Playing Scared (24 page)

Sax, born in 1960, is a handsome man with a classic, chiseled face and silver hair. He’s a health fitness fanatic and a black belt in karate, with an intense energy that’s been channeled into years of positive thinking. And the motivational speaker is never far away when he talks about the great fight of his life. If anything, it sounds like a religious conversion. “So I said, Okay, I admit I have a problem. I’m going to challenge it, I’m going to dare it, and I’m going to bite it in the face and say, ‘Let’s get it on.’ It was just not going to beat me. This became more than me playing baseball. It became much more than me being an athlete or worrying what it was going to do to my contract in the years that followed. It was about my salvation as a human being. What it came down to was, I had to adopt a purpose. I had to plant a flag and adopt a purpose. And the purpose was to beat it. The most important thing in my life at that time was to beat it. It was more important than my family, it was more important than baseball, it was more important than me. It was so important for me to beat it that I would have come within an inch of selling my soul to the devil to beat it. So I beat it.”

Taking his father’s advice, he attacked his fear as if it were a tree. Chop, chop, chop. When he fielded ground balls during batting practice, he pretended to be in the middle of a game. If he made an accurate throw to first, he slathered himself with praise and affirmation: “That was easy. Of course I can
do that.” The instant bat met ball and a grounder headed in his direction, he began counting the seconds in his head, making sure that his throw landed in the first baseman’s glove in four seconds flat: “Because that’s as fast as a runner can get to first base.” Pregame practice became his performance, “so that I was able to relax and feed off the momentum I had at practice. I was more at ease when the real game began, because, in my mind, I had just been through a game.”

Steve Sax
(Courtesy of the Los Angeles Dodgers)

He felt his confidence returning. “Everything you do in sports, whether it’s fielding or hitting, it’s a feeling you get. The rhythm and relaxation come together, and when you start feeling that, your confidence starts to grow.” By the end of the 1983 season, Sax had logged thirty-eight consecutive error-free games. He was, to all appearances, “cured.” His performance block had lasted only three months, but it would become the defining experience of his life. He would become a five-time All-Star. He would help the Dodgers win the 1988 World Series. He would set the New York Yankees record for most singles (171) in a season. But that three-month mystery is what most people still remember when they hear his name.

“You know how many go through this and don’t beat it?” Sax slapped his right fist in an imaginary left glove. “Ask Chuck Knoblauch. Ask Bob Moose. Ask Steve Blass.” He is listing some of baseball’s most famous head cases. “Ask Davy Murphy. He had to be sent to the outfield. He lost his position as a catcher. Lots of people. Mackey Sasser lost his career.” Sasser, a catcher for the Mets from 1987 to 1995, developed a paralyzing fear of tossing the ball back to the pitcher. He would pump it over and over again, unable to let go, as the fans gleefully counted the number of pumps and opposing players ran around the bases. “And this happened in my second year! I went on to play eleven years after that.” Again, Sax smacked his fist. “Not only did I beat it, but when I went to New York—check the numbers, please!—I was the top-fielding second baseman in the American League in my position. Look at the numbers. You can look them up right now if you want.”

Not for him the therapy, the hypnosis, the biofeedback, or any of the treatments that other wigged-out ballplayers have turned to in desperation. Sax did it on his own. For years, that’s how he understood his comeback. It wasn’t until 1995, standing in his mother’s kitchen, that he appreciated the meaning of his father’s pep talk. He was recounting that last conversation—“the same thing happened to me”—when she stopped him. “Your father and I were together since fifth grade,” his mother said, “and he never had a throwing problem.”

Sax leaned back from his desk to let the force of that information sink in. “He never had a throwing problem!” Sax repeated the words like the refrain of a hymn. “He just did that to help me get through this.” The awe in his voice was genuine, though he’d probably told the story five hundred times. “For someone who never said ‘I love you,’ maybe he just did. The gift he gave me on the day he died, I could never replace that.”

While endemic in sports, the yips are most common in baseball and golf, games that provide or perhaps punish players with long periods of time to ponder and perseverate. Psychologists call it “paralysis by analysis.” In golf, the yips are characterized by a sudden jerk or tremor of the hand, usually while putting. Golfers are so fearful of the yips that many refuse to speak the word out loud. When the yips happen, they can be painfully memorable. Ben Hogan, one of the game’s first superstars, developed a case late in his career. He would stand over a putt for what seemed like an eternity,
unable to draw the putter back and begin his stroke. He eventually gave up the game because of it.

Fast-moving sports such as basketball, football, and tennis also have their head cases, but the breakdowns typically occur when the action slows. Basketball players choke at the free-throw line. In football, it’s the placekickers who usually blow it. Tennis players freeze at the serve. One of the most memorable chokes in tennis history took place at the 2004 French Open, when Guillermo Coria faced off against fellow Argentinian Gastón Gaudio. Coria was the hands-down favorite. Known as El Mago, the Magician, for his lethal drop shots and unreturnable backhand, he moved like a gazelle. Across the net, Gaudio was the journeyman and knew it. He was reported to laugh at how out of his league he found himself. But it was Coria who froze. It happened at the serve. His body tightened. He sat down, nervously jiggling his left foot and claiming a physical cramp. The commentators called it a mental cramp. Coria kept double faulting, giving away the third and fourth matches, before flushing the fifth down the toilet. “I just thought too much,” he later explained.

Overthinking is almost always the problem. “When people are concerned about themselves and their performance, they tend to try to control their movements in order to ensure an optimal outcome,” writes psychologist Sian Beilock in
Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To
. “What results is that fluid performances—performances that run best largely outside of conscious awareness—are messed up.”
¹
To illustrate, she studied highly
skilled college soccer players at her Human Performance Lab at the University of Chicago. When the players were instructed to pay close attention to their footwork, their dribbling grew clumsy and error-prone, as compared with the times they dribbled without instruction. Inversely, skilled golfers who were instructed to putt as quickly as possible showed consistent improvement.

Overthinking occurs when the left hemisphere—the side responsible for language and analytical thinking—outbalances the right, which is given to imagination, coordination, and visual acumen. Researchers have found that golfers who putt poorly under pressure exhibit heightened activity in the left hemispheres of their brains and diminished activity in the right hemispheres. The more your left hemisphere lights up, the more your right switches off. With this in mind, researchers at the Institute of Sports Psychology at the Technical University of Munich came up with an easy way to balance the brain: Clench your left fist. Since each hand is connected to the opposite side of the brain, clenching the left hand activates the right hemisphere. The researchers tested their theory on semiprofessional football players, tae kwon do black belts, and expert badminton players. It worked. The participants kicked, punched, sparred, and served—first in seclusion, then while being filmed or watched by a crowd of spectators. What the researchers discovered was that the players who clenched their fist or squeezed a soft ball with the right hand were significantly more likely to choke under pressure. Those who used their left hand performed the same as before or better. It helped them shift the balance of brain activity away from the
left side, allowing them to stop overthinking and let muscle memory take over.

It was six weeks before my concert and I kept hearing about the connection—and disconnect—between music and sports. One pianist marveled over the way soccer coaches rushed out on the field with an ice pack and bandage whenever a player took a hard fall. As a conservatory student, she hesitated to even mention to her teacher that she had injured her hand from overpractice. A violinist wondered at how easily Olympic athletes discussed their stress levels before a competition; none of the string players he knew admitted to having nerves at an audition. Maybe, another violinist suggested, musicians should take a lesson from pro golfers, who know how to conjure an image of the perfect shot, cuing the image with an emotion before they begin their swing.

I called Noa Kageyama, my performance coach at Juilliard, remembering that he had been mentored by a sport psychologist named Don Greene. It was Greene who originally inspired Kageyama to quit the violin and become a psychologist.

Kageyama put me in touch with Greene, who in his role as adviser bounced between the highest echelons of sports and music. In addition to his work with the U.S. Olympic Diving Team, he consulted with professional golfers, tennis players, and Grand Prix drivers. His specialty was training these athletes to perform under pressure, but he had also established a reputation for doing the same with musicians. He first took an interest in their problems after a chance encounter with the principal bassist of the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra (now
defunct). They met on a golf course in 1992, and when Edward Castilano learned what Greene did for a living, he asked the psychologist for help in improving his game. Greene ran him through a two-part inventory that he’d designed with the late Bruce Ogilvie, who is often referred to as “the father of sport psychology.” Ogilvie was a professor of psychology at San Jose State University. He had been trained as a Freudian at the University of London’s Institute of Psychiatry, and though he rejected some of Freud’s teachings, he still spoke the language. He came to sports from a background of treating sexual inhibition as a performance anxiety problem. Once, after the Los Angeles Lakers approached the NBA Championship for the second year in a row, he observed, “Winning it all is like one great orgasm. A number of players must go through a quiescent state before they can reach ‘psychological erection’ again.”

Ogilvie was of the mind that sexual dysfunction was the result of a disconnect between mind and body, and he applied that same theory to sports performance—to the mind-body disconnect in athletes. Combining techniques of visualization, relaxation, and role-playing, he developed performance enhancement strategies that would become the foundation of every sport psychologist’s playbook.

Greene collaborated with Ogilvie on a sports inventory that codified these strategies. The first part, the Learning Styles Inventory, analyzed an athlete’s psychological strengths and weaknesses in order to establish a baseline of treatment. The second part, called the Competitive Styles Inventory, examined how the same athletes performed under pressure. In drawing up these inventories, the two psychologists conducted three
studies, each based on interviews with more than a thousand athletes. Greene half joked that the project cost him his marriage and plunged him into debt. In 1995, with nowhere else to go, he retreated to Ogilvie’s estate, a thirty-seven-acre property in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The Cats Estate, as it is known, boasts some of the most prized views in Northern California. In its prime, it was visited by Charlie Chaplin, John Steinbeck, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Greene and Ogilvie dedicated two years at Cats to refining their sports inventories, but they never saw a payoff.

It was only years later, when Castilano asked for help with his golf putt, that Greene put him through the paces of the ninety-six-question inventory. It revealed that Castilano was motivated but tended to overthink his putts. Greene taught him how to center himself, quieting his thoughts, and the musician’s putting quickly improved. Castilano recognized the potential benefit to musicians and coaxed Greene to Syracuse to work with the members of his orchestra. So began a whole new career for Greene and a whole new application of sport psychology. Initially, he assumed that music was “a totally different ball game,” he told me. He was a jock who didn’t know and didn’t care about classical music.

But performance anxiety was something he knew firsthand. In high school in the late 1960s, he had been a competitive diver and swimmer. His best stroke, the butterfly, was nothing but pure gross motor movement, as he described it. It could withstand any amount of adrenaline that got pumped through the body’s large muscles. He reveled in the feeling that adrenaline gave him in the water. That’s where he could work with
it. But all pleasure vanished as soon as he climbed the diving board. There, he turned erratic—sometimes dazzling, sometimes embarrassing, often hitting the hardest dives while missing the easiest ones.