AS I SEE IT COLUMN: Potential for choking is part of what makes sport so interesting

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/06/2024 (318 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If you watched Irish golfer Rory McIlroy whittle away the U. S. Open on Sunday, you saw a tragic, gut-wrenching potential reality in sport — choking.

Up by two strokes with just a few holes to play, McIlroy could almost taste victory. He last won the U.S. Open back in 2011. What he tasted instead was utter heartache.

Two missed short putts in the final three holes and a bad drive on 18 sealed the loss for the fan favourite. The collapse – the choke – was complete. What appeared to be an all-but-certain victory resulted in a defeat that some golf analysts are saying Rory may never fully recover from. Such was the epic nature of what happened to McIlroy, or, more precisely, what he did to himself.

And therein lies the essential aspect of choking. The athlete or team involved in a choke cannot blame the loss on a bad break or a controversial bad call from an official. No, the wound is entirely self-inflicted. They have only themselves to blame.

Choking can be loosely defined as a player or team freezing and underperforming when it matters most.

Had McIlroy simply parred out the last three holes he would be the current U.S. Open champion. But in those critical final holes, McIlroy clearly underperformed, as this astonishing stat makes clear: heading into those final three holes McIlroy had successfully sunk his last 500 putts within three feet of the hole.

But at the most crucial moment of the tournament, he missed his first three-footer in 500 attempts and it cost him a major.

No player and no team wants to choke. No athlete makes a conscious decision to underperform. But it happens. Sometimes the pressure is so overwhelming that it changes the basic physiology of the athlete. You breathe differently. Your heart rate increases. Self-doubt begins to creep in. All kinds of factors come into play at one really inopportune time and sometimes that results in the athlete performing nowhere close to their ability.

In golf you hear the expression that when the pressure is on, a golfer will “grip his or her club a lot tighter than normal.” It’s a clear sign the pressure is getting to the athlete.

And while choking is never enjoyable to witness – even the player who ultimately defeated McIlroy on Sunday said he wouldn’t wish his worst enemy to miss a short putt like McIlroy did – it is a big reason why sport is so compelling to watch.

Sometimes underdogs over achieve. Sometimes heavy favourites simply don’t play well enough to earn the win and other times, like we saw on Sunday, some athletes will choke at the worst possible time.

It’s excruciating to watch, but impossible to avoid. It’s like driving past a car accident, where one is inexorably drawn to see what has happened even though it’s instantly obvious that what happened is not good, possibly even awful.

The reality of choking in sport also speaks to the power of our minds. All the players in the U.S. Open are fantastic golfers. Most of them are more or less equally talented physically. They all hit thousands of balls a week and they all have coaches helping them with every facet of their game.

To put it another way, their physical skills are essentially equal. However, their mental skills – that part of sport that happens between your ears – may not be so equal.

I hope McIlroy has a good sports psychologist or that he quickly hires one; he’s going to need a lot of help to mentally get over his U.S. Open collapse.