final round of the 1996 US Masters’ championship in Augusta to lose to Nick Faldo.
More recently, the American golfer John Daly admitted that “when the heat was on, I
choked” (The Title, 1998, p. 8) in the 1998 golf World Cup in New Zealand.
Interestingly, in the case of Daly, a curious moderating factor was at work—namely, the
effects of alcohol. Thus Daly believed that the effects of anxiety on his golf performance
had been intensified by the fact that he had given up drinking before the tournament.
Ironically, Daly’s sobriety had caused him to feel more nervous than he would have been
in the past: “Usually, when I have that situation I don’t feel the pressure, I usually just
knock them in. But now it’s totally different. I guess I used to be so drunk I didn’t care.
Now it’s tough, I feel all the nerves and the pressure more than ever” (ibid., p. 8). In
summary, the preceding examples show clearly that choking is a potentially significant
problem for many athletes. But what do we really know about the nature and causes of
this problem?
What is choking?The term choking is used by sport psychologists to refer to a phenomenon in which
athletic performance is impaired suddenly by anxiety. Technically, it involves “the failure
of normally expert skill under pressure” (Masters, 1992, p. 344) or “the occurrence of
suboptimal performance under pressure conditions” (Baumeister and Showers, 1986, p.
362). What makes this mental state intriguing psychologically is that it stems from a
motivational paradox. To explain, in the pressure situations that prompt choking, the
more effort the athlete puts into his or her performance, the worse it becomes. Put simply,
choking occurs paradoxically because people try too hard to perform well.
The symptoms of choking are similar to those of any arousal state (see earlier in
chapter). To begin with, they include tense muscles, shaky limbs, rapid heart and pulse
rates, shortness of breath, butterflies in the stomach, “racing” thoughts and feelings of
panic. In addition, choking may involve the sensation that one cannot complete the stroke
or movement that one intends. For example, golfers who suffer from the “yips” often feel
themselves getting tense over the ball and cannot complete a putting stroke due to
interference from sudden involuntary movements. Likewise, bowlers in cricket who
suffer from anxiety attacks suddenly feel as if they cannot release the ball. For example,
Phil Edmonds, the former Middlesex and England bowler, was so badly afflicted with
anxiety that he ended up standing in the crease and lobbing the ball at the batter’s end
(Middleton, 1996). Choking reactions may also be characterised by a tiny muscular
spasm that occurs just as the stroke is about to be executed—even in practice situations.
For example, Eric Bristow, a world champion in darts for three consecutive years,
revealed that “I had it so bad I was even getting it when I was practising... It took me six
or seven years to sort it out” (cited in Dobson, 1998, p. 16). Before concluding this
section, it should be noted that choking seems to occur more frequently in untimed
individual sports (e.g., golf, tennis) than in timed team-games (e.g., football, rugby). As
yet, however, the precise reasons for this phenomenon remain unknown.
Happily, some progress has been made recently in understanding the aetiology of the
“yips” in golf. Briefly, Smith, Adler, Crews, Wharen, Laskowski, Barnes, Bell et al.
(2003) distinguished between two types of yips phenomena on the basis of whether they
were caused by neurological or psychological factors. On the one hand, the yips “type 1”
Sport and exercise psychology: A critical introduction 86