our children as well as with our heroes – that sometimes we have to concern ourselves less with the performer and more with the complex situation in which the performance occurs. We need to learn that there are times when a poor performance lies not in lack of ability or dedication in the performer but in the situation in which he or she performs – that sometimes a poor test score is the sign not of a poor student but of a good and dedicated one who has suffered a failure which is not all that unusual in sport as in life. Disappointment is in order but no blame is applicable.
