Getting Lost in Your Own House: The Complete Collapse

If you’ve ever choked in an athletic event, you will know that it is one of the worst experiences an athlete can have.  I often differentiate two kinds of choking: a flub and a complete collapse. This piece will focus on the complete collapse, and the next one on the flub.  For now, let’s let it stand that the difference between them is one of time: the flub takes place in an eyeblink, whereas the collapse unfolds over time, making it all the more awful and harrowing.  Thus, it deserves a bit more attention.

In the collapse, one player or team goes from being in a dominant position in an event only to completely unravel, committing a number of almost inexplicable errors standing in stark contrast to the type of supremely wonderful and confident play that put them in the leading position in the first place.  Examples of this include: Serena Williams’ meltdown at this year’s US Open; her loss to the unseeded Italian Roberta Vinci in the 2015 US Open final, keeping her from the remarkable feat of holding all the Grand Slam titles in one calendar year; Jordan Spieth’s back nine unraveling at the 2016 Masters; Dustin Johnson’s limb-loosening effort in the 2008 US Open at Pebble Beach; Rory McIlroy’s belly flop in the 2011 Masters; Jean Van de Velde’s awful gut wrench on the 18^that the 1999 British Open; and perhaps most famously, Greg Norman’s storied collapse in the 1996 Masters.

One thing that unites the flub and the collapse is a breakdown in the player’s ability to regulate their physiological response to the moment.  With the proper monitors, you would be able to detect quickened breathing and elevated heart rate, sweat glands would be more active, and thoughts would race more, indicating the shift from parasympathetic to sympathetic nervous system.  That is, even if it were to take place over an extremely short period of time, the brain of the sufferer would experience itself as under attack.  These kinds of changes, even on the subtlest of levels, are enough to cause corresponding changes in the fine muscle work required for skillful action, no matter how rote, routinized through hours of practice, forged in decades of competitive experience.  But, during a collapse, in addition to the physiological changes mentioned above, there is the additional one of nausea in the gut, owing to the activation of the vagus nerve, running from the brain to the viscera.  This is why so many people in the midst of a collapse experience extreme nausea, and may throw up, or even lose control of their excretory functions.  This is also why we have the expressions of “puking on oneself” or “soiling oneself” to describe this kind of event.  Other physiological changes include an over-narrowing of vision or hearing, disorientation with respect to time, and even a sense of dissociation, that one is leaving one’s body altogether, watching helplessly as this is happening. All of a sudden, you cannot execute skills which have been so well honed they almost feel automatic.  You are lost within your own house.  And worse, you can’t find your way out.  Such a collapse, and the resulting shame, can be extremely difficult to recover from, as you can tell from Jordan Spieth’s not having really made it back from his Masters’ episode, and from Greg Norman’s comments in his press conference after that round, saying that he’d be alright, that it was just a game, and that he had his money and his Maseratis to keep him warm.  The puker doth protest too much.

OK, so what can you do?  1) Well, the first thing is to recognize the physiological signsearly and accept that a collapse is upon you. You have to be consciously attuned to the elevated heart rate, hastened breathing, rapid thoughts [disbelief!], jittery hands, nausea, and then 2) intervene with THE BREATH.  The breath, always crucial, can nip a collapse in the bud, if anything can.  Make sure your breathing practices are solid. Breathing is the bedrock, the salvation, the true hail Mary of sport performance.  Next, 3) plug back into your senses.  As you feel yourself telescope back into the fun-house mirror of your head, plug back into the reality that is happening around you: the sights, the smells, and sounds of your competition.  These are not just cues for you to get back into present reality, but they can be pleasant reminders for you of why you love your sport, and therefore shift you from fear to passion.  If you have gotten to the point of leaving your body, 4) use your “snap out of it” skill.  This skill, developed with your coach, can be a slap to your thigh, a snap of a rubber-band on your wrist, or a gentle slapping of your club or racket on some part of your body.  Finally, 5) believe in yourself. Self-belief, another form of faith, is so powerful in a collapse.  A confident stride is just the thing you need when you think you have forgotten how to walk. During a collapse, self-faith can be expressed in a number of mantras developed with your coach.  “C’mon, Matt, you know how to do this.”  “This feels new, but it’s old hat.”  “You LOVE this.”

That said: the collapse might be such a totalizing experience that there’s not much you can do. Many people think that such collapses are due to inexperience, and that they’re more likely in younger athletes than in older.  But, that’s not so true, as the Greg Norman and Serena Williams examples make clear.  One thing is true: whether you ever recover from your total collapse is based on how you handle it.  Athletes with a growth mentality, a process-oriented approach, can recover and use the experience to make themselves even better competitors.  But, it doesn’t happen automatically: you have to be willing to walk back through it, moment by moment, in exposure format, to help rid yourself of the shame, and to learn as much as possible from what happened.*  Just think about Rory McIlroy: two months after his Masters’ fiasco, he hoisted the US Open trophy, and three more major victories later, cites his collapse as the most important day of his career, and that “ I learned so much about myself” (http://www.espn.com/golf/story/_/id/12603182/rory-mcilroy-says-masters-2011-collapse-was-most-important-day-my-career).  And, as I say at Altius, if that’s not winning, then I surely don’t know what is.

*On learning from losing, see my earlier posts: (“Learning from a Loss,” January 1, 2014; “Lessons from a Loss,” January 12, 2014; “Scott’s Lytham Opportunity: The only way out is through,” August 17, 2012.)

Think Like Dustin: A Lot Less

The US Open golf tournament is always one to produce incredible drama, and this year was no different.  But, this time around, the extreme difficulty of the course, or golfers’ collapses weren’t the story, but rather, the utterly bizarre way in which the USGA enforced the rules of the game on one of the leaders of the tournament on Sunday.  On the fifth hole, Dustin Johnson, on his way to addressing the ball, noticed that it had moved.  The rules official with that group determined that he had not caused it to move since he had not addressed the ball, and so would not be assessed a one-stroke penalty. Then, on the 12^th hole, Dustin was informed that the USGA was reviewing tape of the incident and would decide at the end of the round whether he would be assessed that penalty or not.  This decision led to a situation which is not only unique in USGA history, maybe in the entire history of the sport, and perhaps in the history of sport psychology: the players would have to play without actually knowing the score.  Knowing the score, in any sport, is paramount because it is, after all, the way by which we measure who wins and who loses.  But, it is also vital because it dictates to a large degree the strategic decisions made by the players as they try to win.  In essence, the USGA said to the players, “you go ahead and play with blindfolds, and we’ll remove the blindfolds when the golf is all over.”  While it’s hard to imagine a more bizarre, and indeed absurd, situation, it’s equally hard to know how to handle this situation were you to be in it.  Well, you could do a lot worse than to take a page out of Dustin Johnson’s book, not only because in going on to win the tournament, he taught us how we might manage this situation, all the while reinforcing some very important lessons of performance psychology.

The first one: thought stopping.  When asked how he handled the incredible distraction as to

whether he was going to be assessed a penalty from the 12^th hole until the finish, he reported several answers: “I decided that I hadn’t made that ball move, and so that was that.”  While some people might say that he chose to lie to himself, ignoring the sword of Damocles hanging over his head, those of us in the sport performance business see that he was engaging in one of the more difficult cognitive challenges imaginable.  It’s like putting a chocolate cake in front of you and telling you not to think about chocolate cake.  But, it is a crucial skill because it keeps us from racing ahead into future dreadful scenarios and “what ifs.”  Thought stopping keeps us from falling into wormholes, just the kind of holes the mind loves: usually future, calamity related ones.

The skill of thought stopping did not only extend to keeping himself from imagining future demise, it also covered not racing to past catastrophes, of which he has many to call upon, moments of collapse right on the brink of winning major tournaments (2010 US Open, Pebble Beach; 2015 US Open, Chambers Bay), even including problems involving (bizarre) rules’ infractions (2010 PGA, Whistling Straits).  In this regard, he did not fall into the well known “not again,” or “why me?” cognitive trap.  Dustin made it clear that he was not engaging in these past-driven thoughts, when he was asked what kept him from thinking about the past. “I just thought I was playing the golf course, that’s all I was thinking about.”  His three perfect finishing shots to birdie the 18^th hole was proof that he successfully stopped any negative past-oriented thought from derailing his play, and allowed positive, present-orient thoughts drive positive play for a positive outcome.

 
Another aspect to discuss about this remarkable aspect of sport psychology is that Dustin Johnson is often spoken about on Tour as someone not blessed with a very bright intelligence.  I don’t know how that rumor got started, nor am I in a position to comment on it.  I will say that one way to think about this rumor in light of this winning piece of sport cognition is this: perhaps Dustin just doesn’t have that much going through his mind as he plays golf.  And, there is no doubt that one result of having very little going through the thought stream during performance is that there is much less to filter out in order to get to the right thought.  So, when it comes down to it: thinking too much is clearly a problem, thinking well is something you can train, and thinking well may mean thinking less.  Whether by nature or nurture, find your way to thinking a lot less during your next important sport event.