Doc Rotella’s Cure for the Thinking Athlete
By HOLLY BRUBACH
New York Times
Brad Faxon initially sought out Rotella’s help in 1984, at the end of his first year on the tour, when he finished 124th on the money list and barely held onto his card. Faxon’s strong suit was undoubtedly his skill with a wedge and a putter; he was, understandably, concentrating on other aspects of his game — trying to hit the ball straighter, to cultivate more power in his swing. Rotella convinced him that his emphasis was misplaced and encouraged him to milk his strengths as a source of confidence. ”You don’t have to be the best driver in the world,” Rotella recalls telling him, ”because you’ve got a great short game and a great mind.” With work and over time, Faxon has become even better around the greens, so that now many people consider him the best putter on the tour. He has earned a spot on the past two Ryder Cup teams; last year, he finished eighth on the money list. ”He’s really learned to love his game,” Rotella says, ”and not wish he had somebody else’s.”
Faxon says his work with Rotella has taught him that ”if you’re going to achieve excellence in sport, you’ve got to have the long-term memory of your successes, not your failures.” It is tempting to attribute the success of Rotella’s methods to that time-worn formula, the power of positive thinking, and Rotella acknowledges that there’s an element of that at work in what he does. But, he says, it isn’t crucial: ”I tell people: If you don’t want to get into positive thinking, that’s O.K. Just eliminate all the negative thoughts from your mind, and whatever’s left will be fine.”
Rotella’s earliest lessons in sports psychology came when, growing up in Rutland, Vt., he played on the baseball, football and basketball teams at Mount St. Joseph Academy — a Catholic high school in a working-class neighborhood. ”And we absolutely knew we were going to win,” he says. ”First, because we figured that the kids on the other side of town had money, therefore they were spoiled, therefore we were tougher. And second, because the opposing team assumed that we had God on our side, since all the nuns were praying for victory.” Rotella reasoned that if you had God on your side, you would win all the time; since Mount St. Joseph lost on occasion, he concluded that winning was a matter of attitude, not divine intervention.
The grandson of Sicilian immigrants, Rotella was the second of five children; his six aunts lived nearby. A big family in a small town, the Rotellas took enormous pride in having survived various hardships, and they communicated that sense of pride to every one of the children. In fact, as Rotella describes his siblings and relations, they begin to sound remarkably like a team: Team Rotella, moving in formation on life’s playing field, with each member contributing to the collective glory.
At Castleton State College in Vermont, where Rotella was captain of the basketball and lacrosse teams, he began working with mentally retarded children, teaching them basketball and swimming. Later, while earning a master’s in physical education for the handicapped and a doctorate in sports psychology at the University of Connecticut, he taught sports skills to disabled students. ”I started with the kids and adults who are the most difficult to teach,” Rotella says, ”and since then I’ve worked with the most gifted athletes. Talent means nothing to me. Performance in the long run has way more to do with what you bring to it than with natural ability. I get the same kick helping some retarded kid come in third in the Special Olympics as I do working with the winner of the U.S. Open.”
Rotella’s approach is low-tech and low-key, a far cry from that of, say, Deborah Graham, another sports psychologist who counsels golfers on the pro tour. She begins her work with a standardized one-hour questionnaire — the Cattell 16 Personality Factor Inventory — and then generates a 50-page individualized report. By comparison, a typical first session with Rotella generally lasts two days at his house in Charlottesville, Va., where hardly a week goes by without a client coming or going; his wife, Darlene, and his daughter, Casey, 14, have grown accustomed to a steady stream of house guests. Consultations take place in the basement, in an office furnished with a couch, a universal gym, a TV and a VCR; a putting cup has been sunk into the floor. Much of the time is spent talking. (His fee, a flat day rate, is the same for everyone.) With golfers, he may propose playing a round, but even then he leaves their mechanics — their timing and their form — untouched.
Graham says that the chief difference between her approach and Rotella’s is that, as a practicing psychotherapist, she brings a clinical perspective to the problems at hand. In the name of golf, she delves into such things as players’ marital crises, their addiction to alcohol — subjects that may lie beyond Rotella’s focus. For his part, he asks athletes to articulate their dreams, their experiences in competition. Mostly, he listens. He forces them to examine the doubts they bring to their own abilities. In many cases, his contribution is ”motivational,” licensing audacious hopes and expectations that skeptics would regard as ”unrealistic.”
In April, Dana Quigley quit his job, to give the tour another try. In August, he won his first Senior P.G.A. tour event, the Northville Long Island Classic. He credits Rotella with preparing him for victory, as well as with helping him surmount what may have been the biggest obstacle he faced — his misgivings about not being a constant presence in the lives of his children. ”Bob made me realize that the best gift I could give them was for them to see me chasing my own dream — that whether or not I’m a success out here, that example is something I’ll leave with them for the rest of their lives,” Quigley says.
The most popular mental prescriptions for athletes these days focus on concentration to the exclusion of other factors — like commitment and confidence — that Rotella considers equally important. The objective is to help players get into that magical mental place known as ”the zone.” Rotella is all in favor of the zone but thinks it’s too fugitive to be made the basis of anybody’s game: ”I tell players, If two or three times a year you were in the zone for a whole round, that’d be fantastic — but it isn’t as if we know how to reproduce that. The guys who are great are great because of how they play when they’re not in the zone.”
It is this preparing for the worst in addition to envisioning the best that sets Rotella apart from the positive thinkers. His philosophy — that golf is ”a game of mistakes played by human beings who are born flawed” — is surprisingly radical in a sport that tends to encourage perfectionism. In Rotella’s world, whoever scores the best while making mistakes wins.
He is also intent on cultivating ”trust” — the conviction that under pressure you will replicate the shot that you can hit 10 out of 10 times in practice. The player who trusts his own skill can ”free it up and let it go” in competition, Rotella says. Whereas ”the player who has to give himself a positive-thinking pep talk every time he goes to hit the ball doesn’t really believe that he can make the shot.”
Rotella’s greatest contribution to the already overcrowded field of golf advice, however, may be the case he makes for golf as a reaction sport. True, the ball is stationary when you go to hit it. That, in fact, is part of the problem: the golfer has all the time in the world to think. Most coaches teach that any conscious attention to mechanics should be limited during the golfer’s swing to a single thought. That’s one too many for Rotella, who contends that ”the best swing thought is no thought.” In basketball, when Michael Jordan is at the free-throw line, Rotella says, he’s not reminding himself to keep his knees slightly flexed or to check the position of his hands — he looks at his target and shoots. In baseball, the pitcher reduces his mental routine to seeing the catcher’s glove and reacting. Rotella would have the golfer do the same: pick a target — not a 30-yard-wide swath of fairway somewhere out yonder but a specific spot, a shadow or a patch of grass — and fire away. Act on your instinct, before fear and doubt start talking. ”I think Doc looks at great athletes to figure out what it is they’re doing that nobody taught them,” Davis Love says, ”things which he can then turn around and teach everybody else.”
And yet, though Rotella’s tips are undeniably useful, they cannot account for his success rate, which is phenomenal. Conversations with his clients prove invariably frustrating, yielding few, if any, amazing insights. Much of Rotella’s philosophy has a vaguely Hallmark ring to it, and his clients, in discussing it, are aware of this, apologizing — as he does — time and again for how ”corny” it sounds.
In the end, the search for an idea that the rest of us can take away and apply to whatever it is we do proves futile, if only because so much of what Rotella preaches is so familiar. ”He tells you nothing that you wouldn’t think, Yeah, that makes perfect sense,” Val Skinner says. Love agrees: ”I’ve been working with him over 10 years, and he doesn’t tell me anything now that he didn’t tell me in the beginning.”
Then why do they keep needing to hear it? In addition to being physically gifted, these athletes are highly intelligent. If it isn’t what Rotella’s telling them that enables them to win, then what is it about his method that makes it work? Dr. Frank Lachmann, an eminent psychoanalyst and a co-author (with Joseph Lichtenberg, M.D., and James Fosshage, Ph.D.) of ”Self and Motivational Systems” and ”The Clinical Exchange,” ventures that it is something that occurs in the attachment. ”The words are pretty trite,” Lachmann admits, ”so it’s hard to credit the content with any kind of magical impact.” More important, he believes, is ”a sense that the person’s physical being is being attended to — some way in which there is a response to the body. And I think that may carry a great deal of weight in terms of feeling connected and understood.”
Lachmann speculates on the similarities between what Rotella does and recent findings on the physical and emotional exchanges that take place between mothers and babies — the effects of their movements on each other, apart from any verbal content: ”There are instances in which the impact cannot be explained in terms of reaction time, because the two of them are on the same wavelength. This can also be true for strangers, if they’re attuned. And Rotella has a very select clientele — people who are exquisitely attuned to their bodily experiences, for whom bodily experiences are particularly poignant.” This process of identification, Lachmann continues, gets abstracted, so that symbols or words — or even, in Rotella’s case, a voice on the phone — can evoke a positive physical experience. ”The idea of winning alone would not be sufficient,” Lachmann says. ”It has to be included or embodied in a whole theme of comfort with one’s self, of a pleasure in using one’s muscles, of the esthetics of the swing, perhaps — which all together would lift you into some area that you feel you can’t go into on your own.”
By the final day of the P.G.A. Tournament this August at the Winged Foot Golf Club in Mamaroneck, N.Y., the championship has come down to a match between Davis Love and his friend Justin Leonard, who start the day tied at seven under, with the nearest competition at even par. ”I wanted him to do well,” Love will later say of Leonard, ”but I didn’t want to give him any chance to win. So I said, I’m going to go out and take control of this tournament — bye!”
Though Love pulls out in front early on, Leonard doesn’t fold. When he hits a wayward shot, he rallies on the next one; he one-putts three of the last four greens. ”You want to win,” Rotella says, following the round at home on television, ”but you want to beat somebody playing well.”
On 15, the heavens open. Out come the nylon parkas, the towels, the umbrellas. Love is unfazed. Arriving at the 18th tee, he is four strokes ahead. He smacks a one-iron down the middle, then places his second shot 12 feet from the pin. By the time he and Leonard reach the green, the sun has come out and — I know this sounds corny — a rainbow spans the sky. Though Love’s victory is assured, he takes his time over this last putt, asking his brother Mark, who is his caddy, to read the break. A throng of fans surrounds the green, and you can almost hear them thinking, Just knock it in! His wife and his mother are poised to rush out and throw their arms around him. The marshals hush the crowd, imposing a tenuous silence. ”I thought about Rotella watching me putt,” Love will later say, ”and I thought, I’m not going to do anything different than I would if I were 10 behind.” He sinks the putt. Birdie. Pandemonium.
As the Wannamaker Trophy is presented to Love, Jim Nantz, the CBS anchor, quotes the inscription Love’s father wrote in a book he once gave him:
”Follow your dreams, and enjoy the trip.”
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