Sports Psychopathology

Let me make a few things clear before going into this particular rant.

1. I like the U.S. women's soccer team. They play hard, they have fun, and they play like a team.

2. They deserved to win the gold medal. They took on the world's best and beat them fair and square.

3. The nauseating hype provided by the U.S. media, which worships everything rich, or sexy, or successful, is not their fault. They cooperated, but they aren't responsible for flogging it all to death.

There. That's out of the way. Rah rah for women's soccer. I hope they start a professional league and I hope they draw lots of fans, and I hope the tax-payers take all the money they currently siphon into professional baseball and give it to welfare mothers instead.

Why did the U.S. win? Why do they always seem to win? Is the "American way of life"? Is it clean living and virtue? (Judging from some of the more colorful activities of this same women's soccer team-- posing semi-nude for a picture for David Letterman-- I guess not.) Is it capitalism? Or is it just that the Americans have a terrific level of determination?

Well, think about some of the training "techniques" the U.S. team used. The entire team went out to a building on the Georgia Tech campus and took turns racing up the concrete steps while their team-mates hollered out the theme from "Rocky". They also climbed to the top of a cliff in Portland, Oregon. Half of them put on blindfolds while the other team members led them around a narrow ledge.

These activities were devised by a sports psychologist Colleen Hacker. In fact, Hacker is the "team psychologist". Some of the players credit her strategies with their success.

Sounds logical, right? I think most people read that and think, yes, those strategies probably helped them win.

Why?

Just because they did these exercises and then they won does not prove that there is a causal relationship between the two. In fact, most teams at high levels of competition have team psychologists... and most of them lose.

The U.S. women's soccer team won because they were more skilled and more determined than the opposition. The truth is that "sports psychology" plays a very role in any competition anywhere.

I'm not a very good competitor myself, I guess. These exercises sound pretty stupid to me. What's the point? What's the big deal? These exercises can only make sense to a person who believes that winning is everything. And if you believe that winning is everything, you must believe that life is all about hierarchies, and whoever gets on top is best or happiest or richest or sexiest or whatever. I can't picture one of these sports psychologists spending a lot of time helping poor people or spending time at an old age home, or teaching kindergarten, or doing any of the millions of things that make life good for people.

But this is the age of Nike, and the media openly proclaim their contempt for the idea that winning might not be the most important thing in life. Implicitly, of course, the exact thing they proclaim is that consuming is the most important thing in life. Your hero may be a lean and mean and physically beautiful 20-year-old athlete, but you are 30 pounds overweight and sitting on your couch drinking beer and eating chips and then rushing down to the mall to buy some Nike sneakers because Michael Jordan says losers like you suck, big time.

The real purpose of sports psychology is the same as the real purpose of management consulting: to convince you that you can be just as successful as anyone else if you follow certain prescribed practices and strategies. The truth is that successful people are successful because they were born with certain skills or blessings or blind luck, and you will never be as successful as they are no matter how hard you try.... but you can sure spend a lot of money trying.

Run. Run to the mall. Buy, buy, buy. When you get to the top of those steps leading into the Dunkin' Donuts, raise your hands in the air and scream, "gonna fly now.....".

August 15, 1999