The Best American Sports Writing 2011 (42 page)

The paper created a sensation, inspiring a rain of similar studies. Steele and Aronson subsequently showed you could drive down test scores merely by having black students declare their race on a pretest form. They and other researchers soon found that stereotype threat works on other groups too. Mention anything about gender or "innate ability" to women taking a math test, for instance, and they'll make more mistakes.

Though these stereotype-threat effects fairly reek of choking, several years passed before anyone examined them in the light of sports performance. Then, in 1999, Jeff Stone, a social psychologist at the University of Arizona, asked both white and black golfers to play a putting game framed as a test of either "sports intelligence" or "natural athletic ability." The results still astonish: among the golfers considering the putting game a test of "natural athletic ability," blacks did better than usual and whites did worse. Among those framing it as a sort of sports intelligence test, whites did better and blacks worse.

This result, replicated many times since, eerily echoes the GRE test-score plunge that Steele and Aronson induced in 1995. Yet that white golfers suffered a hit while being tested for "natural athletic ability" raises an intriguing question: if white male golfers in Arizona can be so easily derailed by an unflattering stereotype, who on earth is exempt from stereotype threat?

No one. Since those first studies, Stone, Beilock, and others have produced, with almost laughable ease, absurdly task- and stereotype-specific effects in groups of every sort. For instance, if you ask white men to jump both before and after calling the jumping test a measure of "natural athletic ability," they will jump significantly less high after the threat. White male engineers, meanwhile, will ace a math test if it's presented as a test of gender-based or innate math abilities—but tell them they're being compared with Asian male engineers, and they'll choke badly.

"We haven't found anyone," says Beilock, "that we can't screw up by suggesting that some group they're a member of is bad at something."

Stereotype threat, it turns out, is a surprisingly democratic dynamic. Obviously stereotypes such as bigotry and sexism are not applied equitably. But no one is immune to the mechanism that stereotype threat applies. For this reason, some psychologists are starting to call it "identity threat." As Jeff Stone put it, "We all have multiple identities, and they can all be discriminated against. It's the identities we carry that make us vulnerable here."

Emphasize the identity aspect, and the sports implications rapidly expand. The many late-season and postseason failures by the Chicago Cubs, for instance, start to make more sense: in a pressure situation, any simple reminder that you're a Cub (like, say, your uniform) may cause enough decrement to make you drop fly balls, boot grounders, or monitor your way out of an at-bat.

Meanwhile, stereotype "lift"—a performance boost that some studies have found in people doing tasks their stereotyped groups supposedly do well—may lend extra advantage to the Yankees or (now that their two World Series wins in 2004 and 2007 seem to have lifted the Curse) the Boston Red Sox.

But how does stereotype threat work? The initial hypothesis about the Steele and Aronson African American test-taking results was that stereotype threat creates a self-fulfilling image of failure, a sort of role-playing in which the test-taker surrenders to the stereotyped identity by disengaging emotionally and intellectually. In the last five years or so, however, researchers such as Beilock and the University of Arizona's Toni Schmader have done experiments suggesting that stereotype threat fouls performance primarily by occupying working memory.

Working memory is the crucial mental faculty that briefly retains multiple pieces of unrelated data so you can use or manipulate them. You depend on working memory every time you read a paragraph, learn a new definition, perform a multipart math problem in your head, or try to retain a phone number while you finish a conversation. Working-memory capacity is closely tied to general powers of intellect and decision-making. When it's not working well, you're not as sharp.

In late 2007, Beilock found that when women under stereotype threat choked on a math test she designed for them, they choked almost exclusively on probl ems that relied on working memory; they fell short not because they were thinking too much, but because they couldn't keep in mind the things necessary to the task.

This working memory failure is a much different mechanism than external monitoring (which stereotype threat can also cause); instead of overmonitoring a physical operation, the athlete or test-taker is poorly attending to a mental operation. Beilock believes such misattention is at work when athletes commit mental stumbles like Colin Montgomerie's club switch. Montgomerie wasn't stupid to double-check his choice of club; calibrating club selection is essential to high-level golf. His mistake was in not working through the problem fully and leaving out the essential information: that conditions dictated that he should indeed use his regular club length. But with his cognitive machinery slowed by preoccupied working memory, he failed to think straight and miffed it. He cognichoked.

How do you fend off such effects of stereotype threat? As Jeff Stone notes, identity is partly a matter of context and even choice. "Usually, something in the context has to activate a stereotype threat. It has to be turned on. But you can also turn it off. To some extent, you can reframe things yourself." Asian women, for instance, do better on math tests if they focus more on their Asian-ness than on their gender.

"You can't dictate your genes," says Stone. "But among the many identities you have, you can choose which to operate from." Tiger Woods, for instance, has clearly forged an identity that transcends the potential vulnerabilities of his multiracial makeup. You can wallow in your most negative identity—the slow one, the over-thinker, the one who doesn't care—or you can foreground another identity, the one who is ready, the one who knows what's coming, the one who calmly attacks the problem.

Not that this comes easy. As Beilock notes, this second, cognition-based failure under pressure means "there are at least two things going on, running parallel, almost all the time": a physical track and a mental track. "And what might disrupt you—what might crunch under pressure—depends on what you're doing at a particular moment."

You can jump off the physical track by overmonitoring and fall off the cognitive track through inattention. And distraction greases the physical track and kinks the cognitive. To travel both smoothly requires knowing what to attend to and what not to attend to—or to put it another way, understanding what to distract yourself from (your physical mechanics) and what not to get distracted from (the score, the count, how many time-outs you have left).

This is a vision of athletic performance both alluring and daunting. Sports start to look a lot more like real life—and much more demanding.

"It's a lot more complicated than just 'Don't think about it,'" says Beilock.

How did hitters handle this dual track? I wanted to ask Paul Konerko. So late that season of 2008, on August 29, I went to another White Sox game, the opener of a vital three-game series against the Red Sox in Boston. For pressure, this one easily beat the May game I'd watched with Beilock. Both teams were in drum-tight pennant races; the Red Sox were four and a half games out of first in the American League East and the White Sox up a game and a half in the AL Central. Both teams needed wins. Both knew they might meet a month later, in the postseason.

Despite the stakes, however, the White Sox clubhouse seemed a remarkably calm place three hours before game time. Several players sat watching a Cubs-Phillies game that ran quietly on a television. Another cluster studied laptops showing films of Boston pitcher Daisuke "Dice-K" Matsuzaka, whom they would face that evening. I found Konerko in a chair in front of his locker doing a crossword puzzle.

Konerko in person projects a warmth and quickness of expression that doesn't come across in photos or even video. He is a smart but modest man, and articulate and open in a way that had long made him a favorite interview target among Chicago sportswriters. He sat alone today, however.

His season had not gone well since I'd seen him strike out in May. After hitting .222 in April and .191 in May, he'd gone .250 in June and .209 in July, and so entered August hitting .214 with just nine homers, half his normal pace. The White Sox, desperate to produce more runs, dropped him two spots in the order, from the hallowed cleanup spot, fourth, to sixth; the Chicago press, meanwhile, was calling for his head.

On July 31 the team acquired slugger Ken Griffey Jr., and Konerko started seeing his name replaced on the lineup every few days by Nick Swisher, a 27-year-old outfielder-first baseman who until then had played the center-field spot now occupied by Griffey.

Whether it was the Griffey trade, the days off, or improving health, however, Konerko had started to heat up the first week of August. He got a hit almost every game that week, including three in one game in Detroit. The following week he went 6-for-20. He entered this crucial Boston series hitting .339 for the month.

In four weeks he'd become a different hitter. Surely, I figured, he would be able to describe some difference in how he felt now versus a month before, some mental or mechanical adjustment that explained his cleaner engagement with the baseball.

"It's kind of strange, actually," he told me. "Fact is, I don't feel any different. I mean, I feel happier when it's going well and I'm helping the team. But I don't really understand what goes on when I'm doing well versus when I'm doing badly. I've had whole years where I had 'good years'—good numbers, helped the team—but felt like I was struggling the whole time. I've had other stretches where I feel completely locked in—and things don't work out."

I asked him how he tried to adjust when things weren't going well or when a situation carried more pressure.

"You try to stay steady. Not change too much. You prepare. You do your work every day, so you're swinging well and you know your pitcher and the situation. Then you go in and try to focus and execute. In the box, keep it simple. I try to concentrate on tracking a pitch into a zone I've chosen to focus on, swing hard at those. Sometimes you get fooled. But you stick to your routine, stay focused. Don't overthink."

This message—sticking to a routine, not overexamining—was echoed by every hitter I talked to that day, on both teams: Boston's free-and-easy slugger David Ortiz ("Don't be changing things!"); his tautly focused teammate catcher Jason Varitek ("Stay with your game"); and Konerko's clubhouse mates Jim Thome ("Be true to your program") and Ken Griffey Jr., who simply said, smiling slyly and repeating himself precisely in tone and emphasis, "Every at-bat the same. Every at-bat the same."

These were variations on "Don't think too much." But almost every conversation also addressed, in ways more veiled, the tension between when to think and when not to. The most revealing was a comment Konerko made as I closed my notebook, ready to let him return to his crossword.

"I wish you luck with this," he said. "It's a hard kind of story to get people to talk about this time of year—a team like this, anyway, in the middle of a pennant race. This is really kind of a spring training story."

Only later did I realize what he meant. During the season, hitters in particular must guard against constant tinkering, or they'll tinker away a season. You save the heavy refashioning—reworking your stance or your swing, changing your focal tactics—for spring training. Once play begins, you stick to your program.

Approaching every at-bat the same does more than prevent external monitoring. It ritualizes the mental processes—the zoom out to check the situation, the zoom back in to focus, the oscillations between thinking and not thinking—that are as vital as the physical execution. It creates a management of attention as proceduralized, if not quite as automatic, as your swing mechanics.

I considered all this later, as I watched Konerko confront the mystery that was Daisuke Matsuzaka. Dice-K, 16–2 entering the game, had all seven of his pitches going that night in Boston. He was always on or near the edges of the plate and never over the center; he threw an untrackable variety of trajectories and speeds; he dipped, zipped, darted, and curved; he made the ball do everything but climb. The White Sox managed just two hits, and they never came close to scoring. It was hard not to feel sorry for them.

Yet Konerko, though he went 0-for-3, looked good. Before each at-bat, when he was on deck, he smoothly executed the same stretching and swinging rituals, a sort of meditative entry. At the plate, he stepped out of the box after each pitch with the same deliberation and rhythm every time, took the same easy-ripping practice swing, raised his bat, stepped back in. His body language did not convey the dismay and confusion that it had 14 weeks before. He was more evenly engaged. And he had good at-bats.

He didn't get much to hit, but he took the pitches he should take and swung at the ones he had to, and in the second he drove the one touchable pitch he saw, a nasty low fastball, deep to right-center, where it was gathered in by a sprinting Jacoby Ellsbury. He didn't get a hit. But he had righted himself.

Was he in the "zone," that hallowed place of effortless full focus? Perhaps; he certainly seemed to be there in the week that followed, as he went 10-for-28 with three homers, and for the rest of the pennant race, as he hit .260 with nine homers in September, despite a knee injury mid-month. He was the team's hottest bat as they claimed the American League Central Division by winning a one-game playoff after finishing the regular season tied with Minnesota. (They then lost the American League Championship to the Tampa Bay Rays in four games.)

The zone is a happy place. Yet if the zone lies at one end of a spectrum and the choke at the other, athletes spend most of their time laboring in the spectrum's inner bands, in a gray area between groove and gag. Playing on the happier end of this band requires almost numbingly proceduralized mechanics both physical and mental—a physical groove of automated motion and a mental groove requiring a disciplined oscillation of attention and thought.