Chapter 4
Staying focused in sport: concentration in
sport performers
I have learned to cut out all the unnecessary thoughts ...on the track. I simply
concentrate. I concentrate on the tangible—on the track, on the race, on the blocks, on the
things I have to do. The crowd fades away and the other athletes disappear and now it’s
just me and this one lane. (Michael Johnson, three times Olympic gold-medallist in 400
m, and nine times a world athletics gold-medallist, cited in Miller, 1997, p. 64)
I was in my own little world, focusing on every shot. I wasn’t thinking of what score I
was on or anything... But today was probably as good as I have ever played. (Darren
Clarke, Ryder Cup golfer, after he had shot a record-equalling 60 in the 1999 European
Open championship in Kildare, Ireland, cited in Otway, 1999, p. 13)
At 16–16,1 was singing songs in my head. I was singing Tom Jones’ Delilah. I just
tried to take my mind off the arena, the crowd, everything. (Mark Williams, 2003 world
snooker champion, after he had defeated Ken Doherty 18–16 in the final, cited in
Everton, 2003, p. 31)
IntroductionMost athletes have discovered from personal experience that “concentration”, or the
ability to focus effectively on the task at hand while ignoring distractions (Schmid and
Peper, 1998), is a vital prerequisite of successful performance in sport. For example,
Garry Sobers, the former West Indies cricket star, proclaimed that “on the cricket field,
you have to have a concentration that you can rely on to take you beyond the average”
(cited in White, 2002a, p. 20). A similar testimonial to the value of concentration came
from the Ryder Cup golfer Darren Clarke (see the quotation above) whose career-best
round of 60 in the 1999 European Open championship coincided with a deliberate effort
to focus on only one shot at a time. By contrast, Stephen Hendry, the snooker star,
ascribed his narrow defeat (18–17) by Peter Ebdon in the 2002 world championship final
to a lapse in concentration in the deciding frame of the match: ‘The one thing you want in
the last frame is a chance and I had three but I bottled it... My concentration went” (cited
in Everton, 2002, p. 25). Not only do these quotations highlight the value of focusing
ability to athletes but they also indicate that top sports performers have developed rich
informal theories about how their concentration systems work in competitive situations.
To illustrate, Sobers proposed that “concentration’s like a shower. You don’t turn it on
until you want to bathe... You don’t walk out of the shower and leave it running. You
turn it off, you turn it on... It has to be fresh and ready when you need it” (cited in White,
2002a, p. 20). Perhaps not surprisingly, these intuitive theories are often accompanied by
idiosyncratic concentration techniques. For example, the snooker player Mark Williams
raised a few eyebrows when he revealed that he had sung “Delilah” silently to himself in
an effort to block out negative thoughts towards the end of his classic match against Ken