Competitive fire PDF
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Page i Competitive Fire Michael Clarkson Page ii Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data Clarkson, Michael, 1948— Competitive fire / by Michael Clarkson p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0880118652 1. Athletes—Psychology. 2. Sports—Psychological aspects. 3. SportsCompetition. I. Title. GV706.4.C53 1999 796'.01—dc21 9917568 CIP ISBN:0880118652 Copyright © 1999 by Michael Clarkson All rights reserved. Except for use in a review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying, and recording, and in any information storage and retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher. Developmental Editor: Kent Reel; Assistant Editor: Kim Thoren; Copyeditor: John Wentworth; Proofreader: Don Amerman; Indexer: Daniel Connolly; Graphic Designer: Nancy Rasmus; Graphic Artist: Tom Roberts; Photo Editor: Clark Brooks; Cover Designer: Jack Davis; Photographer (cover): Reuters/Peter Morgan/Archive Photos; Printer: United Graphics Human Kinetics books are available at special discounts for bulk purchase. Special editions or book excerpts can also be created to specification. For details, contact the Special Sales Manager at Human Kinetics. Printed in the United States of America 1 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Human Kinetics Web site: http://www.humankinetics.com/ United States: Human Kinetics, P.O. Box 5076, Champaign, IL 618255076 18007474457 email: [email protected] Canada: Human Kinetics, 475 Devonshire Road Unit 100, Windsor, ON N8Y 2L5 18004657301 (in Canada only) email:[email protected] Europe: Human Kinetics, P.O. Box IW14, Leeds LS16 6TR, United Kingdom 44 (0) 113–278 1708 email:[email protected] Australia: Human Kinetics, 57A Price Avenue, Lower Mitcham, South Australia 5062 (08) 82771555 email:[email protected] New Zealand: Human Kinetics, P.O. Box 105231, Auckland Central 095233462 email:[email protected] Page iii To Irene Clarkson and Jennifer (Vanderklei) Clarkson Page iv CONTENTS Acknowledgments vi Introduction vii PART I 1 Fight, Flight, or Fright Chapter 1 3 The Athlete's Primal Defense System Chapter 2 19 Impact of Optimal Arousal Chapter 3 33 Altered States Chapter 4 43 The Painless Zone and Other States PART II 53 Warring Athletes Chapter 5 55 The Athlete as Warrior Chapter 6 69 The Incredible Drive of Elite Athletes Chapter 7 85 Turning Adversity Into Advantage Chapter 8 97 The Parents' Hall of Fame Chapter 9 107 Fueling the Fire Page v PART III 129 Soaring Athletes Chapter 10 131 New Tricks of an Old Trade Chapter 11 151 Relaxing and Focusing Chapter 12 167 Staying in the Twilight Zone Chapter 13 181 Altering Your Chemistry PART IV 197 Crashing and Burning Athletes Chapter 14 199 Choking Revisited Chapter 15 211 Intensity Overload Chapter 16 221 Athlete Addictions Bibliography 243 Index 245 About the Author 253 Page vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks to the many people who have made this book possible, either through their motivation to me or through information they provided. My family has endured living with a writer and given me support and inspiration through years of ups and downs—my parents Fred and Irene Clarkson, my inlaws Tony and Kathleen Vanderklei, my wife Jennifer, and our sons Paul and Kevin. In the newspaper business, there's been Clive Jacklin, John De Visser, Murray Thomson, Mike Dempster, Dave Perkins, Steve Tustin, and John Nicol and, in writing, J.D. Salinger. I must thank all those athletes I coached and played with over the years who have become unwitting laboratory mice for this project, including my first coach Del Davidson, the teammates and players I coached at Niagara Christian College, and Harry FrithSmith at the Calgary YMCA, who has the best threepoint basketball shot of any psychotherapist I know. Arnold Fox, a Beverly Hills cardiologist and stress author, encouraged me to keep going on my research in the early years when publishers weren't interested. Thanks to the Toronto Star, Sports Illustrated, the Boston Globe Online, USA Today, the Associated Press, the Canadian Press, Psychology Today, and the many users of the Internet for contributing much of the information contained in this book. Finally, special thanks are due to all the elite athletes, coaches, neuroscientists, and psychologists who have contributed to my 10 years of research for this book by granting me interviews, to Human Kinetics editor Ted Miller for his encouragement and faith in my work, and to HK developmental editor Kent Reel for his insights. Page vii INTRODUCTION "There's more to it then throwing the ball 90 miles an hour. It's about your inside." Fivetime Cy Young Award winner Roger Clemens This book is largely about how human desires and needs can create powerful forces in the world of sports. Its main issue is that many superstar athletes reach peak performance more often than their opponents and stay at the top longer during their careers because they provoke and then control their stress emotions as an additive to performance both over the short term and the long haul. Their competitive fires are in a slow, steady burn over the course of their careers and occasionally erupt in supernova performances. Many of their experiences in the socalled "arousal zone" of peak performance seem related to a need to defend their ego and selfesteem, resulting occasionally in a type of "fight or flight' on the playing field. Their insecurities often leave them with a strong need to prove themselves, driving them through years of rigorous training and career setbacks and sometimes triggering record performances. These insecurities and emotions often seem to come from a challenged, even dysfunctional, and yet resilient childhood and from a competitive sports system which fuels their competitive instincts. Page viii Of course, talent has much to do with success, but, at the risk of oversimplifying a complex subject, they succeed because they turn their passions, and often their emotional and psychological needs and fears, into powerful fuels in two ways: Over the longterm, they are fueled by superior determination and drive or emotional drive; and during the shortterm they trigger adrenalin, dopamine, endorphin, and other potent hormones for peak performances. I am not a psychologist, although after more than 30 years of daily newspaper reporting as well as coaching and playing many amateur sports, I've been exposed to human behavior in heavy doses, especially to people dealing with stress. There are many brilliant thinkers who have devoted their lives to sports science and I am bringing together hundreds of top psychologists, sociologists, coaches, and players to help give insight to this complex subject. This book does not contain a lot of new information, although in my research I have produced new findings linking successful athletes and their anger, as well as findings about elite athletes' unusual upbringings and rates of violence in their personal lives. What's especially new is the way old information and ideas are viewed. Much of the "evidence" that has been compiled is anecdotal and the conclusions drawn from it are speculative, but it's hard to dismiss some trends when they keep popping up over and over again. I've studied more than 50 of the alltime peak performances, from Jack Nicklaus in the 1986 Masters to Mike Powell smashing the long jump record, and found that anger was one of the quotients in most of them. I have also studied the lives of 500 high achievers, including many top athletes, and two things jumped out at me: They had a burning desire to succeed, the socalled emotional drive, which they often turned into intense emotions for shortterm benefit. A second trend was that most of them came from a childhood with a serious issue—a dead or missing parent, a serious disability, or a smothering parent. This book is somewhat controversial. It shows that insecurity and anger can sometimes get you places, that stars like Michael Jordan admit to sometimes putting themselves above their team, that NBA and NFL players have a higher rate of arrests for violent crimes than other sports players, that many top athletes may be psychologically or emotionally unhealthy. This is also a book about how many top athletes are sometimes neurotically driven to defend their pride, ego, or selfesteem, as such legends have admitted—Michael Jordan, Billie Jean King, Jack Page ix Nicklaus, Carl Lewis, Nancy Lopez, and Wayne Gretzky. It is also a study in animal response, human revenge, and the tactics that sports stars use to focus their strong feelings into production. Being "in the zone" is one of the most overworked expressions in sports, yet the phenomenon remains a mystery, partly because we're fooled into oversimplifying it. When we talk of athletes being in the zone, there seems to be at least four different types of such states: 1. The Arousal Zone—A short spurt of arousal for one performance or part of one performance, often with "channeled" anger or another emotion as an additive. This results sometimes in tachypsychia, a phenomenon in which the action seems to transpire in slow motion. Example: Michael Jordan getting revenge on a foe who had embarrassed him in the media. 2. The Painless Zone—A shortterm experience in which pain is temporarily numbed but which may result in a mindbody breakdown after the performance. Example: Kirk Gibson ignoring painful injuries to hit a ninthinning homerun as his Los Angeles Dodgers won a 1988 World Series game. 3. Flow—The more romantic version of mindbody harmony, usually with less arousal than the Arousal Zone, but with numerous similarities, including superior concentration. Example: gymnast Nadia Comaneci recording the first perfect 10 in the 1976 Olympics. Over the long haul, flow is probably healthier than other states of mind. 4. LongTerm Zone—More of an emotional drive than the above three. Example: In 1997, Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Roger Clemens, with a "need to prove" something to the Boston Red Sox, the team that let him go, had his best season in years, winning the Cy Young when people said he was washed up. Although there seems to be a connection among several of these zones, particularly in the "altered perceptions" reported by the athletes, we may make the mistake of trying to cram all four of them into one "zone." Perhaps that's one reason we have such a problem getting to the bottom of this subject and why many theories appear to clash. This book, the result of 10 years' research, will concentrate mainly on the arousal zone. During the 1980s, it was said that the mind was sport science's last frontier, and all other systems to improve athletic
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