CROQUET COACHING: What My Choke in the Olympic Games Taught Me About the Perils of Pressure

26 April 2010
Times, London, England, United Kingdom
by Matthew Syed

Humiliation in Sydney

It seemed like an eternity standing behind the curtain, waiting to be announced to the crowd for my opening match at the Olympic Games in Sydney. I glanced at my opponent — a beatable German called Peter Franz — and sensed his ambition. This was the most important match of our respective seasons, quite possibly the most important match of our careers.

The microphone struck up and the crowd roared as I stepped through the curtains into the megawatt light of the arena. The Olympic Games! I noticed a large group of British spectators in the stands, and I knew that back home my family and friends would be tuning in on television. This was the match I had saved for a career, a contest that could be life-transforming.

And then it happened

Franz stroked the ball into play — a gentle forehand top spin. It was not a difficult stroke to return, and yet I was strangely late on it, my feet stuck in their original position, my racket jabbing at the ball in a way that was totally unfamiliar. My return missed the table by more than two feet. I shook out my hand, sensing that something was wrong and hoping it would rectify itself. But things got worse.

Each time my opponent played a stroke, I found my body doing things that bore no relation to anything I had learnt over the last 20 years of playing table tennis: my feet were sluggish, my movements alien, my touch barely existent. I lost the opening game 21-8. It was as if I had regressed to the time when I was a beginner.

The second game was even more catastrophic: 21–4. It was as if an impostor had taken over my body and was playing in my stead. I was fumbling around, as the audience murmured in disbelief. This was more than a defeat, it was humiliation: a collapse both graphic and inexplicable.

As my coach put it with brutal honesty: “It is simple, Matthew. You choked.”

A Tale of Two Brain Systems

Choking is one of the most perplexing phenomena in sport and life. It is not just top athletes, but musicians, politicians, actors, artists, surgeons, painters and all manner of other expert performers who have been afflicted by its curse. You may have choked at some point, too — unable to utter a word on a hot first date, unable to string a sentence together when giving a big presentation.

But why does it happen?

I am standing towards the back of the hall at the Cippenham Table Tennis Club in the South of England. Ken Phillips, the coach, is working with a group of 12-year-olds who are relatively new to the sport, and he is barking instructions at them.

They are learning how to play the forehand top spin, one of the most important strokes in the game. “Keep using the wrist!” Phillips shouts. Lauren, a brown-haired girl on the table nearest me, furrows her brow with concentration. She repeats the coach’s instruction under her breath, and then, on the next rally, makes an effort to get her wrist rotating. She misses the ball completely. Phillips comes across, guides her through the correct movement, and she gives it another go.

This time she connects with the ball, but now she has neglected to rotate her shoulders and bend her knees. Her forearm has also gone out of kilter, as has the connection between the hips and the torso. Phillips, however, does not mention any of this: he is preoccupied simply with getting the wrist moving in the right way.

As I watch, I begin to get a sense of the sheer complexity of the forehand top spin: the symphony of moving parts, the requirement for synchronicity between each of them. Phillips has broken it down into a few simple instructions, but over time his young players will have to integrate literally hundreds of biomechanical rules into the construction of their motor programmes.

I ask Lauren to try something new — to count the number of times I tap my foot on the floor during the next rally — but she immediately breaks down, her stroke petering out even as she starts it. She looks confused. “I can’t do it,” she says. “I can hit the ball or count the number of taps of your foot, but not both at the same time.”

A couple of hours later, Phillips is coaching a smaller group of youngsters: 14-year-olds who have been playing for at least six years each. Phillips asks them to play along the forehand diagonal and this time all the youngsters play their top spins with elegance, making the infinitesimal adjustments to technique and position as each new ball is fired towards them.

I repeat the experiment I had attempted with Lauren by asking a boy called James to play his top spin while counting the number of times I tap my foot on the ground. It is not even a challenge. He nails 15 top spins, during which I have stamped my foot 17 times. He smiles as he gives me the correct answer. On the next rally, I talk with James about what he has been doing at school today, but once again the distraction makes no difference to his ability to play the rally.

The reason is simple: James has “automated” his stroke-making. Many hours of practice have enabled him to encode the stroke in implicit rather than explicit memory. It wasn’t always like this: when he started out, he was just like Lauren, consciously monitoring the way he was hitting the ball as he painstakingly built up the neural framework supporting the shot. Only after many hours was he able to execute the shot without having to think about it.

James and Lauren are, in effect, using two entirely different systems of the brain. Russell Poldrack, a neuroscientist from Los Angeles, has conducted a number of brain-imaging experiments to trace the transition from explicit to implicit monitoring. He has discovered that the prefrontal cortex is activated when a novice is learning a skill, but that control of the stroke switches over time to areas such as the basal ganglia, which is partly responsible for touch and feel.

This transition between brain systems can be most easily understood by thinking about what happens when you learn to drive. When you start out, you have to focus intently to move the gearshift while keeping the steering wheel in the right place and pushing on the clutch. In fact, at the beginning these tasks are so difficult to execute simultaneously that the instructor starts you off in a car park and slowly helps you to integrate the various elements.

Only after many hours can these various skills be performed effortlessly, without any conscious control, so that you are now able to arrive at your destination without even being aware of how you got there, your mind having been on other things, such as what to make for dinner.

But now imagine if an expert were to suddenly find himself using the “wrong” brain system. It wouldn’t matter if he were the greatest player of all time or merely a decent club player because he would now be at the mercy of the explicit rather than the implicit system. The highly sophisticated skills encoded in the implicit part of his brain would count for nothing. He would find himself striving for victory using neural pathways he last used as a novice. This situation has been recreated by Robert Gray, a psychologist at Arizona State University. He took a group of outstanding baseball players and asked them to swing at a moving ball while listening for a randomly presented tone to judge whether the tone was high or low in frequency.

As expected, the tone-listening task had no detrimental effect on the efficiency of their swings (just as counting the number of foot taps had no impact on James’s forehand top spin). Why? Because the baseball hitters have automated their shot-making.

But when the hitters were asked to indicate whether their bat was moving up or down at the instant the tone sounded, their performance plummeted. Why? Because this time the secondary task forced them to direct their attention towards the swing itself. They were consciously monitoring a stroke that was supposed to be automatic. Explicit monitoring was vying with implicit execution.

Their problem was not a lack of focus, but too much focus. Conscious monitoring had disrupted the smooth workings of the implicit system. The sequencing and timing of the different motor responses were fragmented, just as they would be with a novice. They were, effectively, beginners again.

Hoch the Choke

In 1989 Scott Hoch stood on the 10th green of the Augusta National with an 18-inch putt to win the Masters. It was the second hole of a sudden-death play-off with Nick Faldo. Faldo had bogeyed the hole and Hoch, a rank outsider, stood before a simple putt that could transform his life. Had he faced such a short putt on the opening hole, or the 7th or the 15th, the American would have knocked it in without a great deal of forethought, but with the Masters within his grasp, Hoch spent an age checking and rechecking the line. Only after two minutes of analysis did the American settle over his putt. Then he rechecked the line. And rechecked his grip. And refocused his mind. Rechecked everything, in fact.

The putt didn’t even touch the lip — and Faldo won the title at the next hole. Unsurprisingly, the American was known thereafter as “Hoch the Choke”.

Unlike the baseball hitters, Hoch hadn’t been asked by a researcher to monitor explicitly his hitting action. But his desire to win the Masters was such that his attention to the line, the wind, and every other variable spilt over into a very different — and fatal — kind of attention. He consciously monitored the stroke itself. He yearned for the ball to drop so much that he inadvertently took explicit control of a putt that would surely have dropped had he but left it to the implicit system.

He jabbed at the ball, just as I had jabbed during that humiliation in Sydney, my shots becoming unchunked as I tried to control consciously the disparate movements of a task that can only be executed unconsciously.

Think of some of the other iconic chokes and you’ll notice the same pattern. When Jana Novotna led Steffi Graff 4–1 and 40–30 in the women’s singles final at Wimbledon in 1993, the result seemed a formality. Novotna had been playing tennis from the heavens, but standing on the threshold of victory, she stalled. Her movements slowed drastically, her strokes became stilted, her movements disconnected. The explicit system had taken over.

Now think of the way in which chokers are sometimes admonished. When the England football team lost to Germany at the 1996 European Championships, Gareth Southgate was given a hard time for missing a crucial penalty. His shot lacked assurance, his technique all leg and no hips and torso. The various parts of the skill had become unchunked: a classic choke.

“Why did Southgate kick the ball so feebly?” one commentator asked. “You could understand a beginner screwing things up under pressure, but not a man who has spent his life playing football.” But we can now see that the truth is precisely the reverse. It is only an expert performer — someone who has practised long enough to automate a skill — who has the capacity to choke. For a novice any additional attention is likely to benefit execution, not hinder it.

This outcome has been demonstrated by Charles Kimble, a psychologist at the University of Dayton. He took some skilled players of the Tetris video game and also some novices and then created a high-pressure environment by getting them to play in front of a big audience. The expert players got worse, exhibiting clear choking effects; the beginners actually improved.

Bounce: How Champions Are Made by Matthew Syed, is published by Fourth Estate on Thursday (April 29), £12.99. To order it for £10.39 including p&p, phone 0845-2712134 or visit timesonline.co.uk/bookshop.