When the Russian basketball team was preparing for the Olympics years ago, they were absolutely pathetic from the free throw line. They had some real work ahead of them to at least make a showing in the games and their coach decided that this was clearly an area to put their attention on.
He decided that it couldn't hurt to experiment with the team a little bit. He took one-third of the team and had them shoot free throws in practice for two a days. This was conventional; most teams would perhaps instill similar guidelines for such practice.
The second third of the team would sit in a video room for one hour and watch some of the greatest players to have played the game shoot free throws. The video was of players always making the shot, no misses.
After one hour, that team would then join the others and shoot free throws for one hour. The last third of the team, which was a group of their worst shooters, would just sit and watch videotape of free throws, players of the NBA always making the basket. It almost sounded like a punishment when I first read about the coaching tactic.
It's funny how things worked out during the games. Russia had a very good showing for themselves that year. The experiment greatly added to their success. The statistics were interesting, showing that the team that just practiced for the two hours were the ones that didn't change their shooting at all and they were the best shooters on the team.
The second experimental group, the third that watched for an hour and shot for an hour, got better and the teams overall statistics showed a very noticeable difference. The last team -- made up of the basketball team's worst shooters -- were off the charts with improvement. They were the main reason the team had won some of the games that year.
Visualizing is an interesting thing. This little study quite obviously shows that. There is a little trick to this experiment. It was actually a form of brain washing. You see, the average person has around 60,000 thoughts a day. That is probably not surprising. That car was red, wind is in my face, which way is town, etc. But what is perplexing is the fact that 95 percent of those thoughts are exactly the same as the thoughts you have been having on a day-to-day basis, perhaps for years. They are always the same. Our thoughts truly mold our existence, yet there is a field of infinite possibility. We still choose the same thoughts and those thoughts form patterns in our lives. For example, if it snowed outside you might think because of your conditioning that you should get the shovel, where I might think Palm Springs.
What happened to the one-third of the Russian basketball team from watching hours and hours of the ball going threw the hoop? It wiped their original hard drive clean and filled it with new stuff. The new stuff was good. You see, some think that the hard drive in their computer can be destroyed by bad software or viruses. They are mistaken -- software could never do that to hardware. You just have to wipe it clean and put in new software. Make sure the software is good stuff, like the stuff those basketball players were watching.
I was once at an exhibition that Jack Nicklaus was giving to the Members of Bel-Air C.C. It was a lot of fun listening to him. At one point a gentleman from the crowd asked the question, "Jack what causes a shank?" Jack replied, "I don't know I have never hit one."
The man retorted, "Yes, you hit one up at Pebble in the third..."
Jack cut him off in the middle of his sentence and said sternly, "I told you, I have never hit one." Now that's good software.
If you are interested in learning more go to 7mythsofgolf.com and read Billy's philosophy of the golf swing.
