SUPER BOWL XXV / NEW YORK GIANTS vs. BUFFALO BILLS : It’s All in the Mind : Even the Best Athletes Face Fear of Failure

It’s a warm, muggy afternoon in Tampa and your numbered jersey sticks to your back like a nervous free safety. The pressure is suffocating.

You got up too early , which was your first mistake , and please don’t let there be any others. You s et your alarm clock wrong because you misread the dial, so it went off at 5 instead of 7. Your head feels as inflated as the football. But you ignore everything. You just try to focus. After all, this is Super Bowl XXV .

One thought keeps rattling around inside your helmet, over and over:

Don’t mess up!

Don’t mess up!

Don’t mess up!

Actually, this is pretty common stuff in the sports business, especially when chips are down, backs are against the wall, it’s for all the marbles and there is no tomorrow. You know, those really important times.

On such occasions, when there is a goal to cross, a putt to sink, a shot to make or a ball to throw, if you think about it, for every one thing that can go right, there are a lot of things that can be messed up.

Just as athletes are fully aware of the rewards of their actions, they are also well aware of potential pitfalls, so they spend a lot of time contemplating their possible bad luck. Give us this day our daily dread.

If you think of sports as only the playing of games involving money, you may be missing the point. What is being played out on the field or the court or the greens is nothing less than a soap opera without a script, where heroes rise to cheers and goats grow horns and bleat.

If you watch the Super Bowl, you will not be merely watching a football game, you will be watching a psychodrama. Competition is a mental exercise, too.

For instance, what would Cleveland Gary have done in the Super Bowl? Or what would the Super Bowl have done to Cleveland Gary? That is, assuming the Rams had won six or seven more games and arrived at the Super Bowl.

Gary, the Rams’ second-year running back, experienced what you would call the sophomore jinx. He fumbled 12 times. Sophomores with similar grades have flunked out of school, but the Rams stayed with Gary. After examination, it was discovered that there was nothing lacking with his hands, with the possible exception of Velcro.

It got to be a mental thing for Gary and the more he carried the football, the more he fumbled it. Known in college at Miami as a power runner, Gary is now known as, yes, a fumbler, a cruel tag for anyone.

Wendell Tyler says this is sadly ironic. And Tyler should know what he is talking about because he was able to achieve expert status at fumbling during his NFL career with the Rams and 49ers.

“The young man, before he started fumbling, he was a great runner,” Tyler said of Gary. “But you know, then he starts fumbling and now he’s a fumbler. But if he has a few great games, then he’ll be a great runner again.”

Tyler was alternately a great runner and a fumbler. He was a 1,000-yard rusher three times, gained more than 6,000 yards in his career, but also reached double figures in fumbles three times. He led the NFL with 10 in 1982, which was, coincidentally, his last year with the Rams.

“Psychologically, if you fumble, well, I remember sometimes I just knew it just wasn’t my day,” said Tyler, 35, who runs a landscaping business in Lancaster. “I’d think, ‘Hurry up and get this one over with.’ . . . You fumble once and psychologically you would be thinking about it all day. You might be thinking about just holding onto the ball and not really looking for your hole.”

Powerful forces are at work here--deep, dark, mental ones. Psychological frailties of athletes are a side of professional sports that many recognize, yet few really study. Experts in the field seem to agree it is all about confidence, lost and found.

Jim Loehr is director of sports science for the United States Tennis Assn. and has worked with such stars as Andre Agassi, Jim Courier, Gabriela Sabatini, Martina Navratilova and Monica Seles. Sabatini credited Loehr with helping her become mentally tough enough to win the U.S. Open last September.

Loehr said we shouldn’t be at all surprised by sudden, surprisingly atypical behavior by athletes when they are working.

“It happens all the time, particularly in positions that are dictated by very fine motor-skill coordination, like wide receivers, quarterbacks and pitchers,” Loehr said. “The real skill positions within a sport are very, very sensitive to emotional changes, the effect of emotions, the stress hormones.

“It’s very, very delicate,” Loehr said. “When a player loses confidence, when they start developing these images of failure, they become just a little bit tighter. It can begin with something that’s seemingly very insignificant, one dropped ball at a critical time. It begins to change their expectancy for success.

“What you are really talking about are changes in the physiology and the chemistry of the body,” Loehr said. “It has its roots in psychological processes that trigger very powerful, hormonal, neuro-chemical changes that affect the fingers, the hands, the feet, every cell of the body. Fear is a very, very powerful hormone.

“Fear of failure and not looking good, fear of letting down your fans, fear of letting down your teammates and fear of dropping the ball translates into a very definable, very specific set of biochemical changes,” Loehr said. “They seem insignificant to the rest of the world, but they are very magnified in a fine-motor skill position.”

For years, Tom Watson’s motor skills were unsurpassed on the golf course, where he shifted into high gear and drove his prize money to the bank. Five times the leading money winner on the PGA Tour, Watson was so automatic that his consistency inspired something that came to be known as the “Watson par.”

His ball might have been off the fairway, caught in the rough or dumped in a fairway bunker, but Watson always seemed to be able to knock it onto the green, no matter the lie, and make his par.

But since 1984, Watson has won only one tournament. It has been a spooky free-fall for a five-time British Open, two-time Masters and 1982 U.S. Open champion. In time, the “Watson par” became the “Watson bogey.”

A 1971 Stanford graduate with a degree in psychology, Watson, 41, is at least equipped to understand what happened to him.

“We, as players, go through cycles of ups and downs, times when you know you have it and other times when you’re sure you don’t,” Watson said. “Most of the time, you’re in between. The times when I didn’t perform well in the last round, those were the days when the pressure came to bear upon me too much and I couldn’t handle it.

“From an internal standpoint, sometimes there is a tremendous amount of frustration you just can’t make go away. I think sports psychology can probably help that, to try to channel your negative thoughts into something less than negative, but bottom line is whether you feel like you’re confident enough to play good golf or not. You’ve got to deal with the downs.”

Loehr said that golfers are inherently more susceptible to psychological frailty because of the nature of a game with long breaks in the action.

“There is tremendous pressure, there is no opponent out there, you just have the ball in front of you,” Loehr said. “There is little physical release, you can never break a sweat and play is so discontinuous.”

To be sure, discontinuous play will get you every time. Take the strange case of outfielder Dale Murphy, now of the Philadelphia Phillies.

Murphy, 34, has played professional baseball since 1974. He came up as a catcher-first baseman but failed behind the plate early in his career with the Atlanta Braves, partly because of his eerie inability to throw the ball back to the pitcher in a consistent fashion. Murphy said his shortcomings in throwing the ball were not limited to returning the ball to the pitcher.

“Eventually, . . . it was throwing to the bases,” he said. “I just wasn’t very accurate.

“Things like that get psychological. Something like a guy having trouble making free throws. . . . If you’re not accurate, you’re not going to be a catcher. So I got to the outfield where my accuracy still isn’t as good. You just don’t notice it as much in the outfield.”

For sheer, attention-getting messing up, there are few failures that can match the basketball player missing free throws. Wilt Chamberlain is seen as the all-time classic example of this kind of psychological frailty, but he is a bad example. It is not as if Chamberlain suddenly lost his ability to shoot a free throw. Wilt never could make any.

There was one notable exception--the game in which Chamberlain scored 100 points as a Philadelphia Warrior on March 2, 1962. He made 28 of 32 free throws. In his 14-year career, however, Chamberlain shot .540 from the field and .511 from the free-throw line.

“He always had his problems with free throws,” Loehr said. “That, I think, was more a mechanical problem.”

Just as misguided as Chamberlain’s free throws were the throws to first base that Steve Sax made for the Dodgers in the early 1980s. But there was nothing mechanical about Sax’s wildly erratic throws, according to Richard Lister, a Costa Mesa sports psychologist.

“Fear crept into his mind,” said Lister, who has been practicing in Orange County for 20 years. “Sax never had any problem with throwing on a double play with a runner sliding into him. That’s a much tougher play. He never threw the ball away on that play. When did he throw the ball away? A quick one-hopper. He had the ball almost before the batter was out of the box. He had an easy 45-foot throw.

“Why did he throw it away so often? He had time to consider that he could look absolutely ridiculous. That’s why golfers shank short shots.”

It probably helps to know that errors and bad iron shots are common. Tyler said he was at peace with himself once he became a Christian.

“Everyone fumbles,” Tyler said. “All the great backs fumble. If you listen to outside sources, it can penetrate you and affect your psychological makeup. The great ones believe in themselves. I call it unwavering faith.”

Loehr calls it confidence, which he terms “expectancy for success.” Loehr says that confidence control is a learned skill that athletes must acquire. The more successful, veteran athletes are particularly adept at confidence control, Loehr said. He used San Francisco 49er quarterback Joe Montana as an example of a veteran player who does not get upset when he makes a mistake and does not interpret failure in catastrophic proportions.

“He’ll miss a pass occasionally or something will go wrong, but his confidence is something he has learned to control very effectively,” Loehr said. “If you panic and allow things to bother you too much, then you start accelerating the crisis of confidence.”

Raise the stakes and that crisis really gets accelerated. In Lister’s view, such a circumstance ought to be appreciated, not derided, by the viewing public.

“The general public assumes that once these people become hardened professionals, these people are immune to fear of failure and inadequacy, what the general public fights with daily and thinks it’s only them,” Lister said. “It’s not. We’re not dealing with robots.”

No, we are dealing with athletes. Sometimes they can hit a baseball over a fence and sometimes they couldn’t find it with radar, much less a bat. The Phillies’ Murphy has one question about it: Isn’t this all part of the fun?

“In baseball and any sport, there are missed shots, errors, strikeouts, fumbles. I don’t know how else to say it except that part of life is going through things that don’t always happen the way we would like them to,” Murphy said.

“I guess that’s what makes life exciting being a human being, the unpredictability of everything. I don’t think any sport would be interesting to see if everybody did everything just right. How could you do it?”