The Mind of a Champion – How Sports Psychology applies to Grappling

"What separates him (Gretzky) from his peers in the end, the quality that has led him to the very point of the pyramid, may well have nothing to do with physical characteristics at all, but instead be a matter of perception, not so much of what he sees – he does not have exceptional vision – but of how he sees it and how he absorbs it. Here, some works in fields that at first glance seem a long way from hockey, yield some enlightening clues.

"Much of this work is recent, but it is an extension of experiments carried out in the late 1930s by Dutch psychologist Adrian de Groot. De Groot worked with chess players, whom he divided into groups according to their level of play: grand masters, experts and club players. In one experiment he had each player look for a limited time at a number of chess pieces arranged on a board in a fairly complex middle-game position. Then he asked his subjects to reconstruct that position. Perhaps not surprisingly, the grand masters did much better than the experts, and the experts did much better than the club players.

"Then, however, de Groot exposed all three groups to yet another set of positions, only this time the pieces were arranged not in game situations but at random. This time there was no measurable differences in the participants’ ability to recall the arrangements. What the better players had remembered, in other words, was not so much the positions of the chess pieces but the overall situations. Later experiments confirmed these findings; the more highly gifted the chess player was, the more likely he was to see on a board not individual pieces, but the combinations they formed, the forces in play.

"In the 1970s, Neil Charness, a professor of psychology at the University of Waterloo, himself a chess player who had carried on work in the de Groot tradition, extended these explorations to the field of bridge. Charness found – to oversimplify – that expert bridge players could remember bridge hands much better than beginners, but at remembering combinations of cards that had no relationship to bridge they were no better at all. And in a recent PhD thesis, an Ontario psychologist named Lynne Beal showed that the same principle held for music: accomplished musicians could recall and repeat sets of chords better than non-accomplished musicians could, but when notes were assembled in random clusters, the experts fared no better than their less well-trained partners in the experiment.

"Elite athletes, then, like chess masters or artists of the jazz piano, may not so much think differently as perceive differently. Moreover, because they can quickly recall chunks of information from their long-term memories, they can react to those perceptions more efficiently. What Gretzky perceives on a hockey rink is, in a curious way, more simple than what a less accomplished player perceives. He sees not so much a set of moving players as a number of situations – chunks. Moving in on the Montreal blueline, as he was able to recall while he watched a videotape of himself, he was aware of the position of all the other players on the ice. The pattern they formed was, to him, one fact, and he reacted to that fact. When he sends a pass to what to the rest of us appears an empty space on the ice, and when a teammate magically appears in that space to collect the puck he has in reality simply summoned up from his bank account of knowledge the fact that in a particular situation, someone is likely to be in a particular spot, and if he is not there now he will be there presently.

The corollary, of course, is that Gretzky has seen all these situations before, and what we take to be creative genius is in fact a reaction to a situation that he has stored in his brain as deeply and firmly as his own telephone number. When I put this possibility to him, he agreed.

“Absolutely” he said. “That’s a hundred per cent right. It’s all practice. I got it from my dad. Nine out of ten people think it’s instinct, and it isn’t. Nobody would ever say a doctor had learned his profession by instinct; yet in my own way I’ve put in almost as much time studying hockey as a medical student puts in studying medicine.”

Passages excerpted from The Game of Our Lives (pages 185 to 189), by Peter Gzowski, published by McClelland and Steward, 1981.