Fighter's Mind, A (33 page)

Freddie Roach, the boxing trainer, told me, “Well, if you just stare at one thing you’re gonna get killed. It’s not realistic. As a fighter I see a whole picture of the fighter in front of me. I know when his feet move, I know when his hands move, he feints . . . it’s a general picture. If you’re looking at his feet he’s gonna fucking kill you, I don’t care what you say.” And then he laughed his dry raspy laugh.

“You don’t think about it,” he continued. “You react and explode and it’s automatic. I can’t say I’m going to land one-two of a four-punch combination and realistically mean it. I won’t land all four shots, but one punch will develop the next, and you don’t know what that first punch developed until you’re there. You become so accustomed to reacting to what your opponent does with that move, that now it comes natural. You don’t have to think about it. Feel for it.”

You can see that Freddie and Musashi are saying the same thing. And again there are no shortcuts or mysteries. These abilities come only with endless practice. Once you’ve devoted a lifetime to study then the important thing is to get out of your own way and not screw yourself up by thinking.

Herrigel describes the Zen experience, and it sounds just like being in the zone. “The soul is brought to the point where it vibrates of itself in itself—a serene pulsation which can be heightened into the feeling, otherwise experienced only in rare dreams, of extraordinary lightness, and the rapturous certainty of being able to summon up energies in any direction, to intensify or to release tensions graded to a nicety.

“This state, in which nothing definite is thought, planned, striven for, desired or expected, which aims in no particular direction and yet knows itself capable alike of the possible and the impossible, so unswerving is its power—this state, which is at bottom purposeless and egoless . . . can work its inexhaustible power because it is free.”

Although the realization of similarities between the zone and Zen was a revelation to me, the ideas had been floating around for years. Andrew Cooper wrote an interesting book, called
Playing in the Zone,
and he wrote (from a far deeper Zen perspective) about the overlap between Zen and the zone. When I asked Greg Jackson to read this, he called me later to say with typical humility, “I must not have explained myself very well, because that’s what I was talking about.” Greg is way too nice a guy to ever say “duh.”

 

I came across a clip of Dr. Michael Lardon talking about the “old samurai” and the similarities between
mushin no shin
(Musashi’s “the mind of no-mind”) and the zone experience.

Dr. Lardon is a celebrity sports psychiatrist, writing books, doing TV shows, and working with all sorts of top athletes—Olympians, pro golfers including David Duval, all kinds. But he’s no empty suit; he’s thoroughly accredited, a serious scientist and doctor, and a man with boundless enthusiasm and interest. There’s a reason all these top-level professional golfers come to him.

Dr. Lardon’s personal history drew me like a beacon. He’d been one of the best sixteen-year-old Ping-Pong players in the nation and had been sent to Japan to train in 1976. He told me the story over the phone—one of those stories he uses all the time, to good effect.

“I was training with a world champion, at Senshu University outside of Tokyo where we worked alongside martial artists, so I was exposed to a lot of the traditional martial arts, peripherally. There was this huge language barrier, but observationally . . . I would watch these martial artists do amazing things. I was fascinated with the idea of how they were training their brains, and what transfer of energy it allowed them to do. They were doing so much with mental focus . . . one of them even told me
you must leave no trace of yourself
.” One can imagine the impact that might have on a sixteen-year-old boy, far from home.

“In table tennis, you generate potential energy into kinetic, the ball comes out at ninety miles per hour and hits the table, spin takes hold on the bounce, and the ball shoots out at a hundred miles per hour or more in any direction . . . and you have to touch just the top of the ball. If it hits your racket straight up you can never control it. At Colorado Springs [the Olympic Center] a few years ago they tested reaction times of all the Olympic athletes and the table tennis players had the fastest time, no surprise—it’s an eight-foot table and the ball is moving at a hundred miles per hour. It necessitates completely instinctual play, if you used your cognition at all, and thought about the shot, you couldn’t hang.”

At this young age, Lardon had his first real experience with the zone, back in the United States at the USTTA junior championship match at Caesar’s Palace in Vegas. “I had been meditating, and I fell into this dreamy zone, the ball was moving in slow motion, I could do anything I wanted. I was winning everything. Then a friend started talking, and he said things like ‘this is going to be a huge upset’ and as soon as he said it, it was over. I fell out of the zone and lost the next three games and the championship.”

Michael had gone on to Stanford and then medical school, all the while building his research around the zone state.

“In the early 1990s, I tried to look at the action of the brain, what was happening neurologically. Sports psychology doesn’t do that too much. My hypothesis was that the top athletes were just getting more efficient at processing signals—we studied top Olympians, triatheletes, John McEnroe, all these guys who talked about time slowing down.”

As the technology for testing got better, things got more interesting. Michael was working with the Scripps Research Institute doing EEG testing on athletes playing a video game they’d designed. There’s a thing called the p300, a positive wave at 300 milliseconds when stimulus hits the brain—everyone has it. When a sound enters your ear, you can watch it on the EEG (after a mathematical manipulation making an event-related brain potential, or ERP). Everyone’s brain does it, almost like a heartbeat on the EKG (think of that little squiggly jag, beeping on the monitor in hospital TV shows). It’s the reaction time of electrical activity in the brain. People with dementia have it at 350 milliseconds, slower than normal. “Our hypothesis was that top athletes would have a
faster
time—that electric signals would move faster in their brains,” Dr. Lardon said.

“The philosophy of the study comes from David Spiegel at Stanford, one of my heroes, a brilliant guy whose father, Herbert, was a scientific leader in hypnosis. David put people [hooked to an EEG] in a hypnotic trance, and then had two paradigms. One, he had them imagine there was a screen that blocked out a light that was being shot at them. What Spiegel found was that when people imagined this screen, there was a
reduction
in the p300 amplitude—as if the light was really being reduced. Then he flipped it, and had them imagine a giant magnifying glass that strengthened the light coming into their eyeballs. And there was an enhancement of the p300.

“I thought this was a landmark study, because what it tells you is that
states of consciousness
actually change the way you biologically process stimuli. So you think, hey, the baseball is coming and it is what it is—a ball moving ninety-five miles per hour, there’s nothing I can do about it. But there is something you can do about it, you can affect the way you
process
it.”

Ted Williams, one of baseball’s greatest hitters, had always talked about how he could see the baseball hit the bat, and count the stitches, that was what Schjeldahl was referring to. In
Blink,
Malcolm Gladwell writes of a tennis coach who had studied these things and found that “in the final five feet of a tennis ball’s flight toward a player, the ball is far too close and moving much too fast to be seen.” The event happens in three milliseconds, far, far too short a time for the human eye to see it. But Ted
thought
he could. To him it was real. And just because it is “physically impossible” does that mean Ted was imagining it? I think the short answer is no. If everything else speeds up, then time slows down.

Dr. Lardon continued, “In doing this testing, we thought we were going to see a faster p300 from top athletes, but we didn’t see that. What we saw instead was another wave, called the N50, a negative potential at fifty milliseconds that everybody has . . . but in great athletes, that potential came early, with more amplitude. So it wasn’t the cortical process that was different, it was the priming pathway. It was as if they were picking it up earlier.”

Michael talked about an insight he had, in terms of explaining this. His older brother had been deeply involved in very fancy stereos when they were growing up in New York. “He was into the high-end stuff, the twenty-grand stereos—the best stereos reproduced sound by making the circuit as fast as possible. Things we thought were cool, like equalizers, actually interrupted the flow and you lost depth of field, or lost the imaging quality of a great stereo. All those conductors with gold inlay were to make circuits as fast as possible . . . more beautiful was faster.

“I was John McEnroe’s courtside guest, watching him and Andre Agassi, and I could just feel how they were both picking the ball up much quicker than you or I.”

There have been plenty of studies that show that “experts” are much more efficient than amateurs at performing the same tasks. Their brains are more efficient and use less energy—giving you more energy to deal with anything outside of the practiced task. Of course, what defines expertise? Ten years of study or more, that same old line.

Dr. Lardon continued to an interesting further hypothesis. “In your brain there are these bands, alpha, beta, and then the gamma—they’re brainwaves, electrical activity. Now, in schizophrenics, the gamma band is disrupted—they have trouble processing information. If you and I are talking, and you had a dream last night, you can differentiate between the two. For schizophrenics that boundary is knocked down. I have a little buzz right now in my telephone. A schizophrenic wouldn’t be able to listen to you over that little buzz.

“There’s something called a Kanizsa image. Like drawings by Escher, they fool you, visually. First you see one thing, then, as you look longer, you see another thing in the negative space. They discovered during studies on composers, at the moment of recognition of the other thing, the gamma band reveals itself in the brain. What’s thought now is that the gamma band has to do with cortical synchronicity. When the gamma band comes then the motor and sensory parts are firing as one—like an in-tune engine.”

I thought then about the Special Forces guys training with that M-wave monitor that showed coherence between brainwaves and breathing—again, like an in-tune engine. And I instantly started to think about all the pattern recognition, how a lot of guys in a fight would see patterns in an opponent and start cracking him up, inside his own pattern. It kind of made sense, in a grand, cosmic scheme of things—feeling and finding patterns without thinking about them.

“So right now I’m involved with Scripps and we’re testing this further, trying to correlate the gamma band and the zone experience. I feel like it’s the closest we’ve ever been to understanding what’s going on.”

Dr. Lardon told me an interesting story about watching a professional actress unwinding after an evening’s performance. “I watched her backstage, and for twenty minutes she was coming out of this hypnotic state, it reminded me of the zone. I’ve seen it so many times in interviews with athletes after a great performance. They are in this trance—this sort of egoless place. They often don’t have much to say.” It seems Schjeldahl was right positing that to ask artists or athletes about their time in the zone would get you “scandalously dopey” answers.

Dr. Lardon talked about how he’d seen it in so many professional golfers who asked him for help. It was usually after they had done well and won a major tournament, and fame was upon them. “Suddenly the ego gets involved—and when it does, I bet there’s no gamma band happening. Now, we don’t know where ego lies, neuroanatomically, but my theory is that it interferes with your circuitry, like the stereo. The ego is treble and bass, you lengthen the circuit, and now it’s not so fast or efficient.”

Dr. Lardon had been working with a fighter and was very confused by the world of fighting, the intrusive promoters who were asking him to violate doctor-patient confidentiality. He mused, “The way that fighters are propped up in the media is basically antithetical to the parameters of the zone, of ‘no-mind.’ They have to badmouth each other, threaten to rip his heart out . . .” I could almost hear him shaking his head. It was a long way from the PGA tour.

I thought about Frank Shamrock’s shit-talking—specifically designed to keep you out of the zone. During the recent “Dream Fight” between Manny Pacquiao and Oscar de La Hoya, head games and mental strategies were in play. Freddie Roach made a big stink, a few days before the fight, about the way Oscar tapes his hands, rolling the tape to create extra knuckles. He took it to the commission and got a partial ruling, and like in the old days he got to go watch Oscar get his hands taped prefight (which is how it used to be done; a trustworthy man from your camp would be in the opponent’s locker room and watch him tape and glove up, making sure he wasn’t putting a horseshoe in his glove).

Freddie said, “I had a real point, but if you can mentally fuck with a guy on the day of the fight, then you’re doing your job. It’s a mental game. Look at what Hopkins did to Trinidad. They say it never got to Oscar, but I know it did,” he laughs his dry laugh. “Oscar reads the Internet.” And Oscar’s mental flaws were on display like never before—constantly casting about for a new trainer, someone to tell him what to do—and coming into the fight lighter than Pacquiao was surely a sign of machismo gone wrong. Manny, deeply in the zone, shut Oscar out and beat him up worse than anyone in his career. He fought perfectly, and seemed unhittable, a work of art.

Maybe it wasn’t what art can tell us about fighting—maybe it was what fighting and sports can tell us about art. Art as sporting event? Was that what David Salle was telling me? Csikszentmihalyi had begun his research talking about the “flow” with composers and poets, not athletes. He talked about looking for places to find ecstasy, sports arenas and temples under the same roof.