The Super Mental Training Book (17 page)

"I just love those kind of books," he said. "I can't get enough of them. Let me show you what I'm reading now. I read this every morning. 'Dear Father, whatever conditions confront me, I know that they represent the next step in my unfoldment. I will welcome all tests because I know that within me is the intelligence to understand and the power to overcome.'"[6]

The phrase Chones read to himself every morning would qualify as a good general autosuggestion. This is yet another indication that any differences separating yoga practitioners from self-hypnosis practitioners are minor. Interestingly, Ostler made it clear that Chones was but "one of several on the Lakers" who practiced yoga. The other players on the team who engaged in the discipline went unidentified at the time; but, several years later it was revealed that Lakers center Kareem Abdul-Jabbar attended yoga classes. Abdul-Jabbar, the all-time NBA scoring champion and record holder for most seasons played in the league, termed the yoga classes as "crucial" in extending and enhancing his exemplary career. Referring to cardiovascular training, strength training, and yoga, he remarked, "I don't think I'd (still) be playing (in 1987) if it wasn't for that." [7]

The 1979-80 season, in which yoga practitioners Abdul-Jabbar and Chones both played for Los Angeles, definitely qualified as one where the Lakers physically and mentally put it all together: they won the NBA Championship. Coincidence? Maybe, because the next year the Lakers lost to their first opponent in the playoffs, the Houston Rockets. Even so, the weight of evidence tends to support these conclusions about yoga: 1) the discipline offers the athlete many of the same benefits that self-hypnosis and meditation provide, and 2) like self-hypnosis and other mental training strategies, practicing yoga does not guarantee you victory.

The Phoenix Suns found out in 1982 that employing mental rehearsal techniques will not ensure victory. Sports psychologist Barbara Kolonay worked with the Suns during the 1981-82 season. The main mental drill she had the players perform was imagery. The players, with eyes closed, lied down on mats on the basketball gym floor. According to correspondent Rebecca Bricker of People Weekly, Dr. Kolonay would then set up a critical game situation for the players to imagine, such as this one:

The score is tied with only five seconds to play. The whistle blows: You've been fouled. You can feel your heart pounding. Your legs are rubbery. Sweat is rolling down your back. A hush settles over the crowd. The referee hands you the ball for the free throw that could win the game. [8]

While the players imagined themselves in such a situation, Kolonay noted the psychological reaction of each player via a biofeedback instrument. Reported Bricker:

(Kolonay) gives each player a hand-held biofeedback instrument which indicates tension by measuring the expansion of skin pores and the amount of sweat. From the rapid high-pitched tone the device emits, Kolonay can gauge anxiety levels and concentrate on imagery.

Presumably, Dr. Kolonay provided anxious players some tension-reducing and confidence-building imagery to help them deal with potential game-on-the-line situations. In fact, Kolonay's imagery technique was credited with improving forward Truck Robinson's free throw shooting percentage from 59% to 75%. We do not learn from Bricker how other members of the Suns did on improving their free throw shooting or overall performance, but we do find out that Kolonay's specialty is helping basketball players improve their free throw shooting. Dr. Kolonay's master's thesis, informs Bricker, "showed that the success rate of eight New York area college basketball foul shooters had significantly improved—from 68.3 percent to 74.8 percent—after a six-week program of relaxation and imagery exercises." [9]

While the imagery exercises might have helped the Suns improve their free throw shooting percentage, it was not enough to get them by the Los Angeles Lakers in 1982. Phoenix finished in third place in the Pacific Division, 11 games behind the first place Lakers. Then, in the second round of the playoffs, Los Angeles swept the Suns in four straight. Because Phoenix employed the services of a sports psychologist during the season, let us focus in on these four games, comparing the Suns' free throw and field goal percentages to those of the Lakers. (The overall percentage totals in this case were obtained by assigning an equal value to each game, adding the four games' percentages, then dividing by four.)

FT = Free throw percentage FG = Field Goal percentage

The Suns only shot 2% better than the Lakers on free throws, an insignificant difference. The Lakers, however, outperformed Phoenix on field goals by an impressive 11%. If one were to guess which team used the services of a sports psychologist, the Lakers would be the logical choice. But, Dr. Kolonay worked with the Suns, not the Lakers; and, her specialty was helping

players improve their free throw shooting via imagery. So, how do we account for the Lakers essentially matching the Suns on free throws and way outperforming Phoenix on field goals? For starters, the Lakers were a strong team in 1982, winning the NBA Championship. Not only were the Lakers strong, but Kolonay might assert that the players on the Lakers were highly compatible. Bricker tells us that Kolonay's doctoral dissertation revealed that "compatibility meant victory. Among teams with a .500 record or better, those whose players got along best won the most games, those whose players got along next best had the second best record, etc." So, the players on the Lakers may have been more compatible with each other than was the case with the players on the Suns; and, this compatibility factor perhaps figured more prominently in the final equation than any benefits Kolonay's imagery provided the Suns.

Probably the best explanation for the Lakers superior performance was that L.A. just possessed more talent than Phoenix; after all, the Lakers did have superstars Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Magic Johnson. Johnson himself implied in his book, Magic (1983), that the Lakers were more talented, stating that the Suns "were unable to match our speed and quickness."

Of course, all of these proposed explanations are speculative in nature. The '82 season cannot be replayed. So, we'll never know how the Suns would have done if Dr. Kolonay had not worked with them. Perhaps Phoenix would not have even made it to the playoffs without Dr. Kolonay's help; then again, maybe the Suns would have done much better without the imagery sessions. All we can do is speculate.

Dr. Kolonay charged the Suns $50/hour for her imagery sessions, and at the time of her work with Phoenix was looking into helping out the Chicago White Sox or New York Yankees. As we have already seen, Harvey Misel won the contract with the White Sox; this occurred in mid-1983, showing that the White Sox management was thinking about hiring a "mental coach" for over a year before actually doing so.

Dr. Kolonay is not alone in having introduced mental training techniques to a professional basketball team. In 1985, as reported in the Orange County Register, the Los Angeles Clippers retained the services of a sports psychologist, Saul Miller. Miller defined his role in working with the team as that of a mental coach, one who complements the rest of the coaching staff; he emphasized at the time that he should not be regarded as a doctor, that is, as someone who is called in because there is a problem. The sports psychologist briefly described the complementary nature of his serving as the Clippers' mental coach:

Teams have strength coaches to work on weightlifting. And I have techniques to improve their mental strengths. It's an instructional thing.

Instead of asking "What's wrong?" our approach is always in a positive context. We ask, "What can I create?" "What can I do?" [ 10]

The techniques Miller employs to improve a player's mental strength include imagery, breathing exercises, positive-attitude reinforcement, and others which probably are versions of hypnosis. Register correspondent Michele Himmelberg, who interviewed Miller, noted that he "offers instruction in the areas of concentration; being loose in a game, yet still being intense; and stress, which can rise to high levels with cross-continental travel."

At the beginning of the 1985-86 season the sports psychologist's work seemed to have paid off with the Clippers. Los Angeles won its first five games, the best start in the franchise's history. Then, a rash of serious injuries hit the team, from which it never recovered (they did not make the playoffs). Carl Scheer, Clippers general manager until his dismissal at the end of the '85-'86 season, feels that professional basketball has reached the point where having a mental coach on the staff is practically a necessity. "In the sophisticated level of the game today," Scheer informed Himmelberg, "we need any edge we can get. It's no longer just a physical game, but a physical-

mental game. This is an awareness that those of us in sports are just now gaining."

The Portland Trail Blazers evidently agreed with Scheer's assessment that professional basketball is now a physical-mental game because they too for the 1985-86 season hired a team psychologist, Dr. Bruce Ogilvie. Himmelberg reports Dr. Ogilvie as saying:

We're very interested to see if a player is adaptable, competitive, if he sets high or low goals. How does he feel about putting out over a period of time? Can he adjust to delayed rewards? Can he come in, let's say, used to being a starter, then average six minutes a game and not have his ego deflated?

No one is lost due to emotional reasons. My primary responsibility is to see to that [11]

How Dr. Ogilvie saw to it that emotional matters did not upset players on the Trail Blazers we do not learn from Himmelberg, nor how long Ogilvie served as team psychologist for Portland. We do know, however, that Dr. Ogilvie arrived on the scene with Portland some time after 1980. This is because Bud Winter, author of Relax and Win (1981), interviewed Jack Ramsay, then Trail Blazers' head coach, in 1980. Winter asked Ramsay: "Do you know of any coach in professional basketball who gives his players instructions in how to relax?" (By "relax," Winter meant a mental rehearsal technique akin to self-hypnosis.) Replied the coach, "No, I don't." Winter persisted, leading to the following exchange, which appears in Relax & Win:

Question: Jack, when your players shoot foul shots, do you give them any special tricks to stay relaxed? For example, having the players shake their hands and wrists, bouncing the ball a few times, taking a deep breath, dropping their shoulders, etc.?

Ramsay: No, we do not use any special gimmicks. What I stress is concentration and visualizing the ball going into the basket.

Question: Does the athlete close his eyes during this visualization?

Ramsay: No, just a mental visualization.

Clearly, if Dr. Ogilvie had been working with the Portland players in 1980, Ramsay would have mentioned the fact, and no doubt would have been able to describe several mental rehearsal techniques the sports psychologist was having some or all of the team members try out. But, from Ramsay's answers to Winter, it appears that the Trail Blazers were not doing much in the mental training area at the time. By 1985, though, the situation had greatly changed. Despite their remaining several unanswered questions about Dr. Ogilvie's work with the Trail Blazers[12], it is sufficient to recognize the trend in professional basketball towards utilizing the services of sports psychologists.

According to Himmelberg, some teams consult sports psychologists when they have very important personnel decisions to make. In 1985 the Cleveland Cavaliers drafted Keith Lee on the first round after they received the results of a personality test Lee had taken. Cleveland already knew about Lee's considerable physical ability and basketball talents, but they wanted to know more about his character. They hired Personality Dynamics Inc. to assess Lee's personality traits, and were pleased with the findings. Said Cavaliers' spokesman Harvey Greene, "The tests showed him to be a winner, a person with a great innate desire, a person who listens well. . . with exceptionally high coachability." George and Gordon Gund, owners of the Cavaliers and Minnesota North Stars of the National Hockey League, also had Personality Dynamics administer the written personality test to all personnel within the Cavaliers and North Stars organization—players, management, and office personnel. One wonders if the owners were just as pleased with their secretaries' scores as they were with Lee's.

The Los Angeles Clippers were interested in making Creighton's Benoit Benjamin their '85

first round draft pick. However, the Clippers management wanted to be sure of their choice, and asked Saul Miller to sit in on interviews with Benjamin. After the interviews, Miller apparently gave the Clippers the green light to select Benjamin, which they did. Carl Scheer noted that "Miller helped us identify some things. And he thinks we can raise a player's level of performance by developing those traits." Again, the emphasis is on getting the most out of the athlete— potential-actualizing—with the sports psychologist's role being geared toward this, rather than crisis-intervention. Said Miller about his analyzing the traits of Benjamin[13] and the other Clippers:

These are not people who are having trouble. We want to optimize performance. That can be helping a player to overcome pain or perform in a moment when he's on the spot. [14]

Two years later in 1987 the Clippers possessed three first-round draft picks. On the eve of the draft Don Greenberg of the Orange County Register reported that the club had "given psychological tests to all the players they are considering selecting."[ 15] Elgin Baylor, executive vice president of the Clippers, explained to Greenberg that this was done because "we want to know as much as possible about the kids we could pick." Perhaps underlying this comment of Baylor's was the wish to avoid the woes some NBA teams had experienced with their 1986 top draft choices. Alluding to these woes, Greenberg cited three notorious cases:

Only two days after the Boston Celtics made him the No. 2 overall selection last June, Len Bias died of cocaine intoxication. The Nos. 3 and 6 picks last season, Chris Washburn and William Bedford, wound up backfiring in the faces of the clubs that chose them. Washburn spent nearly two months in a drug rehabilitation center and had a woefully unproductive season for the Golden State Warriors. Bedford had early season knee surgery before being implicated in grand jury testimony probing drug use among the Phoenix Suns.