2006 - March

[Nigel]

Zürich. Good for you for citing your doubts, Andy. They skit around and catch you when you are least expecting it. The classic response would be a simple reassuring message, but I'm not going to do it. So there.

I have read a few books by a sports psychologist (Alan Fine) who surfaced about ten years ago when such things were first fashionable. He coached David Feherty, a charming Northern Irish golf star who had just blown the Italian Open by choking down the stretch. Well, not even down the stretch, but actually on the very last hole, where he carted it straight out of bounds off the tee, and successfully negated a whole week's work and his first ever Tour victory in half a second. Feherty was distraught for months, hating himself for his failure.

Fine reasoned that Feherty clearly had the talent, but could not bear the tension. And the approach he took was simple. He simply told Feherty to imagine what was the worst which could possibly happen at such moments. 'Fire it out of bounds again,' was the obvious answer. So - would this make him unhappy ? - Yes, very. But would it kill him ? - No. Would anyone else care ? - Not many, actually, and not that much. Could he live with that failure again, given time, even though the pain would be worse than ever ? - Yes.

What Fine was doing was to ask Feherty to face the worst, to accept the possibility, even perhaps the likelihood, of defeat, and to deal with it ahead of time. The idea was that this was the only way he could ever liberate himself to cope with that same situation again.

Amazingly, the following year, Feherty was again leading the Italian Open by a single shot as he teed off on that same last hole. He knew that whatever happened, he could live with the outcome, somehow. This time, he hit the fairway, and went on to win the event. More successes followed, and for a few years he was amongst the top players in Europe, playing in the Ryder Cup several times, and always accrediting himself well.

Then, suddenly, Feherty seemed to lose the ability to play at the highest level any more, just at the very time when he had been offered a plum commentating post on US TV. He still does that job, and is amongst the best broadcasters in the game, the only shame being that we don't hear him much on this side of the pond these days, unless we have Sky (which I don't).

So perhaps it was good to see you visualising the broom wagon. Looking full on into the face of failure is the only way of doing it with marathon running, and with many other challenges, I think, or at least the only way of doing it when we know our own weaknesses and can see where we've struggled before. So what ? - just do your best. It's all that you can do, or anyone can do, and there's just no point beating yourself up about it - the biggest achievement is simply to try, and keep trying. And on that score, you've won already, many times over.