Sport Ethics: "Be Smooth"

I watched a amazing double play last night and marveled at how seamless and flowing the entire coordinated action was. The integrated flowing precision of the play while adapting on the fly reminded me of how important being efficient and flowing can be to sports achievement. When he spoke to the media for the first time in six months, the Seattle Seahawks powerful half-back Marshawn Lynch was asked how he felt. The man known for "beast mode" running over people, simply responded, "smooth," capturing a powerful insight into how strength matters little unless allies with form and efficiency.

In an ESPN Magazine article Aaron Rodgers described the result of his endless repetitions in his off seasons as well as how he has grown over the last five years. He reiterated that what he achieved was to be smooth. Smooth captures an interesting and vital concept when thinking about athletic and professional accomplishment. I would like to explore its nature and importance.

Smooth is the anti-thesis of turbulent and chaotic. Hitching, jerking, choking, hesitating and waste stand opposite of smooth. Smooth actions maximize outcome for energy expended. Smooth operations epitomize efficient energy deployment, a smooth action simply does not waste motion or energy so it maximizes quickness and execution consistency. Being smooth represents integrity of action and judgment expressed as expertise.

Smooth encompasses two domains: physical and mental. First, extra or needless motion slows down action and exposes players to greater disruption. The more complex and less integrated the motion, the less smooth and the greater the probability things will go wrong. Smooth physical action minimizes inconsistencies in performance and requires the least energy because no extraneous motion occurs. Smooth action permits the body to bring maximum energy to bear upon the movement and because it is smooth, it increases the consistency of action and results. 

Second, smooth actions flow from integrated decisions that adjust to the situation and deploy technique in face of unpredictability. These decisions proceed without hesitation or second-guessing because the person represents the pattern emerging in the situation and responds cognitively. This minimizes openings that  opponents can disrupt. As actions grow into a single, fluid motion, they minimize what can go wrong and minimize the profile to be attacked by an opponent.

Rodgers talked about the micro-adjustments he made over the years such as footwork, arm angle, release point. Each evolved, but more importantly, over time these changes coordinated with each other and then integrated. He learned to release faster and more accurately under attack. This hard earned smoothness minimizes friction which  maximizes  predictability in his suite of skills and confidence to employ them. Repetition, continuous learning and adjustment resulted in coherent dependability.

If you watch a beginning athlete or a beginning anything, she or he moves very cautiously. Often they master one skill at a time in sequence. They then try to connect them together. Their actions hesitate, jerk and seldom link together well  or the same way each time. Each action becomes an adventure with little reliability or confidence.

Athletes and professionals master small aspects and then mesh them together. Tennis and volleyball players practice tosses thousands of time before a consistent serve emerges. Then they work on swing, angles and release points. Most important they learn to translate lower body strength into explosive energy. I could break down any athletic or professional skill suite this way. To achieve smooth integration of a skill suite involves committed discipline and practice.

SMOOTH requires integration of skills and synchronization with context to achieve. It requires endless practice and refinement. Social psychologists talk about the idea of flow that I have often mentioned. In flow, an athlete has prepared so that the kinesthetic, intellectual and perceptual dimensions of suite of actions flow together. Actions possess a rhythm and resonance where the athlete precisely repeats what works and can slow down the world as they act.

Each motion and skill involves thousands of micro-skills and adjustments. These must be mastered and blended into a master action suite. This action must then coordinate with fellow teammates or adjust to conditions. Think of a rower in eights. The angle of repose changes as the wind or place in race changes. The angle of one’s wrist, shoulders, elbows and back and legs must all be monitored, coordinated and then adjusted on the fly. From a distance it looks beautiful and powerful, but each sweep, like each Aaron Rodgers' throw or Albert Pujols' swing requires incessant monitoring, adjusting and fusion of perception, power and form.

Dave  Cameron discusses this in terms of kinetic chain or transfer and the importance of efficient and effective energy impact maximization. This involves mindful practice, refinement and adjustment. Talking about a baseball swing he points that that actions look smooth because there is a proper transfer of energy as it flows through a chain. The energy flow is close to seamless from one step to another. Any movement that siphons energy away from the kinetic energy in the chain of action will diminish the energy output of the bat or action. Put simply this swing analogy applies to all professional actions:

Swing energy = Total energy - Energy lost to excess movement and bad timing.

Even more simply:

Smooth is good; herky-jerky is bad.

When you listen to scorers, they will sometimes complain of a “hitch” that subverts their shot. Other times they might talk about how they had to hurry a shot, and to hurry means they could not synchronize in adjusting and executing. The hitch or jerk induced or self-inflicted subverts smooth. It upsets reliability, induces tweaking and over-thinking and can undermine confidence. Opponents will try to hurry or disturb rhythm or fluid motion to throw off the skill and the mind of athletes.

Being smooth in executions means that practice and experience reinforce each other. Mindful repetition enhances the integration and etches the neural pathways that support habitual and instant action as well as refined decision making under pressure. Experience builds psychological, physical and memory capital for a person. It builds a mental toughness flowing from “I have seen this before, so my body and mind do not panic.” Internalized experience supports smooth action because athletes don’t panic or choke in face of surprise or opposition; like good professional they adapt and call upon extra energy and focus to stabilize emotions and perceptions that permit focus upon actions. Every pick and roll or double play embodies unique aspects but great teamwork makes it all look smooth.

Smoothness reveals “thought-less” expertise. The repetition and adjustments from game to game and season to season mean athletes and professionals constantly must learn. The learning results in refined skill and adjustment. Athletes improve  proficiency as well as decision-making. The learning manifests as reliable performance under stress. 

People compliment actions by calling it a  “smooth operation.” They seem to mean something went off without a hitch, notice that word again. They often refer to the actions relative to a plan, like a litigation strategy or football play. However, we seldom really mean an operation that went off exactly according to plan. The old truism “no plan survives contact with reality” carries real weight.

We need to distinguish between an operation going exactly according to plan and one that achieves its outcomes. In reality, the plan condenses to a direction or momentum, but not an exact rendition of what unfolds. Outcome based “smooth” means well trained and experienced athletes and professionals improvise, adapt and achieve outcomes within the plan’s goals. It looks smooth because their actions seem fluid and continuous with the goal even as they must perceive, process information and make new decisions constantly and seamlessly.

A smooth operation achieved its goals by executing but also adapting in countless micro decisions to small and unexpected obstacles or surprises. The individuals and team worked together kept their cool and achieved the outcomes with practiced efficiency. In smooth success, small things matter and the hours of practice to orchestrate internally and externally come together.

Good athletes, good teams, good professionals make it look easy, make it look smooth, but it never is.

The Lessons of Pete Carroll's Hair

We can learn a lot from Pete Carroll's hair. I finished watching the NFL Conference Championships and got my fill of the scowling hat wearing brothers Harbaugh or the stone faced hoodie wearing Belichick and the guy from Atlanta. They all take lessons from the same coaching school where coaches don’t show emotion and never ever ever (to quote Taylor Swift) smile. They know how to scowl, stare, and in Jim Harbaugh’s case, simmer in coiled anger until exploding in ax-murder tantrums. Watching this breed of coach made me miss Pete Carroll ex of USC and presently of the Seahawks. More to the point, I missed Pete’s hair because his hair tells us a lot about how to be a good coach.

 I teach at Washington so I do not see Carroll as a paragon. He is a ferocious and cold-eyed competitor and built a superb dominating program at USC. After talking to friends, I don’t believe he fled to escape the looming sanctions that hit the program (I do believe he should have known about the Reggie Bush issues and under modern NCAA rules would be responsible for the mess)—I do believe he had unfinished business with the NFL, believed he had reached his college ceiling at USC and had an amazing offer to build an NFL program his way from Paul Allen. Carroll had nothing more to prove to himself in college football but a whole new world to conquer in professional football.

I decided that Pete’s hair (https://www.facebook.com/LovelyLovelyHair)

held the key after watching him coach the Seahawks to one of their seven improbable fourth quarter victories this year. His mind never stopped racing; his jaw never stopped working on the gum; and his emotions flashed across his face in utter transparency. When the team made a mistake you knew; when they succeeded you knew. But above all his platinum hair flawlessly disheveled remained resolutely in place through all the emotional, intellectual and physical gyrations of the game. Storm, suprises, violence, purpose and platinum order amid the game chaos.

Carroll freely admits that his emotions sometimes got the better of him and he makes high-risk calls. He now expects his assistants to get in his face and remind him of the real risks association with his own high-roller instincts honed so successfully in college. Carroll likes to take chances, big chances, and in college with USC’s dominance, it usually worked. Professional ball creates a different calculus and the talent differential will not carry a team; Carroll has learned this the hard way. It tempers his emotions, but won’t dampen them.

He understands that his own emotions can catalyze and support his players. In college this matters more profoundly with 20 year-old young men, but Carroll believes that professional players are not so jaded that contagious energy cannot be created and sustained on the sidelines by the coaches. He is correct.

I do not want to romanticize the hard driving relentless and ruthless side of being a coach. In his first two years, the Seahawk roster churned through players faster than any three other teams combined. Like all winning coaches, Carroll must and will replaceunderperforming players, even veterans and players he respects and likes, with younger, hungrier and more talented players. His staff has scoured every heap of players and every league, but once in Seattle, players get a real chance to earn their shot. His team could fall apart with its intense never ending “everyone competes every day” philosophy, but he infuses this with a passion and exciting dimension that players actually can sense the fun that brought them to the game originally.

Unlike the Belichik/Harbaugh School of coaching, Carroll still believes that football can be fun for players and for coaches. He knows how demanding the game can be. He pushes his players and will cut and churn the roster to get talent and fit. He knows how quickly players and coaches go from hero to goat; but he remembers at his core that this fiercely competitive game is a game and a fun one at that. His entire approach from recruiting, to training, to cutting to game play is infused with that celebration.

Belichick’s players will dutifully say that they grew under him, and he got the best out of them. No one will say they enjoyed it or had fun. Jim Harbaugh’s players form an us against them cult and play with a chip and intensity that scares everyone. The Seahawks play hard, physical, brute and intimidating football. Their defense anchors them which surprises folks when they want to picture Pete Carroll as a laid back west coast kind of guy. The players know the drill and costs but like playing for him and will acknowledge they are having fun in the process. Dare I say it playing for Carroll can be cool.

When he used to coach at USC and regularly whump us, I wondered if Carroll did not have a portrait of Dorian Grey somewhere—you know, where the real Pete Carroll had a widow’s beak, age spots and grew fat and waddled. I still worry about it sometime, but I’ve seen the wrinkles and crinkles, the minor blemishes and know that the hair takes really really good product and blow-drying.

Coaches should take a cue from Pete Carroll’s hair in its glorious tousled impeccability (is that a word?)—Passionate but focused; aware but decisive; disciplined but open; unruly but never disarrayed.

Professional versus College Coaching

This last weekend I watched teams coached by Nick Saban, Mike Riley and Steve Spurrier. All the teams played with abandon, skill and precision. Yet I was also struck by the fact that all the coaches, like Pete Carroll who made his reputation at USC but has returned to the professional ranks,  had one thing in common. All had barely OK professional football coaching careers, but flourished at the college level.

Their experience and many others like them lead me to reflect on the divergence between the worlds of college and professional coaching and the interesting migration from one to the other. Rick Pitino and John Calipari  epitomize the college basketball version of failed professionals returning to become superlative college coaches, but I will focus on football. The the core the professionals coach players but the college coaches educate and teach young men.

The journey from pros to college is treacherous and many fail in their first try, witness the failure of Charlie Weis at Notre Dame or Bill  Callahan at Nebraska. The move from controlling the talent and dealing with the maturity level of professionals can compare badly to endless recruiting and the need to maintain the level of motivation required for 19 year olds. It can  be unnerving and even feel demeaning.

The move in either direction can be treacherous as almost any coach who has coached at both levels will tell you. Professional coaches assume an ultra elite level of skills and paid commitment as well as 12 month development by players. They also possesses an ability to move people in and out quickly. On the other hand, most professional players have a profound awareness that they can be traded at any moment, and  ultimately they must protect their individual value which lies in individual skill and achievement on the market, not the team. They will think of their career as much as their team.

To be honest, coaching college is not for everyone. Many ex pro coaches hate having to woo and identify with 18 year olds. Worse, coaches must now show up for games of 14 and 15 year olds. Grown adults must work with grasping coteries, middle men and relatives who can surround elite players. 

Many coaches prefer the chess board approach of the pros where everyone is a free agent and all the players are fungible, completely replaceable. It makes developing the talent level much easier. Any contract can be terminated, at some economic cost, but no coach is stuck with kids for four years or has to worry about the care and feeding of adolescents let alone the need to make sure they have enough to eat or get to class on time. More importantly no coach has invested years in wooing and helping the kid from pre-high school nor have the coaches talked and worked with the kids parents and guardians. Professional coaches often don't need or want an personal investment in the quality and growth of the players--college coaches must make that investment to attract and retain their players.

But the sheer truth is college coaching is alot more fun than pro coaching. There is a reason coaches call the NFL  the "no fun league." Professional football players, for good reason, are all free agents. Football players represent the issue in its purest form.  Players play a violent harsh games with no institutional compassion or loyalty. Their contracts are not guaranteed so they need to protect themselves to maximize what will only be a short hard career. This puts serious limits on what coaches can do with them and how much influence coaches have. Very little real teaching goes on in the NFL. The players may pick up certain techniques and adapt to systems, but they do not over invest in one particular system since they may be playing across the ball on another team the next year, and the half life of professional coaches covers nano-years. Very little reason exists for players to buy into a system or feel an abiding loyalty to a team or tradition or fans and certainly none exists to change or grow as a person unless it increases their endorsement value.

If the players know this, the coaches are worse. Bill Belichick epitomizes the coach who treats all players as interchangeable parts to play until they break or fail and discard or replace them as needed. Let's be clear, all coaches must "cast a cold eye on life, on death," as Yeats would have it. Every leader needs a clear hard eye to judge and evaluate and decide upon performance, but professional Coaches seldom have the luxery to care and infuse their coaching with care. The demands to win, to perform before a relentless and fickle public and owners do not give them the luxery to care about or to educate players.

The coaches who return from the pros to college often feel relief and liberation rather than failure and exile. If you talk to coaches who have coached in both leagues, most recognize the immense satisfaction in being a teacher with a profound and lasting impact upon the life of a young person. Eighteen year olds have their limits, but they possess possibilities. A coach can still change a life; they "can save" and "rescue" kids. 

Coaches and teams can impart  lessons of discipline, internal judgment and teamwork. Good college coaching  builds moral and social equity in the young men. You won't hear pro coaches referring to their players as "kids," But college kids can grow into young men under a coach's tuteledge.  For many of their charges the coaches serve as surrogate fathers, powerful role models. The coaches and the academic staff hound kids to get educations despite themselves. Watching a disorganized and angry 17 year  old grow into a fine player and competent and sometimes fine human being buttresses the lives of many college coaches, especially the ones who are not at the glamor jobs or the army of assistants who migrate from team to team teaching the sport they love and helping kids they enjoy being with. Few professional experiences can match the exuberance and emotional commitment of college players. The vast majority of college players know this is the end of their playing career and they give it their all.

I do not want to romanticize college football coaching. Nor do I want to pretend it exists independent of its own world of pressures to win and boosters who seldom worry about the welfare of moral growth or education of the young men. To boosters and athletic directors,  the players are fungible. But college incentives push coaches to invest more time and energy in the developmental aspects of players. Coaches not only get to the know the players and parents when they are younger, but they have them for four years--they cannot just cut them at well. Most good schools and coaches put strict limits upon dismissing a player just for competence issues.

Interestingly in college because coaches are stuck with their kids for four years (I know a few schools permit coaches to run off the players they believe are not good enough, but surprising numbers of coaches for moral as well as self-interested reasons live with "my mistakes). If a student-athletes gives their all, commit to the program and compete with honor, then most coaches and most schools will not run them off. This stuckness means coaches  have to work with what they have. They have to teach harder and work harder to connect with players and help players really develop their potential.

College coaches can't go buy free agents or trade players who don't live up to their potential. College coaches have the opportunity and the constraint to work with young men to grow in skill, commitment and learn as they must master complex schemes and master judgment under stress.right. They experience the satisfaction of being a real teacher or educator that transcends just coaching.

Pro coaches seldom get to experience the joy and satisfaction of watching young men blossom or the pain of watching them implode and fail. College coaches have more responsibility for the humans in their charge; because of that they also have more fun.

For Love of the Game: The Costner Baseball Movie Trilogy

Just a quick celebration. In 1999 the Tigers beat the Yankees in this fine movie, yesterday they swept them for real in the ACLS!!!

Kevin Costner has made three fine baseball movies. The movies create an accidental but powerful arc covering baseball’s myths and narratives. The trilogy also reinforces a basic truth about the power and limits of sport as a way of life. The collective movies are not only enjoyable—especially Field of Dreams and Bull Durham—but they create a counter-narrative about the personal lived reality of a professional athlete. The movies’ dissection of how a professional athlete’s love of sport threatens their capacity for intimate connection and humanity.

For Love of the Game joins an aging pitching star Billy Chapel in the autumn of his career. The aging vet has just learned that his team, the Detroit Tigers, will be sold, and part of the deal includes his being traded to San Francisco. Billy does not satisfy a cost/benefit analysis for the new owners. Billy has spent his entire career and earned his fame and fortune in Detroit. The night before Billy also learn that his estranged girlfriend Jane Aubrey played by Kelly Preston will not reconcile. Recalling an earlier point she made, “You're perfect. You, and the ball, and the diamond, you're this perfectly beautiful thing…You don't need me.”

The next morning dejected and hung over Chapel heads for the ballpark to pitch and must decide about the trade before the game is over. The movie braids his nine innings with his troubled relationship with Jane. The movie unfolds one inning at a time playing in a raucous and hostile Yankee Stadium building to an improbably perfect game opportunity as the scuffed and awkward story of Billy’s adult personal life plaits between innings.

The movie moves slowly. It possesses neither the self-conscious mythologizing of Field of Dreams not the iconoclasm or humor of Bull Durham. Its stately progression led some reviewers to find it boring, and it remains the least favorite of the trilogy. I believe it is undervalued and feels true to baseball and the themes of the first two movies.

The first them unfolds touching  on the the harsh reality and discipline of an aging athlete, an aging star  facing mortality. In one conceit Costner starts each pitch with a mental imperative “clear the mechanism." When he does this the jeering Yankee fans (is there any other kind?), the scoreboard, even his own teammates recede, and he channels his presence and skill. The moment captures the experience athletes or any high achieving professional recount when they arrive at “flow.” Their practice, focus and situational awareness allow them to deploy their skills where the conscious and unconscious blend into a smooth inner consistency and quality. When it fails him in the movie, we know that he has reached his own limits.

The second theme unfolds in the awkward, tenuous and sometimes touching relationship between Billy and a cautious and burned single mother Jane Aubrey and her daughter Jena Malone as Heather. They meet when Billy saves her from a flat tire and ends up taking her to a baseball game against her will.

She points out, “I need a regular guy, not the guy in the Old Spice commercial.” Missing her irony and metaphor completely, Billy reminds her he was in the Right Guard commercial. Jane usually feels like a fish out of water being with a star athlete of a game she knows nothing about among wives and groupies she shares little with. Yet Costner and she stumble into a kind of intimacy and mutual joy. Costner passes the test so many men fail when they meet single moms. He actually enjoys the “family” feeling and likes being a clumsy, almost, sometimes dad.

Chapel grows to enjoy their world together. But both sides remain so wounded and protected that they agree to a “man’s deal” where they can see other people. Of course Jane does not see anyone else, but Costner reminding us of the man-child (a grown up Nuke LaLoosh from Bull Durham?) lurking in so many athletes sleeps with his masseuse. “What about the deal!” he asks when Jane surprises him only to be be shocked by seeing a scrambling nubile half dressed masseuse.

Jane wants more from the relationships, more than Billy has given to anything except baseball. When she asks him “have you ever had your heart broken?” “Yeah, he replies, “when we lost the pennant in ‘87.” She comes to believe he can never commit to love because he is perfect with his ball and game. Perfect on the perfect baseball diamond so enshrined in Field of Dreams. Billy resembles many athletes and high performing professionals. They feel so in command and at home in their professional world that this lures them into a belief in its own moral and emotional self-sufficiency.

The movie’s turning point occurs when Billy badly cuts his hand and is told by doctors and the team he is finished. His entire career is in jeopardy. He dreads the loss purpose and withdraws from the relationship to focus obsessively on rehabilitation.

Jane realizes that his identity and love lie with the game, not with her. Losing the game shatters his sense of worth and willingness to love. The love of the game undermines his love of her.

His terror at the loss lies not just in its threat to his self-worth but it reminds him that a professional athlete remains a depreciating asset and no more despite the headlines and hero worship. As long as his skill returns a reasonable benefit for its cost, he will be retained. Bull Durham and Love of the Game, however, make clear, every player lives pursued by younger, hotter and better players seeking to take his place. Every athlete is replaceable.

Billy’s friend and mentor, the old owner of the Tigers, sees the trade to the Giants as a chance to leave with dignity. Billy can retire before the trade occurs at the end of the game. The owner does not want Billy traded and devalued into a painful eclipse that so many fading stars experience. At the end Billy takes the owners advice after reflecting on his life and writes on a baseball that he is leaving "for love of the game."

The three movies unite in their insistence upon the priority of humanity to the allure of sport.

At the end of Field of Dreams, Moonbeam Graham achieves his dream of playing with the greatest players of his time. He loves and glories in it, but when a little girl’s life is threatened by choking on a hot dog, he steps back across the line to rejoin his life as a country doctor. He saves the girl and looks back at his moment with the players with satisfaction but not regret. In Bull Durham Crash Davis plays out his minor league career and sets the minor league home run record. He ends his playing career to begin as a coach. But he returns to Annie where two shopworn but authentic people try to create a life together.

Billy Chapel pitches a perfect game to cap his career. Jane has seen it while waiting for a delayed flight at the airport. He beats the New York Yankees. The game makes clear as all “perfect” games do how critical his teammates are to the achievement. He achieves the pinnacle and at this moment retires.For an ancient Greek this would be the moment to die, at the perfect peak, the moment from which his career can only be downhill. But alone at night, alone at night in his luxurious hotel suite, he cries. He meets Jane at the airport before she leaves and reveals the key truth any professional athlete faces when they sacrifice their personal life for their professional life,

I believe that if you give something your all it doesn't matter if you win or lose, as long as you've risked everything put everything out there…I did it my entire life. I did it with the game. But I never did it with you, I never gave you that….well last night should've been the biggest night of my life, and it wasn't. It wasn't because you weren't there.

Baseball, achievement, sport, profession, even perfection in all its cold beauty cannot maintain intimacy, connection or purpose. The magnificence of achievement and a perfect moment linger but a second. For Love of the Game completes the theme of Field of Dreams and Bull Durham. Sports can be a great and hard profession, even a way of life, but in the end, athletics will not complete a person’s humanity.

The trilogy insists that sports, even baseball, remains a game, just a game. While sport, like all professions, tempts people to confuse it with life, life involves more and wise people learn this.

Sports Ethics: Grind it Out

We all have bad days. I mean really bad days, you know, the ones where nothing goes right. Our normal smooth skills just do not seem to work; our reactions feel sluggish and the simplest actions we have done by rote for years take concentration and thought. It feels like forgetting how to ride a bike while careening down a hill.

Athletes have a term that all of us can draw upon—grind it out.

Athletes grind it out when their reliable skill sets flounder. Grinding it is the antithesis of being in the zone and requires a different kind of mental focus and discipline. Grinding it out draws upon experience and will power. Young athletes and professionals who are used to winning and performing at the highest level tend to freeze or panic when their reliable expertise set fails. Learning to grind it out requires learning how to keep calm and disciplined when facing adversity and really bad days.

It happens on those days when we are not at our best; we don’t have our A-game, heck we don’t even have our B—game. In life or sport, these are the days when we come to work and our reactions feel slow. We do not read the situation or the other people quickly or comfortably. We feel sluggish. Our dependable skills falter. When we deploy a skill, we execute it awkwardly or not well at all. These moments always arise, but when they happen in competition the player is exposed to the opponents who will jump on the struggling athlete and exploit their weakness.

On bad days a player loses flow or smooth efficiency on their skills. This can happen to doctors, lawyers, teachers, brick layers, carpenters. Our craft or profession does not matter, we all have really bad days.

A struggling baseball pitcher illustrates it clearly. The pitcher may lose their best pitch or maybe two pitchers. The pitch loses something, speed, movement, accuracy, maybe all threes. Batters know this and wait out the pitcher to sit on their troubles. The pitcher then loses close calls because the umpire will not give them the benefit on close calls. The pitcher then self consciously starts to aim the pitch and it best worse. Then they get frustrated by the bad pitches and bad calls and lose focus or turn on themselves in self-recrimination.

A good pitcher has to draw deep on his or her  experience and remember they can get through this. Don’t get angry at oneself or at one’s pitches. On the mound and with the catcher, the pitcher has to re-remember basic mechanics. Go through the motions and concentrate harder to get the pitch over. It takes conscious mental effort to recall and consciously pull up what is normally unconscious and flowing. You see it most in the pitcher because they are all alone out there and facing combat with each pitch and the slightest mistake the leads to hit. You can watch them struggle and overcome anger and doubt. But the pitcher like any of us cannot get in the habit of self-consciously aiming, it guarantees failure. So the pitcher has to balance just doing it, failing, letting go and then doing it again until some approximation of professional execution occurs.  Like a good professional, they simply concentrate on one pitch at a time and getting it done.

Good professionals and craftsman know how to grind it out.

When we grind we are must rely upon will and knowledge. Individuals re-envision in their minds the complex skills and mind-set called for and call them up. They have to force the right angles, the right words, the right attitude toward the fore. As important when we are struggling, panic and paralysis and giving up all tempt us and we have to hold them at bay. At the same if a person starts to overthink, their actions can stagger and lose smooth efficiency. 

The metaphor tells us a lot. Gears grind when they are slightly misaligned. The parts don’t integrate well or smoothly. Grinding increases friction and slows down reaction time. Each action takes more work and harder focus to get it right or offset the misalignment. The scraping surfaces not only increase friction and inefficiency, they produce unpredictability as actions stagger and lurch. The task at hand devolves into a grind, drudgery where any fun or joy leaks from the work. In another take on grinding, a person needs to grind in play and practice to recover the edge of their skill and focus.

Grinding takes away the fun and the smooth naturalness of flow. We have to work at everything, and I mean work hard. We have to recall and will what comes naturally on a good day. We have to force our mind to work and our perception to focus and remember the skills that seem to have abandoned us.

Like the struggling pitcher, athletes look at other pitches, other skills. They compensate and find replacements actions. They find other ways to stay contribute in the game and help the team. A team member passes better or a scorer steps up their defense or passing. They rely on other members to cover for their limits and use the team rather than fight themselves. They rely on teammates to support and encourage them as well as position better or play better defense or offense. Nothing brings out our interdependency then having to grind it out.

People and athletes who know how to grind it out never accept “it’s just one of those days.” It may not be fun. Everything comes hard. Your best skills abandon you. Nothing comes easy. Everything takes more effort and outcomes feel random.

Good athletes and professionals grind it out.