Yips

"If we could have just screwed another head on his shoulder, he would have been the greatest golfer who ever lived.”  (Ben Hogan, 1912-1997)

Rick Ankiel had an amazing arm.  He could throw a baseball accurately and on-the-fly from deep right field to home-base.

Before playing right field, Ankiel had been a young, hard-throwing Cardinal’s pitcher. In the 2000 postseason, in a series against the Braves, Ankiel was the game-one starter.  For the first two innings he did well, not allowing a run.  Inexplicably, in the third inning he gave up four runs on two hits, four walks, and five wild pitches.  He was pulled from the game.  In his next start, he threw 20 pitches, 5 of which went to the backstop. He didn’t get past the 1^st inning.

I was living in St. Louis at the time, and I was an enthusiastic Cardinal’s fan.  This was a calamity. As both fan and psychiatrist, I felt I owed it to the Cardinals to share a little advice.  I was aware of other performers, mostly actors and musicians, who had severe performance anxiety.  There was a medicine called propranolol that was effective in relieving their tremors and shakes without causing any sedation or cognitive impairment. Maybe it’d work for Ankiel. I thought I’d pass that bit of information along to the Cardinal’s organization just in case their doctors hadn’t already thought of it. Big mistake.

A few weeks later, I received a rather curt letter from the sports medicine department at Washington University, where I too worked.  They informed me of their affiliation with the Cardinals. In effect, the letter told me that I was out of line and to mind my own business.

In retrospect, Ankiel had the yips.  Under playoff pressure, something happened to his mind and body. Performance went out the window. He choked.  After several unsuccessful years pitching in the minors, unable to regain his control, Ankiel shifted from the mound to the outfield.

Fast-forward approximately 20 years, to the recent Chiefs-Bengals playoff game.  For the first two quarters, Patrick Mahomes played near perfect football, until the last play of the half when the Chiefs failed to score from the 2-yard line.  Chiefs got the ball back to start the 3^rd quarter and couldn’t move the ball, nor could they for most of the remainder of the game.  Mahomes looked bewildered, maybe even panicked.  Was this a case of the yips?

I’m over being upset about the game.  The good news is I don’t feel compelled to listen to two weeks of sports commentary leading up to the Super Bowl.  And I learned my lesson.  I will not pass along any of my suggestions to the Chiefs' organization.  I will assume that they have a competent team of sports doctors and psychologists to help Mahomes get his head screwed on right.

I am nervous.  I wonder how Mahomes will respond to the pressure next season.  Once you’ve got the yips, they’re awfully hard to get rid of.  Patrick Mahomes has an amazing arm.  But in football, right field is not an option.

Assumptions

“Karl Jaspers (psychiatrist/philosopher) . . . argued that the worst attitude toward philosophy is to pretend that we do not need it because then we simply use and enact our philosophical assumptions without realizing that we are doing so and without analyzing the limits and weaknesses of our assumptions.”  (JAACAP 46:6, June 2007, p. 786)

Once upon a time, it was assumed that illness was due to an imbalance of the four main bodily humors—black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood.  That was the philosophic basis for medical practice 2,000 years ago, and the rationale for practitioners to bleed their sick patients, a practice that unfortunately persisted well into the 1800’s. To the modern mind, it sounds a bit . . . humorous.

For more than 2,000 years, Euclidian geometry was supposed to be the pinnacle of reasoned Truth, with a capital T.  Euclidian geometry was constructed upon five postulates that were assumed to be true.  That is, until Russian mathematician Nikolai Lobachevsky (1792--1856) determined that proof of Euclid’s fifth postulate is impossible.  Subsequently, by challenging one assumption and changing one postulate, Lobachevsky constructed an entirely sound, but very different, geometry. Today, Euclidian geometry is only one among several geometries.

When I trained to be a Child Psychiatrist it was assumed that autism was caused by cold, rejecting parents, especially cold and rejecting mothers.  The investigators who first described autism observed that there was often a distant relationship between the child and the parent.  In an era still dominated by Freudian theory, it was assumed that autism was a child’s response to parental rejection.  Decades of research, writing, and treatment were based upon this premise. The result was the cruel and needless recrimination of parents, for a condition we now assume is genetic.

The edifice of science is constructed upon a foundation of premises. Scientists assume that there is an objective reality that can be discovered by systematic observation and experimentation, and that reality is governed by laws that are orderly and comprehensible.  Scientists assume that every event has a preceding and determining cause.  All phenomena, even those which today are not fully understood, are consistent with the natural laws, principles, and formulas of Physics.  Scientists assume that our world, ourselves included, can be reduced to matter and energy only.  However, assumptions can be challenged and occasionally changed. Science, as we know it today, may or not resemble science as it will be known in a hundred or a thousand years.

Geometry has it postulates, science it’s premises, and each of us has our own internal set of assumptions, upon which we construct our personal truths and upon which we interpret the world around us. Our assumptions are not based in Truth, as much as they’re based in plausibility.  We live with incomplete and changing information, and so we must be prepared from time-to-time to examine our assumptions and occasionally alter and amend them.  That which we believe is true today, may or may not be true tomorrow. . . I assume.