Rudi V. Webster - Think Like a Champion

RUDI V. WEBSTER

Interviews with Wasim Akram, M.S. Dhoni, Jacques Kallis, Rahul Dravid, V.V.S. Laxman, Clive Lloyd, Sir Garfield Sobers, Greg Norman and more.

For all the sportsmen and sportswomen around the world

D r Rudi Webster has rare gifts.

On the one hand, his academic prowess is undoubted and he has a number of specialist degrees in medicine to prove that.

On the other hand, he is possessed of that most uncommon commodity common sense. This allows him to convey very technical information to laymen, especially to sportsmen and sportswomen, in simple and clear terms. He has a way of illustrating his instructions with examples and anecdotes (often humorous) that make the concept that he is trying to convey very understandable.

As manager of the West Indies cricket team in Kerry Packers World Series Cricket he became a mental skills coach to many of the players who, under Clive Lloyd and later Viv Richards, dominated world cricket for over fifteen years.

Rudi is truly a pioneer in the mental preparation and mental conditioning of athletes and soon became known as the guru in Australian sporting circles.

In Australian Rules football his impact on the game and his influence with the coaches were such that during the quarter-time break in a finals game in Melbourne two head coaches fought with each other over him; a sensational incident that stunned the 80,000 spectators at the ground and the millions of TV viewers around Australia.

In 1984 Rudi wrote his first book, Winning Ways: In Search of Your Best Performance.

Around that time I was indeed in search of my best performance, as a privateer driver in professional saloon car racing in Australia, and Rudi helped me to find it inter alia by teaching me techniques which allowed me to control my thought processes, both in preparation for races, and in the high-speed pressure situations which confronted me in most races. By this means I was able to produce my best performance on a regular basis. He did similar things for other sportsmen and sportswomen, and for politicians, businessmen, administrators, doctors and medical students.

Rudi later became Barbados ambassador to the US and Barbados ambassador to the Organization of American States (OAS) and despite his worldwide success he retains his common touch and his wicked sense of humour.

In his new book Think Like a Champion the sections on motivation, concentration, mastery of the basics and coping with pressure are important and revealing and will be of great benefit to the athlete. Fascinating are his techniques, including visualization, for training the mind to remove mental limitations and self-imposed barriers to performance, as well as his methods for tapping into the secret of success that is already within us. These will no doubt be a handy reference for those training to be mental skills coaches in sport.

Interviews with great sportsmen like Sir Garfield Sobers, Clive Lloyd, Greg Norman, Jacques Kallis, Wasim Akram and Rahul Dravid provide a rare and intimate insight into their minds. His conversation with Clive Lloyd is truly revealing and gives a long-awaited account of the birth, development and triumph of Lloyds champion West Indies cricket team.

In his book Greg Norman: My Story (Harrap Publishers), Greg described how Rudi got him out of a performance slump and turned his golfing career around. He claimed that his phone call to Dr Webster from London was probably the best investment he ever made. Norman subsequently went on to be the worlds number one golfer for many years until Tiger Woods came on the scene.

Read this book, and refer to it often. It contains the secrets of success, and it applies as much to most forms of lifes endeavour as it does to sport.

J IM K EOGH

Melbourne, Australia

T he ancient Greeks were great lovers of sport and believed that games were a metaphor of life. They paid enormous attention to winners and bestowed great wealth and status on them. Not so with the losers. At the time, poets and philosophers were eagerly studying athletes performance to discover the root causes of victory and defeat.

For instance, the Greek poet Pindar recognized the positive impact of dedication, discipline, hard work, and mental control on performance, while Plato and Pythagoras observed the negative effects of fear, confusion and mental weakness.

These poets and philosophers felt that the secret of success lies within the athlete, and thought that bad habits, self-doubts and other negative mental forces cloud that secret. They hinted that the athletes worst enemy is himself, not his opponent, and that self-sabotage is one of the greatest threats to performance.

It is only in recent years that mental conditioning and the science of sports psychology have become a public part of sport, but it is untrue to say that they have not been used privately and in an unstructured way for more than a thousand years. Richie Benaud, a former cricket captain of Australia, points out that throughout the ages successful athletes, captains and leaders in sport have given due importance to the mental component and ended up successful.

Many years ago, when I was playing cricket for Warwickshire County in England, I used to spend hours in the pavilion listening to the wise advice of Tiger Smith, an old Warwickshire and England player who represented his country from 1911 to 1914. He continually stressed the importance of the mind in performance and tried to teach me simple methods to improve my mental skills; techniques that he had learned from his predecessors who played in the late 19th century. He described mind techniques that todays sports psychologists have cleverly packaged and repackaged to enhance the performance of their players.

He spoke about the dangers of mental and physical tension and the advantages of having a clear, calm and inventive mind. He talked about positive and negative thinking, goal setting, motivation, concentration, self-confidence, self-belief and pressure, as well as the importance of good planning, preparation and execution. He even spoke about debriefing after the game. He was very keen on positive imagery and acquainted me with visualization and mental rehearsal techniques that he used during his career.

Todays technologies have revolutionized sport and have brought enormous benefits to the game, but they have also brought a few negatives. For instance, players and some captains have become so dependent on technology and their coaches that they have lost some of their self-reliance and the ability to think independently and creatively. We must not allow knowledge and speed to replace wisdom and good judgement. In this techno-environment, imagination, common sense and honesty with self are often forgotten factors in performance.

Some coaches now place greater emphasis on information gathering, analysis and diagnosis than on good execution. This is a troubling development since execution is a key to successful performance. Plans and strategies amount to nothing unless they are well executed. Moreover, the skills of acquiring knowledge and information are very different from those of doing. Both are needed for good performance. Unfortunately, many coaches and players, mistakenly believe that once they have information and knowledge, execution would be easy and automatic.

In recent years there has been a tendency to play down the importance of the basics of the game. This is unfortunate because the basics form the fabric of your performance. If you ignore them or execute them poorly, your performance will suffer. They are most important when the pressure is greatest and the odds are stacked against you, or when you are in good form and become overconfident. The stronger the impulse to disregard the basics, the greater is the need to stick to them.