increases in physiological arousal and cognitive state anxiety do not inevitably lead to a
deterioration in athletic performance. Recall that the effects of both of these variables
depend crucially on how the performer interprets the perceived changes in arousal. For
example, increased arousal may be perceived as energising rather than overwhelming and
hence facilitative of performance. Third, the interaction between arousal and cognitive
anxiety seems to be more important in determining performance than is the absolute
value of either variable on its own. With these general conclusions in mind, let us now
consider what happens when anxiety hampers athletic performance.
Performance anxiety in sport: “choking” under pressureEarlier in the chapter, we learned that the term anxiety is derived from the Latin word
“angere” which means “to choke”. Not surprisingly, the phenomenon of “choking under
pressure”, whereby athletic performance is suddenly impaired by intense anxiety, has
attracted both popular interest (e.g., Coop and Morrice, 2002; Dobson, 1998) and
scientific scrutiny (e.g., Graydon, 2002). Interestingly, the term “choking” is so widely
known in athletic performance that it has a variety of sport-specific synonyms, such as
“icing” (in basketball), “dartitis” (in darts) and the “yips” (in golf). Although it affects
athletes of all levels of ability and/or experience, choking is especially prevalent among
performers of precision sports such as golf, tennis, snooker, darts and cricket. To
illustrate, current stars like John Daly (golf) and former world-class athletes like Rod
Laver and John McEnroe (both tennis) and Lee Trevino and Tom Watson have all
admitted publicly that they have choked psychologically in certain pressure situations.
Unfortunately, choking is not only debilitating but can affect athletes over a long
period of time. For example, the Welsh golfer Ian Woosnam admitted that he had
suffered from the “yips” for three years. More precisely, he said that “it got to the stage
where the right hand would suddenly jerk into action and you’d putt to the left... Then, as
it goes on, you don’t know where the right path is and you get even more tense. I was
suffering so much when I got onto the green I was feeling physically sick” (cited in
White, 2002b, p. 22). Fortunately, this problem disappeared when he made a technical
adjustment to his stroke by switching to a “broom handle” putter. Similarly, Eric Bristow,
who won the world darts championship five times, choked so badly at times that he could
not release the dart from his fingers. It took him years to overcome this problem
(Middleton, 1996). Other athletes have not been so lucky. For example, the former
snooker star Patsy Fagan had to abandon the sport because of his failure to overcome
anxiety problems which affected his cueing action (Dobson, 1998). Less dramatically,
anxiety has prompted remarkable collapses in the performance of such athletes as Jana
Novotna and Greg Norman. To illustrate, consider what happened in the 1993
Wimbledon Ladies’ Singles final between Jana Novotna (the Czech Republic) and Steffi
Graf (Germany). Serving at 4–1 in the third set, with a point for 5–1, Novotna began to
lose control. She produced a double-fault and some wild shots to lose that game. Later,
she served three consecutive double-faults in her anxiety to increase her 4–3 lead over
Graf (Thornley, 1993, p. 6). Interestingly, Novotna played in a similar fashion in the third
round of the 1995 French Open championship in Paris when she lost a match to the
American player Chanda Rubin despite having 9 match points when leading 5–0, 40–0 in
the third set. In a similar vein, the golfer Greg Norman surrendered a six-shot lead in the
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