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Stage Fright
Yip...e...e...e
Literature can help us understand others' experience of stress.
Posted September 13, 2019
Henry is a collegiate shortstop with enough of a reputation that scouts have begun sitting in the stands at games. He’s been getting calls, his plays are beautiful to watch and a marvel of execution.
And then,
He clapped his right hand over the captive ball, spun it to find the seams. He cocked his arm, locked his eyes on [the first baseman’s] glove. His arm was moving forward, there wasn’t time to think, but he was thinking anyway, trying to decide whether to speed up his arm or slow it down. He could feel himself calibrating and recalibrating, adjusting and readjusting his aim, like an army sniper hopped up on foreign drugs.
Some days later, after a number of missed plays—an unheard of action (or inaction) on Henry’s part—his teammate comments to a friend:
You should see the throws he makes at practice. Or even in games, on the bag-bang plays. When he doesn’t have to think about it. His arm is a triumph of nature…It’s always the easy plays, the balls hit right at him. You can see the gears spinning: Am I gonna screw this up? Maybe I’m gonna screw this up. I just want to grab him by the shoulders and shake it out of him. He’s creating this whole problem out of nothing. Nothing.
What is the problem?
The classic name for it, in sports, is the “yips,” a sudden loss of skilled fine motor functioning The term is most often associated with golfers (and it turns out that a lot of golfers experience the yips—our friend Wikipedia says that the yips affect between ¼ and ½ of mature golfers). It also shows up in other sports, such as baseball and basketball. If you’re a darts thrower, though, it’s not the yips, it’s dartitis.
Among fans who (over)identify with high-level athletes, the shift from being gods to being, well, crap can occur in a nano-second.
So who is Henry? One of the protagonists in a long but beautifully written and very easy to read new novel, The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach.
We are so interested—and involved in—issues of performance, whether it’s physical performance or the mental skills and challenges of performance. Kind of easy to write about the successes…but what about the things that can go wrong, that can feel awful in a competition, a game, a performance, or over a long time? How do we learn about them?
Maybe it’s because I’m someone who loves reading—particularly if it’s engaging and well-written—that I often turn to books, novels in particular, to help inform me about the insides of someone else’s experience.
And if it’s something as unsettling as the yips, maybe it’s easier to confront at the hypothetical (fictional) level than as a baffled, self-observing self. Professional memoirs, even with the addition of a ghost or a journalist to beef up their comprehensibility, may show some self-reflection and factual accuracy…but be low on literary merit.
So here’s another novel that involves a baseball player and yips, this time a major league pitcher, dealing with life after the yips. In Evvie Drake Starts Over, by Linda Holmes, we meet Dean after he has given up resurrecting his career. Before quitting, he attempted to resolve whatever was going on by trying, as he enumerates, eight sports psychologists, two psychiatrists, acupuncture, acupressure, suction cups, candles in his f***ing ear, quitting gluten, quitting sugar, quitting sex, having extra sex, eating no meat, eating just meat.
A smorgasbord of options like that, some presumably involving people who know what they’re talking about/helping with and some that are mutually contradictory—and none that apparently resolves the issues—what does that say to you?
To me it says that whatever the yips is about, it’s a complex phenomenon, no doubt involving interactive elements of both psyche and soma, our minds and our bodies. A one-off error can spin a person into doubt which can tighten the muscles which can result in more erratic behavior which can….You get the idea.
It’s also interesting that the phenomenon, whatever its etiology, is labeled differently depending on the particular domain in which it occurs. “Yips” has a sort of cute sound, like a brief pinch that really, truly, might be no big deal…except that of course the effects are very real. In music performance, what may be the same phenomenon—a sudden inability to execute a known, highly skilled action—becomes “focal dystonia,” an impressively sounding medical term (more elegant than, for example, “pianist’s cramp.”)
But pianist’s cramp may give an indication of part of what is involved for some people regarding this challenge, that is, the over-use and ultimately mis-firing of muscle as a result of repetitive motion.
Having moved into discussing the performing arts and the clutched inability to perform, what about plain old vanilla stage fright? Is it the same as the yips…just something that can be named in the arts world but would be a shunned term in the world of sports?
And btw, there’s a book to go with that: Yes, it’s a memoir rather than fiction, but good writing will win me over every time. Though she loved to play the piano, journalist Sara Solovitch had a lifelong fear of playing in public. Playing Scared is at one level her own travels with stage fright over a yearlong period, in middle age, to come to terms with playing in public. Along the way, she also shares extensive research on stage fright, performance anxiety…or whatever we want to call it.
The yips isn’t the same as stage fright, the context is different, but it’s also interesting and informative to see how people handle it within their own performance area. Among musicians, Beta blockers as a way to handle “nerves” have been used for years, whether above-board or passed from colleague to colleague. So it was intriguing to read recent research on the use of Beta blockers among—wait for it— some golfers with the yips.
