He was a career choker, said a friend the other day as we were talking cricket and about men who looked like geniuses in domestic cricket but failed most of the time when playing for the country — Graeme Hick, the Zimbabwe born England batsman, for one.
Is there a stereotyping of a sportsman worse than that — anything physically draining and psychologically at once menacing and dreadfully nightmarish, however high the player might be in the pecking order in his sport?
Players don’t mind being called losers. They find consolation by saying that they had lost to a superior athlete; nor do they care much about losing to competitors lower ranked than they are. They can always say that they had one bad day or that the opponent played the match of his life.
But the choker tag is something different because it involves the mind more than any other manner of losing. It turns the spotlight into the deepest recesses of one’s mind and is much more character-revealing than anything you can think of.
There you are, all alone, at the very last doorstep to victory, and suddenly something goes wrong. You have not even played the ball — all you need is a single good shot on a day when you’ve been on song for the most part. And the few seconds between what you might have imagined the last ball — a time when you should “Knock, knock, knocking on the heaven’s door,” as Bob Dylan sang — turns out to be hell on earth.
Up 40-15 or 40-30 on serve at 5-4 in the decider in a Wimbledon tennis final; requiring one or two runs off the last ball in an ODI World Cup final; walking up to take the penalty that means everything — the World Cup itself — is the time when you must stay in a state of Zen mindfulness rather than think of what might happen if you failed.
Of course chance plays a major role in such situations and the stature of the player or the popular heft of the tournament matters little. But that little makes a huge difference. Remember Roberto Baggio of Italy in the 1994 final against Brazil — arguably, the team’s best player taking the last kick.
Then up goes the ball, way above the crossbar. The World Cup has been won and lost by the margin of a single shot.
That is a statistic; for, more than that, I would never forget the face of a player displaying such deathly horror and distress. What might have been one of the greatest moments of his career, instead, turned into a nightmare for which he will always be remembered, as unfair as that may be. Did Baggio choke or was it just a part of the game?
There are players who carry out the task routinely, as if nothing big was at stake; and there are those who think of the consequences of failure and stand there, shivering, hands shaking a bit, mind all over the place rather than focussing only on the job on hand.
How many times have we witnessed these situations in sport! How many times have we seen a Pete Sampras or a Roger Federer hit two successive aces at 15-40 and 5-6 in the final set of a tournament final or semifinal. How many times have we witnessed Mahendra Singh Dhoni turn a seemingly hopeless situation and bring up a famous victory, prompting us to switch on our television once again?
But for every Sampras, Federer, Dhoni or Virat Kohli, there are dozens of people who wish they would never have to be in such situations because they themselves are not sure that they’d be able to pull it off.
“I always think what the consequence would be, how the world would laugh at me and how the shot I want to make may not fall in the court,” a top-three tennis player told me long years ago. Of course, he got over his early career jitters and did not end his playing years as a choker. But he did confess that his career clearly fell in two parts — before he reinvented himself as a super-confident big match player, and after he unburdened himself of the choker tag.
All this goes to prove that chokers are not to be found only among the also-rans; it is a disease that has affected the men and women at the very top. And every sport has its own well known athletes who carry the choker tag.
You might want to think of South Africa in limited overs cricket, or Jana Novotna in a Wimbledon final against Steffi Graf — when she famously cried on the shoulders of the Duchess of Kent — but there are too many examples and the names alone might fill this page.
Crucial factor
In sport, mental conditioning is as crucial a factor as anything else. Sometimes it is even more significant than great natural talent. This is because sport is played by men and women who are like us for the most part. They don’t sport horns or wear a cloak of invincibility.
“I think, therefore I am,” said the great philosopher Rene Descartes in an entirely different context. But there are times in sport when thinking becomes suicidal.
In the men’s singles final of the Wimbledon tennis championship in July 2000, the talented Australian serve-and-volleyer Pat Rafter dominated Sampras for almost two full sets. In the second set tiebreak, Rafter opened up a 5-2 lead and the greatest Wimbledon champion was two points from defeat.
“Pete, what were you thinking at that point,” the American, who hit a second serve ace and won the tiebreak and the match eventually, was asked at the post-match press conference.
“Nothing. I thought of nothing,” said Sampras. But what he really meant was that he was not thinking of what might happen if he had lost a point or two there. He had the great gift of emptying his mind of all the psychological trash.
Living in the moment is not just a new age religious mantra. If you believe in evolutionary psychology, it may be a matter of life and death in sport.
Finally, if you want to find out more about choking in this day and age, just look up the English football team’s record in the penalty shoot-outs of major tournaments; Greg Norman’s fourth round scores in the Majors when the title was almost in his pocket; Jana Novotna’s record in the Majors; Jimmy White’s record in world snooker finals — especially in 1994 — and many, many more.
Finally, chokers are not pathetic jokers; it is just that they let their nerves get the better of them and the player cracks in pressure situations.
Sometimes, wanting too much might lead to losing the whole lot.
