May 7, 2009 – Page 17
Head Games on the Diamond
BY SPENCER
BROOME
Three seconds on the clock. Your team is down by two against
your hated rival, and Joe the Kicker is lined up 42 yards away on the right
hash, wind barely brushing against the flags in the distance, the crowd
tantalizingly silent.
The
whistle blows, bodies begin clashing. The snap, the hold, the kick is up….
Fundamentally,
only two results can occur in this scenario. Either ol’ Joe misses it, sending
you and your buddies to the car in a foul mood and cursing the relationship you
have with your team. Or Joe becomes your new hero and is carried off the field
as the toast of the town, not to be forgotten in the near future.
Yet,
despite those two reasonably simple and contrasting outcomes, the variables
that are put into play as foot meets ball can go much deeper than plain leg
strength.
Just
ask Dr. John F. Murray, one of the premier sports psychologists in the world.
“There
is an art and a science to understanding how each player ticks and also how to
be able to bring out the best in that person,” Murray said via phone from Palm
Beach, Florida, where he runs his practice. “You have your talent, your
physical skills, and then you have your mental skills. Those all go together
with effort to determine performance, and how well you perform determines
whether you win or lose.”
Murray,
dubbed “The Roger Federer of Sports Psychologists” by Tennis Week
and “The Freud of Football” by the Washington
Post, has been providing sports psychology
along with clinical psychology services to help individuals, organizations and
teams succeed for over 14 years, not to mention writing a best-selling book, Smart Tennis: How to Play and Win
the Mental Game.
While
it seems fans and media types alike would prefer our athletes to be cut from
the mold of Terminator – robot seeking to destroy the opposition without so
much as a glitch – it is a vision that is confounded by real human
deficiencies.
Athletes
struggle with common problems like everyone else, problems such as anxiety, low
confidence or improper management that unavoidably effect performance, Murray
says. He estimates about 80 percent of the people he sees are seeking to
perform better in their individual sports.
Murray
has worked with individual athletes from tennis players – he has played and
coached tennis including an ATP professional at the Australian Open — to
quarterbacks, as well as entire teams, and says one of the most common issues
he encounters is athletes that perform well in practice but can’t reach the
same level of performance in live game situations.
Yogi
Berra once stated, “Baseball is 90 percent mental — the other half is
physical.” And though Yogi’s math was a bit rusty, the basic principle holds
true in all sports.
“If
you ask any group, ‘How important do you consider mental skills?’ depending on
the sport you will get inevitably people raising their hands and saying
70,80,90 percent,” Murray explains. “Then if you ask, if its 70-90 percent, how
often do you train your mental skills, how much time do you spend on that in
your training time, they will always say 5 percent to nothing.”
The
lack of training represents the challenge for a sports psychologist. Nearly
everyone recognizes the magnitude of the mind in athletics, yet it is hardly
practiced enough, like, say, offensive or defensive drills.
“That’s
the gap that you are filling,” Murray says of the function of a sports
psychologist. “You’re a high performance advantage to somebody with the science
of success that’s derived from many years of solid research, in both psychology
and the sports sciences.”
A
bit of the research that Murray mentions includes his own Mental Performance
Index (MPI), which is a measure of an overall football team’s performance in a
game by looking at every meaningful play and including mental aspects of
performance. He calls it the percentage of perfection.
Progress
is obviously being made within the field, though Murrays says it is difficult
to gauge the overall awareness.
However,
one needs to look no further than the recent NFL draft to see the influence of
sports psychology. Amidst 400 pound bench presses and 4.4 40-yard dashes, more
and more professional organizations, specifically the NFL, are taking the time
to administer psychological assessments, especially among skill position
players (namely quarterbacks) in the scouting stage of amateur players.
With
money on the line, teams are attempting to slim the chances of wasting a big
payday on a player who shows signs of psychological immaturity or imbalance
that weren’t correctly taken into account. In sports, the mind is gaining
ground on the legs and arms in terms of usefulness on the field of play.
But
Murray still sees plenty of room for growth.
“[Professional
leagues] are not doing it preventively or proactively,” Murray says. He is
currently working on a book based on football and psychology. “Usually what
they do, they have people they pull from when they need them, when there is a
problem they can’t solve. In my opinion, that is putting a bandage on it after
it’s too late. “
Murray
would prefer consistent contact with athletes in order to understand their
needs fully, their strengths and weaknesses, thereby developing an ongoing plan
to move forward with accordingly.
He
rehashes on a time he approached former (2000- 2004) Miami Dolphins and current
Pittsburgh Panthers head coach Dave Wannstedt about bringing in a sports
psychologist for regular office hours to work with the players as needed. His
idea was rebuffed. And a “we’ll call you when we need you” attitude was given
in return.
“For
a league that is so invested in success and professionalism, that’s really the
thinking,” Murray says. He cites a Good Old Boy system that is prevalent within
coaching ranks that would rather utilize more of their own former teammates and
coaches to come in and speak with their players than a sports psychologist.
Small
steps seem to be the most prudent approach at this point in time for sports psychologists
in professional sports. Know that
we’re here and
we can help you; just let us
show you is the mantra right now.
Murray,
who says that there are fewer than a handful who make their living exclusively
practicing sports psychology, which might a potential roadblock to growth,
wants to assist others the way he did professional tennis player Vince Spadea. Spadea
suffered from the longest losing streak in ATP history; after working with Murray,
he rose from 300 in the world to the top 10.
A
broken psyche, a wounded confidence or a misguided culture within a team or
program is truly where Murray’s field begins.
“It’s
just being able to help that person in a professional way to perform at his or
her highest level, to do it in a systematic, ongoing training way,” says
Murray. “There are so many possibilities that could be affecting that person because
we are all so complex.”
One
athlete’s problems can be complex enough, but when you begin to imagine a full
squad of players there is an innumerable amount of psychological variables that
can have a profound impact on a team’s success, or lack thereof.
The
easiest and most common expression thrown on a sports entity that has struggled
over a number of years is curse. Murray scoffs at the word, calling it
ridiculous. And what sports psychologist wouldn’t? Because for every Chicago
Cub’s Curse of the Billy Goat that is still ongoing, there is a Boston Red Sox
Curse of the Bambino that has been seemingly broken. Does anyone even remember
the Red Sox “curse” anymore?
Changing
a losing culture, Murray says, can only take a small dose of success, breaking
through the wall of low confidence. Though he does believe the past influences
the present and the future, Murray points to a famous Henry Ford quote,
“Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.”
Finding
the happy medium of personalities to productively lead a team along with
correct psyche is essential.
Take
a team like Murray’s own Miami Dolphins. For the past decade, a once proud organization
had been reduced to nothing more than a laughingstock, barely sniffing anything
remotely close to a winning record. Then enters the rough and tough
disciplinarian Bill Parcells, a man who will be enshrined in the Hall of Fame
with two Super Bowl rings. As the new vice president of football operations prior
to last season, he begins to transform the mentality within the team through
personnel and coaching moves and — boom! — they are AFC East champions in 2008.
“What
he does, being tough on his players, making sure things are done the right way,
is very similar to what a sports psychologist does,” Murray says. “What we are doing
as sports psychologists is taking it to another level, being available to the
players and understanding much deeper so we can help the Bill Parcells of the world
have their players perform even better.”
All
in all, psychology and its use in sports is still in the infancy stages, and
Murrays says he will know they have progressed past that when his phone is
ringing off the hook from the likes of the Yankees and the Dolphins, though the
foundation that has already been laid creates optimism for the future of the field.
So
next time Joe the Kicker lines up for the game winner, perhaps he will have the
security in knowing that when the ball is in the air he has been prepared to
perform at the peak of his ability, physically and mentally.
By
the way, the kick was good. Now everyone can go home happy.