We
should be clear that, first and foremost, a loss in team competition
falls on the shoulders of the coach, or, as he is called in the Ryder
Cup, the team captain. As Davis Love himself said, “If we win, the
players take credit, and if we lose, the captain will.” And this is
right. For example: if the young lad McIlroy had indeed missed his tee
time and thus forfeited his match to Keegan Bradley, and that point had
proven decisive--as it no doubt would have--a great deal of the blame
for that miscue would have fallen on the shoulders of European team
captain Jose Maria Olazabal, because it is a coach’s job to get his
players where they need to be when they need to be there. That said, it
is all the more surprising to have heard Davis Love comment, in the
immediate aftermath of the defeat: “We’re all kind of stunned. We were
playing so well. We just figured it didn’t matter how we sent them out
there.” Wait. What?! Rewind that tape and listen again: it didn’t matter how we sent them out there.
That’s quite an admission. In an earlier posting (“Scott’s Lytham
Opportunity,” August 17), I commented that there is almost nothing as
corrosive to a potential victory as thinking that it’s in the bag. In
that post, I called this cognitive error the “I’ve-got-this” error. How
many times have you thought, “I’ll just par 18 and post my best score
ever,” only to triple it and slink home in a silent, impotent rage? I
certainly remember making that cognitive error in a match, both as
player and coach, only to shake my victorious opponent’s hand only an
eye-blink later in shame and dismay. Once you’ve made that error and
tasted its sting, you learn to change the self talk from “I’ve got
this,” to “let’s bear down and keep the momentum going.” It’s really
shocking to hear such a seasoned Tour and Ryder Cup veteran as Davis
Love having fallen prey to it. In this regard, what have come to be
called miraculous comebacks (1999 and 2012) could very well be explained
by the “I’ve-got-this” error insinuating itself with the kind of
insidiousness and perfidy common to all cognitive errors.
Apart
from getting the players to the venue on time, another vital role for
the coach is to shape the meaning of the impending contest for the
players. This is why the pre-game speech or the half-time speech
carries so much weight. The coach is shaping the cognitive framework
for the players so that, as much as possible, their play reflects and
lives up to that frame. And this work is not only done with words. The
coach’s entire habitus communicates his frame of mind to the players
through a sort of osmosis or trickle down effect, and they feed off of
his body language and facial expressions, positive or negative,
energized or lethargic. So, my message here is two-fold. If he
actually said that the Cup was in the bag, he went a long way to having
his players take victory as a foregone conclusion, and therefore, play
without conviction. And secondly, even if he didn’t say it, he
communicated it in these other, metacommunicative ways. I was not lucky
enough to be in the team rooms, but all weekend, I found him eloquent,
sportsmanly, and understated. But, he definitely did not communicate
the spirited thirst for victory that we always feel from the Europeans
and that could have helped inspire better play from his team on Sunday.
I’m sure there is fire in Davis Love’s belly, but I’m not sure he let
the conflagration circumradiate enough for his players to feel its heat.
Finally,
I think another error that preyed on Davis Love and the American team
is a concept from organizational management called “threat rigidity.”
This concept holds that when an organization encounters a complex
series of external threats, it responds by becoming more insular and
wooden, more reliant on antiquated answers and ways of being, and less
creative and flexible. This rigidity renders the organization incapable
of adapting to the needs of the moment. Where do we see this in the
2012 Ryder Cup? The first area is in captain Love’s insistence on
continuing to play the team of Woods-Stricker despite their dismal
performance in their first two outings together. Though successful in
many Ryder and President’s Cups, the pairing didn’t have it this year,
and finding other, younger partners whose more spirited play could have
catalyzed something in the lumbering veterans might have been a more
adaptive response. Secondly, threat rigidity appears most clearly in
playing not to lose rather than playing to win. Playing not to lose
manifests itself physically with tension and a need to overcontrol. And
we all know that this sort of tension wreaks havoc on a golf swing and
putting stroke. We can only perform the highly controlled and technical
physical motions of sport if we have the cognitive freedom to do so. A
classic example of this loss of control through threat rigidity is Greg
Norman’s epic collapse in the 1997 Masters, where it actually looked
like he had forgotten how to play golf. This year, we saw Jim Furyk and
Steve Stricker play very constrained golf in losing the last two holes
of their matches late in the day on Sunday. Furyk’s seemingly endless
stalking of his putt on 18 was good evidence both that he was
experiencing threat rigidity and that he was going to miss the putt.
In
the next post, I will discuss some of the vital differences in the
European approach that proved the difference in this year’s Ryder Cup.
As so often happens in these matches, we are left again to wonder why
the Europeans consistently create more spirited, cohesive teams who are
always stronger than the sum of their parts, in stark contrast to the
Americans, who usually underperform relative to their potential. To be
fair to captain Love, it is a notoriously difficult job to create a team
out of athletes who are most accustomed to playing by themselves for
themselves, particularly when those players are super stars. But it can
be done and it has been done. For now, American fans will have to wait
another two years to see if golf’s Phil Jackson will emerge who can
effectively galvanize his players to produce steely mettle for all three
days of the competition. We’ve seen Michael Jordan at a number of
these events now, including this one, but maybe it’s time to call his
old coach for some answers.
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