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The Golf Whisperer
Tiger Woods is always changing coaches and altering his mechanics—the sort of tinkering Jack Nicklaus always avoided.
By JAMES ZUG / WALL STREET JOURNAL
June 17, 2015 11:49 a.m. ET
Two books from the past decade represent the poles of the current debate about what makes a champion: nature versus nurture. On one side is David Epstein’s “The Sports Gene” (2013), which explored the role biology plays in high-level sports. You are either born to be a champion or not. The other theory was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in “Outliers” (2008). Mr. Gladwell said that it takes hard work to achieve mastery in a field—precisely 10,000 hours of practice. This spawned amateurs putting in their 10,000 hours and blogging about the results.
Bob Rotella says that neither theory is right. The great champions, he argues in “How Champions Think,” are not born or made; rather, they have developed certain mental habits and attitudes that play a central role in their success. It is not your parents or hours at the range and weight room but something in the noggin. Ordinary schlubs like us can train our brains.
Mr. Rotella is a sports psychologist. His profession officially began just over a century ago. In 1898, an Indiana University professor named Norman Triplett observed that cyclists went faster when they competed against others than when they biked solo—humans are social and competitive animals. You get the feeling that Triplett was not really the first, however—that in ancient Greece someone gave advice to javelin throwers. The whisperer on the sidelines surely was the first person to appear after the very first contest.
HOW CHAMPIONS THINK
By Bob Rotella
Simon & Schuster, 290 pages, $26
But as the sports industrial complex developed, so too did the sports-psychology movement. Today college teams, high-school teams, nearly every professional athlete—they all have a head doc. Mr. Rotella says that the names of his colleagues float around putting greens at pro golf tournaments “almost as if they were being chirped by the birds.” Why sidle up to Bob Rotella?
For one, his client list is studded with very successful people. He is not shy about telling you. NCAA champions and Olympic gold medalists are on page one. On page two, Mr. Rotella mentions that three of the five players to ever shoot a 59 in a PGA tournament were working with him when they did it. On page three, he talks about counseling LeBron James. From there is a cascade of boldface names, many from the world of sports but others from the entertainment industry: Padraig Harrington, Tom Kite, Seal, Greg Maddux, Pat Bradley, Richard Petty, Jimmie Johnson, Jim Furyk, Charl Schwartzel, Rick Carlisle, Hal Sutton, Ken Griffey Jr. He works with teams: George Mason basketball during their Cinderella season in 2005-06, the Cincinnati Reds right now. He works with companies like Merrill Lynch.
Golf is Mr. Rotella’s wheelhouse and is much discussed in “How Champions Think.” He suggests that one thing wrong about Tiger Woods’s game—and something Jack Nicklaus avoided—is that Mr. Woods is always switching coaches and tinkering with his mechanics. Mr. Nicklaus stuck with his bread and butter. Writing months before Jordan Spieth’s runaway victory at the 2015 Masters, Mr. Rotella points out Mr. Spieth’s unusual mental strength.
“If you stood behind him and a dozen other young stars on the practice range and you didn’t know who he was, you’d probably not select him as the best of the bunch,” Mr. Rotella writes. But Mr. Speith has an “excellent mental game”: He talks about being “indifferent to what his competitors were doing. . . . He didn’t fall into the trap of thinking much about where he stood in the tournament and trying to force things.”
The holy trinity in Mr. Rotella’s coaching pantheon consists of John Wooden, Vince Lombardi and John Calipari. The first two aren’t surprising choices, but Mr. Rotella’s reasons are new. He loves that Wooden was so concerned with details that he would teach his players exactly how he wanted them to tie their sneakers. The author says that his cousin Sal from New Jersey knew Lombardi well and spoke about Lombardi’s love of effort, not outcome, debunking the “winning is everything” myth. Lombardi, Mr. Rotella writes, taught his players “that sustaining a commitment to personal excellence over a lifetime would separate them from other people and make them exceptional.”
But “Cal,” as Mr. Rotella calls Mr. Calipari, seems to be his favorite. He mentions the Kentucky basketball coach a dozen times, telling stories from Mr. Calipari’s boyhood and career that explain his methods. One involves the coach walking in on a team celebration in 2011, after Kentucky thrashed St. John’s by more than 20 points. He shut it down by pointing out that his players coasted in the last eight minutes. “I have not mentioned winning or losing once all year,” Mr. Calipari admonished. All he insisted upon was maximum effort.
Mr. Rotella eschews bullet points and overt takeaways—there is just one, rather plain-Jane graph in the entire book. Instead, in more than serviceable prose (the book was written with Bob Cullen), he spins tales from his decades of advising the exceptionally rich, talented and famous.
His advice doesn’t sound earth-shattering. It’s straightforward and simple. Be optimistic and confident and believe in your talent. Do visualization exercises in the same way you practice your three-pointers or bunker shots. Let the subconscious brain do the work—“train it and trust it.” Forget mistakes and failures; treat them like accidents. Commit to working hard—“sweat in practice so you don’t bleed in the game.” Immerse yourself in the process, not the final goal. Love the great days more than you hate the bad days. Underreact to everything. Be patient with yourself but impatient with the limits others place on you. Surround yourself with positive people. Do what you love and love what you do. Luck affects outcomes, but it doesn’t affect effort.
“Ninety percent of this game is half mental,” said Yogi Berra. Do the math. Read Rotella.
Mr. Zug is the author, most recently, of “Run to the Roar: Coaching to Overcome Fear.”
Tiger Woods is always changing coaches and altering his mechanics—the sort of tinkering Jack Nicklaus always avoided.
By JAMES ZUG / WALL STREET JOURNAL
June 17, 2015 11:49 a.m. ET
Two books from the past decade represent the poles of the current debate about what makes a champion: nature versus nurture. On one side is David Epstein’s “The Sports Gene” (2013), which explored the role biology plays in high-level sports. You are either born to be a champion or not. The other theory was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in “Outliers” (2008). Mr. Gladwell said that it takes hard work to achieve mastery in a field—precisely 10,000 hours of practice. This spawned amateurs putting in their 10,000 hours and blogging about the results.
Bob Rotella says that neither theory is right. The great champions, he argues in “How Champions Think,” are not born or made; rather, they have developed certain mental habits and attitudes that play a central role in their success. It is not your parents or hours at the range and weight room but something in the noggin. Ordinary schlubs like us can train our brains.
Mr. Rotella is a sports psychologist. His profession officially began just over a century ago. In 1898, an Indiana University professor named Norman Triplett observed that cyclists went faster when they competed against others than when they biked solo—humans are social and competitive animals. You get the feeling that Triplett was not really the first, however—that in ancient Greece someone gave advice to javelin throwers. The whisperer on the sidelines surely was the first person to appear after the very first contest.
HOW CHAMPIONS THINK
By Bob Rotella
Simon & Schuster, 290 pages, $26
But as the sports industrial complex developed, so too did the sports-psychology movement. Today college teams, high-school teams, nearly every professional athlete—they all have a head doc. Mr. Rotella says that the names of his colleagues float around putting greens at pro golf tournaments “almost as if they were being chirped by the birds.” Why sidle up to Bob Rotella?
For one, his client list is studded with very successful people. He is not shy about telling you. NCAA champions and Olympic gold medalists are on page one. On page two, Mr. Rotella mentions that three of the five players to ever shoot a 59 in a PGA tournament were working with him when they did it. On page three, he talks about counseling LeBron James. From there is a cascade of boldface names, many from the world of sports but others from the entertainment industry: Padraig Harrington, Tom Kite, Seal, Greg Maddux, Pat Bradley, Richard Petty, Jimmie Johnson, Jim Furyk, Charl Schwartzel, Rick Carlisle, Hal Sutton, Ken Griffey Jr. He works with teams: George Mason basketball during their Cinderella season in 2005-06, the Cincinnati Reds right now. He works with companies like Merrill Lynch.
Golf is Mr. Rotella’s wheelhouse and is much discussed in “How Champions Think.” He suggests that one thing wrong about Tiger Woods’s game—and something Jack Nicklaus avoided—is that Mr. Woods is always switching coaches and tinkering with his mechanics. Mr. Nicklaus stuck with his bread and butter. Writing months before Jordan Spieth’s runaway victory at the 2015 Masters, Mr. Rotella points out Mr. Spieth’s unusual mental strength.
“If you stood behind him and a dozen other young stars on the practice range and you didn’t know who he was, you’d probably not select him as the best of the bunch,” Mr. Rotella writes. But Mr. Speith has an “excellent mental game”: He talks about being “indifferent to what his competitors were doing. . . . He didn’t fall into the trap of thinking much about where he stood in the tournament and trying to force things.”
The holy trinity in Mr. Rotella’s coaching pantheon consists of John Wooden, Vince Lombardi and John Calipari. The first two aren’t surprising choices, but Mr. Rotella’s reasons are new. He loves that Wooden was so concerned with details that he would teach his players exactly how he wanted them to tie their sneakers. The author says that his cousin Sal from New Jersey knew Lombardi well and spoke about Lombardi’s love of effort, not outcome, debunking the “winning is everything” myth. Lombardi, Mr. Rotella writes, taught his players “that sustaining a commitment to personal excellence over a lifetime would separate them from other people and make them exceptional.”
But “Cal,” as Mr. Rotella calls Mr. Calipari, seems to be his favorite. He mentions the Kentucky basketball coach a dozen times, telling stories from Mr. Calipari’s boyhood and career that explain his methods. One involves the coach walking in on a team celebration in 2011, after Kentucky thrashed St. John’s by more than 20 points. He shut it down by pointing out that his players coasted in the last eight minutes. “I have not mentioned winning or losing once all year,” Mr. Calipari admonished. All he insisted upon was maximum effort.
Mr. Rotella eschews bullet points and overt takeaways—there is just one, rather plain-Jane graph in the entire book. Instead, in more than serviceable prose (the book was written with Bob Cullen), he spins tales from his decades of advising the exceptionally rich, talented and famous.
His advice doesn’t sound earth-shattering. It’s straightforward and simple. Be optimistic and confident and believe in your talent. Do visualization exercises in the same way you practice your three-pointers or bunker shots. Let the subconscious brain do the work—“train it and trust it.” Forget mistakes and failures; treat them like accidents. Commit to working hard—“sweat in practice so you don’t bleed in the game.” Immerse yourself in the process, not the final goal. Love the great days more than you hate the bad days. Underreact to everything. Be patient with yourself but impatient with the limits others place on you. Surround yourself with positive people. Do what you love and love what you do. Luck affects outcomes, but it doesn’t affect effort.
“Ninety percent of this game is half mental,” said Yogi Berra. Do the math. Read Rotella.
Mr. Zug is the author, most recently, of “Run to the Roar: Coaching to Overcome Fear.”