Focus: The Eye of the Tiger

 Before his unfortunate sex scandal made him a polarizing figure in sport, Tiger Woods was seen as a model of competitive fire.  And while many aspects of his dominance merit comment, the one I am going to call your attention to in this piece is the issue of his focus.  In his heyday, he was known for his clutch play down the stretch, the absence of errors, and a trait his father honed in him and predicted would undo his opponents: his killer instinct.  If we could trace the source of his successful ability to bear down during important moments, the thing we would want athletes to emulate would be the look in his eye, the eye of the tiger, if you will.  Of course, he has this focus on every shot, but you will notice it particularly on his short game shots, and most supremely on his putts.  Watch him stalk a putt and you will see the picture of competitive focus.  My recommendation to you is that you try to add this skill to your repertoire.  To find the eye of your inner tiger, try the following set of skills.

            Directing: Yoga gurus for millennia have commented that a critical aspect of attention is our ability to direct it.  Without some concerted effort, attention wanders, and with it our cognitive, and indeed, physical energy.  Yoga connects sharpening the mind’s eye to our ability to control where we focus the vision of our actual eyes, and calls this skill 'the drishti’, a Sanskrit word which means, "the gaze."  It has the quality of being intense and soft at one and the same time.  It burns deeply, yet feels cool.  It is equally quite engaged and yet detached.  If it burns too hot, we will become overly activated, and yet if it becomes too cool, the very focus we are looking for will slip away.

            Filtering: I have mentioned this skill in a prior post ("Focus?"), but I will reiterate it here. We correctly think of focus as an act of directing our attention, but it is important to say that it is also an act of filtering out distracting inputs.  Many have said that expertise involves increasingly being able to distinguish salient versus irrelevant factors.  The filtering skill is a version of this, but doesn't require you to be a black belt in martial arts or a Jedi knight.  It does require that you sift out the noise of your thoughts and emotions and be present to the relevant factors of the task at hand.  Strong emotions, perceived slights, and dwelling on past or future moments are all things that should get filtered out if we want to get the eye of the Tiger.  In fact, Tiger's father bragged about coaching this skill in Tiger by intentionally trying to distract him during his putting routine as a child: jangling keys, coughing, whistling, and stomping his feet.  He was goading Tiger to work on the skill of filtering.

            Practicing: As can be seen from the example of the Woods family, the filtering skill can be practiced.  Nor does it need to be done in a cruel, Earl Woods kind of way.  Try this drill: Sit or stand about four or five feet from a picture on a wall, preferably one without text.  While maintaining a good posture, find a spot about the size of a quarter on the picture to focus on, and try to keep both your visual and attentional focus on the spot.  Can you achieve 'one-mindedness', that unbroken concentration that does not waver, and stays a medium-grade temperature?  You may notice that your eyes wander.  You may notice that your attention rushes to many things other than the task of just looking.  You may notice that you slouch, or get hot or cold: all inputs to notice, dismiss, and gently return your attention and your focus to your spot.  Remember: the goal is not to become so united with your spot that you feel as though you have left your body or the present moment and have melded with the picture.  The goal is to remain focused on the spot and be able to notice, but filter out, distractions by bringing your attention back to the task of focusing on the spot.  Try it for three minutes three times a week, and then increase your time to five minutes per session.  Easy drill, hard practice.

            Whether you are a fan or a detractor of Tiger Woods, you have to admit that the Tiger years were a wonder to behold for the definitiveness of their dominance, their duration, and the sustained clarity of vision that was required for so protracted a period.  You would definitely say that one of the main ways he outplayed his opponents was that he outconcentrated them.  You might also say that what has led to his demise is the fact that he let his all-too famous gaze rove a little too far of field.

Lessons From A Loss

Because I try to practice what I preach, I want to share with you some lessons I learned from a tough loss.  In an earlier post (“On Rivals and Rivalry”), I introduced you to a team I coached that was involved in a very unpleasant rivalry.  Without rehashing the details, I am going to tell you about a moment that I have reflected on a great deal since leaving that team.  We were going to play our rival for the last time in the season at their home courts, and when I pulled the van into the parking spot at our rival’s venue and was going to give some words of encouragement, my captain said that she had a request.  As it was her last match, I acquiesced, not knowing what it was.  Then, she pulled out her smartphone, plugged some portable speakers into it and played for the team Al Pacino’s inspirational speech from “Any Given Sunday.”  It was a difficult moment for me, because, having agreed, I didn’t feel as though I should turn it off, and yet it felt strange to me that we were listening to a fictional coach give a fictional speech to a fictional team.  Wasn’t I supposed to be giving a speech?  Wasn’t the captain?  Was this a referendum on my motivational speaking abilities?  Either way, I had a bad feeling in my stomach, and was not surprised to come out, yet again, on the losing end of an encounter with our rivals, finding that Al Pacino hadn’t worked his magic on our squad.

        But, it is not their fault.  In all arenas, but perhaps the athletic more than any other, we have become entranced by the power of the pre-game speech to inspire bold performance in players.  And although I am a big fan of listening to and delivering a good speech, I would like to dispel the notion that a good pre-game speech makes much of a difference in performance during the game.  In particular, I do not think speeches are a good way to overcome performance anxiety, and I would urge athletes and coaches alike to adopt a different approach to peak performance on any given Sunday other than relying on speeches.  And so, my advice to coaches when seeking peak performance from their players is to keep the pre-game words to a minimum and follow some simple steps:

Clarity of plan: Most coaches have devised fantastic practice plans throughout the season.  Game day is no different.  And big game days even more so.  That pre-game plan should be extremely detailed, including when people should arrive at the venue (or departure) site, what they should have eaten, what and who should speak before the event, how the warm up should proceed, and, who should watch and coach which players.  Finally, this plan should consider all contingencies as the match gets toward its decisive points.  As you can see from the vignette above, one problem was that I had not communicated with the captain as to who was going to speak when.  Thus, the plan, just like any other kind of training, is seeking to control as much as possible before and during the event and avoid all surprises.

Clarity of Communication: Pre-game speeches are nice, but the most important form of communication--other than discipline in practice--is the kind that happens during the game.  If a coach says something to his/her players, it should be brief (“hit to her backhand,” “volley more”) and digestible.  A good technique is to ask players to repeat what they heard before they go back into the melee.  There is nothing worse that adding to a player’s muddle with muddling words.  And remember: raising your voice, or even worse, yelling, is not a way of being more clear.  It is likely to contribute to rather than reduce performance anxiety.

Clarity of Role: One of the problems from the example above is that there was a lack of role clarification.  The captain was doing something I thought I was going to do, and, perhaps the players thought I was going to do something I didn’t do.  In any case, being very clear with a team about who does what and when is a key aspect of any successful team endeavor.  Its opposite, role diffusion, leads to confusion, poor performance, and potentially deep rifts among team members, as people are not giving and getting what they need from each other.

        Perhaps this is a problem of Hollywood’s making: when we think of good coaches, we think of them delivering rousing speeches.  But, really, the main job of a coach is the quite difficult task of fostering group cohesion in order to create the conditions under which each player can grow as a player and person and give her best up for the common good.  The three steps I’ve offered here will help.  And maybe you don’t want to take my word for it, but just please don’t take Al’s.

Learning from Loss

In our ruthlessly competitive culture, there is a huge premium on winning. Unfortunately, there are some pretty obvious negative consequences to this emphasis. First and foremost among these consequences: 'always be a winner' turns quickly into 'winner takes all' and then into 'win at all costs'.  But another insidious cost of this attitude is that losing becomes unacceptable.  In the arena of youth sport, we have managed this shame often by veering toward the equally unrealistic position of 'everybody's a winner', with score-less games, equal playing time for everyone, and trophies for all.  So, how is a young athlete to sort out this contradiction?  My answer: preach a gospel of losing.  We shouldn't preach this gospel for its own sake, but given that losing is more common than its opposite, we should remove the shame from it and celebrate it for all the things it can teach us not only about life but, well, winning.  By being better losers, we can in fact become better winners.

           In the very first post of this blog (“Scott’s Lytham Opportunity”), I wrote about Adam Scott's collapse in the last four holes at the British Open in 2012.  In that post, I suggested that if he really wanted to contend again in a major championship, he would do well not to shy away from the bitter sting of that defeat, but to really approach it, expand it and investigate it closely in order to mine it for all that it could teach him about how he handled himself in that situation so that he could master it the next time.  We'll, if his 2013 year is any indication, he did just that: winning the year's first major in a nail-biting and gutsy playoff, contending again at the British, finishing very high in the season's standings, and just completing a torrid stretch of three major victories in his native Australia.  In short, rather than shriveling up in defeat, he gained strength from it.  Indeed, he even stated at the time, as reporters were asking him if his terrible loss meant that he wasn't destined to win a major, "No, in fact, it has shown me just the opposite: that I can win a major, that I belong to be there down the stretch, that my hard work is paying off."  Now, unfortunately for me, I'm not Adam Scott's sport performance guy, but if I were, here is what I would have preached to him in 2012 that I think every athlete needs to know about the value of losing.

                       Learning from loss: Every loss has a crucial juncture, a crisis point that we would like to go back to and re-do if we could.  Those moments are the ones to investigate. Did they come from a technical weakness or from a psychological one, or, from a combination of the two?  Or, did it stem from improper preparation?  Put the loss on an x-Ray machine and go through it, detail by painful detail.  Doing so will both teach you to avoid those mistakes in the future, and will inure you to the shame of losing.  Because one thing I can guarantee you of for certain: if your performance is only motivated by the fear of losing, you will lose often, gain little satisfaction from your victories, and not grow as an athlete or person.  You cannot go for broke when you are clenching the till so fearfully.

                       Practice to lose.  In our winner culture, we have become so loss-averse that we think that in order to have winners, we must train winners.  But, often a top athlete is only tested in defeat.  And so, the top athletes often train under conditions where winning is almost impossible, so that flaws and mental weaknesses can be exposed rather than hidden.  Such practices include playing against stronger players, devising pressure situations in practice, and most of all, analyzing what broke down in those situations.  In order for such an analysis to be truly effective, it should be conducted with a ruthless honesty and relentless compassion at one and the same time.  Shame breeds fear which increases the odds that we are going to play from a protective rather than an appetitive position.

                       Losing and dying:  Many athletes equate losing with dying.  They might not be conscious of this association, but it is there.  And how could it not be, if they have  been bred to be winners, if their culture celebrates winners so extravagantly, and if they have lived sheltered from the real consequences of loss?  Perhaps even their parents, in synch with their culture, have adapted an ego orientation with them with regard to their sport participation (“Ego&Mastery”).  Often this athlete reveals himself by the temper tantrums he throws upon losing.  For him, we should burn the ring of falsehood that surrounds him by over-exposing him to loss.  Doing so will test his determination and love for the sport, and will burn away the protective carapace which he has built around himself, sealing him off from learning the lessons of loss. 

        I am not preaching losing for the sake of humiliation.  I do not think humiliation is a good training method.  But, on the same token, there are very serious negative consequences to training our young people with an eye toward winning rather than with an eye toward process.  I will leave you with a quote from one of sport's most loss-averse losers, a character whose downfall is only mirrored in the pages of Greek tragedy, Lance Armstrong, and his attitude toward losing: "I like to win.  But more than anything, I can't stand the idea of losing, because to me, that equals death."  So, let's raise athletes with a stronger sense of themselves than that.  Let's look loss right in the eye, so we are winning with joy rather than relief.  Let's learn from loss.

Selfish v. Self-full

Young athletes are often introduced to the old saw that there is no “I” in team.   On its surface, the message seems obvious: the team only succeeds when the individual puts his or her own needs aside.  Those needs generally mean thinking that we should be playing a certain desired role, get a huge portion of playing time, and receive the lion’s share of the attention.  Instead, this dictum succinctly reminds us to sublimate the self in order for the common good to succeed. Any thought of the self, this statement suggests, is selfish.

The problem is that this statement is often offered to rather young athletes, people for whom the concept of joining a collective is not yet developmentally appropriate.  We may remember that becoming husbands, wives, co-workers and citizens is a pretty advanced developmental step, because doing these tasks successfully involves already having a pretty fully formed sense of self to bring to those relationships.  But, young athletes, from pre-little league to almost the end of college, are caught up in the tasks of defining self-hood.  That is their full time job.  So, telling a latency-aged or adolescent athlete to have no thought of themselves is a developmentally confusing message.  Furthermore, ignoring athletes’ developmental level often leads to behavior that seems downright selfish.  That is, the more we try to tell the athlete to not have a big self, the more we will see that self asserting itself in ever more frantic ways.  

So, what am I saying?  Am I suggesting that young athletes cannot join teams?  Absolutely not!  But, what I am suggesting is that parents and coaches help clarify for young athletes what their role is in any given team situation so that the young athlete can be invested wholeheartedly in mastering that role.  Fulfilling that role to the best of the young person’s ability, then, can be the way they show up in their full selfness for the team or athletic moment.  In essence, I am arguing for a concept of self-fullness over selfishness.             

To make this difference between more clear, let me give a simple chart comparing common forms of selfish behavior in an athlete and how that can be redirected to more a more self-full orientation.

The Selfish Athlete	The Self-Full Athlete
The selfish athlete feels as though s/he needs and deserves to play the starring role (quarterback, pitcher, batting clean-up, short stop), get the lion’s share of playing time, make the winning play.  The selfish athlete does not see the value of practice.	The self-full athlete knows his/her role on the team and delights in learning and excelling at that role.  The self-full athlete enjoys both practice and game time, and sees them as both valuable opportunities to master their role.
The selfish athlete cannot tolerate setbacks, and blames teammates and referees for them.  The selfish athlete throws temper tantrums in the face of these setbacks.	The self-full athlete feels but manages intense disappointment, and has a balanced appraisal of blame and fault.  S/he does not make a spectacle of him/herself in victory or defeat.
Since, for any athlete, a loss represents a threat to the self, the selfish athlete takes losing as an opportunity to quit.  Quitting is never far from the mind of the selfish athlete.	The self –full athlete abides a loss.  And based on that perseverance, s/he can mine the valuable data that a loss presents.  The self-full athlete gains strength from a loss.
The selfish athlete can’t really identify any reason they play the sport.	The self-full athlete can quickly identify several reasons why they love playing their sport, aspects that make them feel more alive.

There are a few important lessons here for coaches, and parents, and athletes.  

• For coaches: make sure to clarify for your athletes what their role is at every moment, and what success looks like in that role.  Role clarification is not just good for the team dynamics, it’s an essential component of good team performance.

• For parents: from a very early age with your athlete, adopt a mastery orientation over an ego orientation (see http://altiusperformanceworks.blogspot.com/2013/03/sport-parents-ii-ego-mastery_6.html), and make sure to model that orientation in your own life.  If you espouse it, but don’t believe it, your young athlete will detect the difference and be more aligned with your intent than with your message.

•  For athletes: if you notice that the comments in the left-hand column of my grid apply to you, maybe it’s time to re-assess your commitments, and either reconnect with your primal joy for your sport, or, in fact, find another endeavor.   In moments of wavering affiliation, always come back to what you love about your sport, how it feels when you do it right, how uncluttered it feels to have intention and action so closely linked.  It feels great.  It feels like flying.  It feels so full of self, that, at its far edges, it feels selfless.  Those are moments when you’re ready to attach yourself to a bigger canvas, a bigger picture, a bigger plan.

Excuses & Radical Responsibility

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the goofy t-shirt that has common excuses tennis players use when they hit a bad shot.  The shirt says things like: “the sun got in my eyes,” and “my strings were too tight.”  You get the point.  While the shirt is intended as a light joke, it speaks to a natural tendency that all of us have when we make a mistake.  We immediately leap to the mitigating factors that led us astray.  Top athletes, in particular, fall prey to this defense mechanism, often called denial, because they have honed their games to such an extent that they feel as though they are no longer prone to simple mistakes.  This is why you so often see a player glance with a disbelieving look at his or her strings, racket, the ground or the air after a bad shot, trying to fathom the reason for their miscue.  But instead of excusing away a bad shot, I encourage you to use a skill I will call ‘radical responsibility’, in which you avoid the easy balm of environmental fluke and instead take full, personal ownership for the mistake.  Owning your errors is the quickest path to shoring them up, whereas excusing them away is the surest way to remain in the fiction-laden universe of denial and sour grapes.  In this post, I will expand on this common pitfall and promote the skill of radical responsibility as a way toward improved performance.

    Often, there are some other cognitive distortions lurking behind a defense mechanism and it’s important to know which one you might be using when you resort to excuses.  I have written about them both previously, but the first is perfectionism.  Many athletes understandably fall prey to perfectionism because they work so hard and are always striving for the perfect result.  This kind of striving is a good thing.  But it derails performance when the athlete thinks he or she has trained away all mistakes.  But even the best players hit the ball into the net or chili-dip an easy chip shot.  An excuse, then, masks the insult that the mistake has caused to the imagined perfection.  But, often a mistake can be a good opportunity to notice a technical flaw or to realize that your attention has strayed from the task at hand.  The second one is grandiosity, the idea that as we train and get better, we get beyond making certain mistakes, that somehow they are beneath us, that One so Great should never make an error so small.  They say that great mathematicians are not good at simple calculations.  But, that doesn’t make them immune to the laws of nature which addition, subtraction and division describe.

    No.  The real opportunities for learning from mistakes comes from taking radical responsibility for them.  Instead of “I had a bad lie,” try, “I didn’t account for my lie.”  Instead of “the wind really took that,” try, “I didn’t adequately judge the wind.”  That is, radical responsibility demands that you bring your own agency into focus before considering the environmental factors.  Doing so will give you more opportunities to know what you need to work on, and will give you a greater sense of ownership in the outcome.  You take credit for your victories, so you should also put yourself forward as the author of your mistakes.

    I will leave you with two recent examples of how this sense of radical responsibility can play itself out even among the best players.  After missing the cut at this year’s U.S. Open, 2007 Masters champion Zach Johnson remarked, “I’d describe the whole course as manipulative.  It just enhances my disdain for the USGA and how they manipulate courses.”  Now contrast that remark with one that comes from the 1996 P.G.A. Champion, Mark Brooks.  Many people might not have known that he was actually caddying for another tour player at this year’s Players Championship.  When asked what his years of competitive experience were bringing to his man’s bag, he replied: “One thing I try to get him to do is to take responsibility for his shots, really do it, deep down.  And the second thing is to work on his deficiencies.”  Note that the two are connected: take radical responsibility for your mistakes, see them as windows to deeper technical flaws, and then use that feedback to reduce their frequency.  Radical responsibility: put it in your bag and on your next t-shirt.
(For help with this or any other performance challenge, don't hesitate to contact Altius Performance Works at MattMunichPhD@gmail.com.)

Healing to run, running to heal

In the wake of the events at the Boston Marathon and the subsequent shootout and stakeout in Watertown, there has been much discussion of the strength and resilience of the Boston community.  Our Mayor crowed, “Boston will overcome,” and our president uttered his somber words, “they picked on the wrong city," and, "make no mistake about it, we will finish the race.”  The phrase “Boston Strong,” has gone viral.  Even our busses flash this slogan after their LED banners show the number of the route, as if, no matter what bus you get on, we are all headed toward this same impregnable fortress.  And indeed, many of the runners, even among the injured, have pledged that they will run next year, even if on new fiberglass limbs.  Such a display of strength in the face of such terror is both admirable and simply human.  We endure because we have no choice.  But, what of those who don’t feel this sense of strength, whose sense of safety has been so shattered that they are experiencing far greater disturbances than can be addressed with simple slogans of an imagined bravery?  What if they cannot fathom running the marathon again, or even, running again?  What do we say to them?

    The subjective nature of trauma.  The first thing to say is that trauma is an entirely subjective experience.  Just because you weren’t there, doesn’t mean that you weren’t traumatized.  The images of the explosions and the descriptions of the wounds were repeated so often by the media that we all had a very vivid pictures of the horrific event imprinted in our minds.  Some people can seem to regroup relatively quickly, while others--particularly runners and marathon participants--might feel that their universe has become so inverted that they just cannot imagine returning to their pre-event peace of mind.  The important thing to remember is that there is nothing inherently wrong with either response.

    Know the signs of acute traumatic stress.  The second thing we might offer them is to recognize that certain reactions to trauma, though distressing, are normal and can be overcome.  Professionals often break down trauma symptoms into clusters, the most common of which are: re-experiencing (flashbacks, nightmares, hightened sensitivity to reminders of the event), avoidance (social withdrawal, difficulty having or naming feelings, avoiding stimuli or activities associated with the event, difficulties with memory), and hypervigilance (an edgy feeling of always being on, of always thinking the event is going to happen again).  Experiencing these symptoms can often make a person feel as though they are going crazy, when in fact, they are part of the body's natural protection system that went into overdrive during the event.

    Grounding exercises.  One good way to help yourself if you are experiencing any of these symptoms is to first recognize that this is what they are.  Then, you can practice some fairly simple grounding exercises to help you through.  If you are having re-experiencing symptoms, it is important to stop the thought or wake up from the dream and say something to yourself like, "It's over.  It's not happening now.  It was only a flashback/dream.  I'm safe."  If you are having some social withdrawal, try to make yourself do something socially that maybe stretches your comfort zone but isn’t impossible.  Ask a friend to do something that feels pretty easy and then expand from there.  And if you are experiencing some hypervigilance, practice some grounding exercises like some deep breathing (exhaling twice as long as your inhale), guided meditation, or even some physical exercise that gets you out of your head and into your body.  One thing that you will notice about these grounding exercises is that they attempt to give you back some control that was lost during the traumatic event.  Loss of control is one of the signal aspects of trauma and by addressing these symptoms yourself you are taking back some of what was lost.  

       Yet another thing that was lost in a traumatic event is some basic trust in the universe, our faith that bad things like this shouldn't happen.  In that regard, trauma represents a spiritual injury as well as a physical and psychological one.  For this sort of injury, I might suggest that running does offer the best bet for a return to spiritual health.  Your running has been a spiritual exercise for you, a time when mind and body synchronize with your surroundings and gave you that sense of transcending the here and now and participating in something larger than yourself.  Thus, running can be a way to re-harmonize what has gone so badly out of tune.  Recognizing and treating the signs and symptoms of acute stress rather than pretending they're not there might just be one way for you to put those shoes back on to begin the long journey back to the starting line.  But, if some of these symptoms are particularly severe or last longer than a few months, don’t hesitate to contact a mental health expert with some experience working with traumatic stress.

On Rivals & Rivalry

When I arrived as the new coach of a squash team, I entered unknowingly into a long-standing rivalry between my new team and that from another local prep school.  The bitterness between the two teams ran long and deep, with charges of thievery at games, boyfriend stealing, slurs on social media, and the standard suspicion that somehow the other side was gaining some competitive advantage through unfair means.  I was, quite frankly, shocked at the level of nastiness to which this rivalry had descended, particularly in the genteel sport of girls' prep school squash, and dedicated my first season to cleaning up the tenor of the rivalry and getting my team focused on the squash and not the banter.  For it seemed obvious to me that not only was this grudge antithetical to the entire mission of the school, we were the ones whose squash was suffering the most and who always came up on the losing end of our close encounters.  I often wondered if my team had decided that they would never beat this team and so had decided to take the consolation prize of winning the smear campaign.  The recent and very public kerfuffle between Sergio Garcia and Tiger Woods has brought my old experience back to me quite vividly, and so I thought I'd share some things I tried to impress to my team back then about what a fantastic opportunity a rival represents and how to transform the negative feelings a rival elicits into performance gains.

    Violation of the first commandment.  Becoming embroiled in the negative aspects of a rival violates the first commandment of good sport cognition, namely, to focus on the things you can control, not the things you can't.  Though we need to be mindful of our opponent's moves and gamesmanship, a rivalry starts hurting our performance when our focus moves exclusively on that behavior rather than the appropriate performance response, which will usually just be to commit to focusing on the task at hand.

    Elevate the rival.   Two important distortions occur when a rivalry has gone south.  The first is that a rival is in our way and the second is that the rival is somehow less than human.  We see this latter in the terrible name calling we engage in toward the rival and in attributing evil intent to the rival.  Both of these thoughts elicit hostility, a motivator sometimes, but more often a distraction.  Instead, we have to shift the thinking and recognize that a rival offers a great opportunity to strengthen weaknesses in our own games and train harder, focus more clearly and play better.  In essence, the rival is calling us to a higher place, knowing all the while that if we engage in the negative thoughts and behavior that a rivalry offers, we are actually descending to a lower place.  Use the rival to motivate improvement, not to feed the impulses of judgment and rancor, which, if we are going to achieve our highest potential, need less attention rather than more.

    Take the higher ground.  Always take the high ground in these instances.  Always resort to better sportsmanship when you are being lured into gamesmanship.  Compliment rather than criticize  ("nice shot," rather than "lucky bounce!").  Don't take away your opponent's humanity by imparting evil intent to them.  Doing so is not only better for the game, it's better for your game.  You will find yourself less caught up in your opponent's shenanigans and more focused on your own play.  And, you will not have a moral hangover for slights and injuries that you were lured into, behaviors that linger into subsequent points and games and drain your focus away from the moment at hand.

    To return to the earlier example of Sergio and Tiger.  I think it was fairly clear to everyone on Saturday at the Players Championship that Sergio's blaming Tiger for his own bad shot on the 38th hole of the tournament was an example of bad sport cognition which bit him very bitterly on the 71st.  I have written in these bytes before about Sergio's bad thinking, but his behavior at the Players and his subsequent offhand and racist comments really reached a new level, and in it we should recognize the self-destructive power of the kind of negative thinking involved when a rivalry goes awry.  Think of him what you may, but Tiger Woods is clearly calling the golfing world to a higher level (of golf) and if Sergio could only transform his negative thoughts about Tiger into motivating ones, he might be the one raising the jug on Sunday.  Believe me, no one would be more motivated to play better golf by such a sight than Tiger.