The Spirit of Winning:

BY MITCH HOROWITZ

From the classic halftime locker room speech to recent mind-body studies of peak performance, the benefits of a motivated mind have long been a source of intrigue in sports and physical achievement.

Although motivational techniques are not new to athletics, athletes themselves, from college wrestlers to Olympic medalists, have never been so open about discussing their spiritual and mind-power programs. What they share is a master class in the power of New Thought.

Probably the greatest pioneer to openly embrace New Thought and Science of Mind on the playing field is former San Francisco Giants pitcher Barry Zito. The Cy Young Award winner was an avowed reader of Science of Mind founder Ernest Holmes and mystic Neville Goddard.

Barry Zito came from a family steeped in the metaphysical. In 1969, his maternal grandmother founded the Teaching of the Inner Christ Church in San Diego, a denomination that emphasizes the divine creative forces inherent within the mind. Barry’s mother, Roberta, was an ordained minister at the church. He also grew up hearing his father Joe’s injunctions to affirmative thought, which fueled his daily pitching practice.

“I’ve been raised by a family that has always told me that I could do anything I wanted,” he said. “…Even from the time I was seven, eight, ten, twelve, fifteen, if you asked me I would say, ‘I’m going to be a big-league pitcher.’ I didn’t know how or where or when, but I saw the end result.”

Barry augmented his beliefs, of course, with intensive training. Joe Zito built his son a pitcher’s mound in the family backyard, and at age seven Barry started practicing seven days a week. Well into his major league career, the pitcher continued to workout daily, including on vacations.

(On a personal note Barry’s father, Joe, who died in 2013, also played a formative role in my writing career. After I profiled Barry for Science of Mind magazine in 2003, when I remained uncertain about my work as a writer, Joe, who I did not know, called me out of the blue and said – or rather commanded: “Mitch, you stick with this thing.” He meant my writing on metaphysical topics. I listened. Within three years I had my first book contract.)

In the early 2000s when Barry was pitching for the Oakland As he pasted an affirmation inside the rim of his cap: “Be still and know.” It came from Scripture and also from a passage in Ernest Holmes’ first book from 1919, Creative Mind. Barry credited the slender volume with resurrecting his baseball career after a mid-2001 slump. The pitcher and his father huddled to read Creative Mind together “for five, six, seven hours a day. I made notes and I made affirmation tapes and put up signs in my room affirming who I was, and the power that I have.”

Barry went on to win a remarkable 11 of his next 12 games. He famously rounded out the 2001 season with a 17-8 record and a 3.49 ERA. The southpaw whose second big-league season had looked like it was headed for disaster instead won two consecutive American League pitcher-of-the-month awards by the season’s end.

“You could call it a miracle,” Barry said. “The bottom line is that I went from being one of the worst pitchers in the league and then, post-Creative Mind” – Barry often spoke of his career as divided before and after his discovery of Creative Mind – “I went from being well-below average to being named pitcher of the month for the American League for August and September.”

After several rocky seasons with the Giants starting in 2007, Barry was sidelined in early 2011 by a foot injury. This time he augmented his mental preparedness with the daily practice of Transcendental Meditation, a mantra-based form of meditation that is credited with promoting both relaxation and mental focus. He came roaring back in the 2012 season, pitching for the first time in the World Series, which Zito helped the Giants sweep. One sportscaster called it “the 2012 rebirth of Barry Zito.”

 

Spirit Runner

For sheer mental toughness, few athletes can compare with Olympic runner Gail Devers. The three-time gold medalist is an extraordinary anomaly in the history of sprinting and hurdling. Gail was struck with a crippling bout of the thyroid disorder Graves Disease in 1988. Fearing ejection from competition if found using banned substances, Gail refused the drugs that were intended to mitigate side effects from the radiation therapy required to treat her enlarged thyroid. The results were as unexpected as they were calamitous: Gail developed excruciatingly painful lesions on her feet, and sores and scales all over her body and face. Her weight plummeted. Her feet swelled so severely that the 5-foot, 3-inch runner could barely squeeze into size-12 men’s sneakers – and eventually couldn’t walk at all. Family members had to carry her to the bathroom. Gail’s feet grew so swollen and infected that doctors considered amputation.

A combination of drugs and a program of steady, determined training allowed her to emerge from the ordeal to win a gold medal at the Barcelona games in 1992. She continued to run competitively more than fifteen years later, into her early forties. Gail won track competitions well past an age when most of her contemporaries were retired.

A devotee of positive thinking, the Olympian credited her comeback to a rigorous program of focused thought. “I think positive begets positive, and the same is true on the opposite side. We’re magnets.”  Like many Americans, Gail called herself spiritual but not religious. “My affiliation is that I have a connection with God, bottom line,” she said. Gail, like Barry Zito, professed admiration for Science of Mind.

“There’s a force out there in nature that allows or puts things in place, and sets it in place for people – whatever you call it. Even in science there is a force of nature that allows things to keep moving in the right direction. That’s how I look at life, that’s how I live my life…there’s all kinds of forces out there; now, I chose, and what seems to bond with me is, the positive.”

Gail’s mental-training program encompassed several methods:

• Consistent Prayer. “I’m constantly praying. Do I have a certain time that I sit and meditate? No. Is there a certain way I do it? No.  I’m constantly calling on God and asking Him to help me through my day.”
• Sacred Contracts. “I actually sign a contract with myself for any goal that I set out to do, no matter what it is; because that holds you accountable.”
• Journaling.  Gail wrote constantly: to relax, to sort out ideas, and to digest the events of the day. “That’s how I clear my head.”  She also gave inspirational writings to friends.
• Deep Faith. Devers called her Olympic comeback was one part grit, one part faith. “Nobody gets where they are by themselves, there is something or some force out there that has helped you. For me, it’s asking God to come into your life. I tell kids all the time we get into trouble when we ask man to help us…when He created me, He gave me a box of potential, and all He asks is that we keep reaching into that box, and He’ll keep blessing it.”

 

In dealing with issues of illness and recovery, Gail exemplified how positive-mind principles are not necessarily a substitute but an augment to medical treatment (which for Gail includes a lifelong intake of a synthetic thyroid pill). In effect, Gail’s approach was an updated version of the Emmanuel Movement, the positive-mind ministry of the early twentieth-century that combined metaphysics and traditional medicine. Affirmative thought multiplied Gail’s sense of both medical and training options.

For example, in 2001 she began training without a coach. Most runners would never consider such a move – yet it coincided with some of her greatest successes. Three years into her self-coaching, Gail made history with back-to-back victories in the 60-meter dash and 60-meter hurdles in the U.S. indoor championships.

“A lot of people say you cannot coach yourself in a technical event, there’s no way,” she said. But the fiercely independent-mined runner saw it as a natural progression of her inner development.

 

Do Things Properly

In many regards, the granddaddy of sports motivation – someone who combined both spiritual beliefs and ethical formulas – was UCLA’s legendary basketball coach John Wooden. Coaching UCLA from 1948 to 1975, Wooden led his team to an unequalled ten national championships, eighty-eight consecutive victories, and a more than 80% win record. Wooden did not profess any one mind-power philosophy. Rather, he engaged in what might be considered the core American success metaphysic: An indomitable belief in self-development and fair dealing, even in the face of individual limits.

The coach told his players – including superstars Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Bill Walton – that the factors within a person’s control, such as attention to detail and dedication to hard work, matter more than innate talent. “I’ve had some players that didn’t have great natural ability,” he told me shortly before his death in 2010, “but they learned to do things properly – and maybe they couldn’t do them with the grace and quickness that the more natural athlete could, but they would still get the job done. You couldn’t have great teams if they were all like that, but I don’t think you can have a great team without some like that.”

Wooden would humble hotshot players at the start of each season by instructing them on the first day of practice on the proper way to put on their shoes and socks, so as to avoid blisters. “I would not permit fancy stuff in the teaching of my players at all.” It was a Wooden hallmark: he spoke rarely of coaching but more frequently of teaching. As a result, many players, and a large number of fans, saw Wooden not so much as an athletic coach but a life teacher.

 

How You Label It

In the twenty-first century, sports commentators and journalists also looked more closely at the positive-mind dimension of athletics. This was on poignant display in the 2012 Olympics women’s gymnastics competition.

Gymnast Aly Raisman delivered one the games’ most extraordinary performances on the balance beam – a uniquely mental sport. The beam is 4-inches wide – everything in nature tells the athlete that she must fall. It is the least natural of all events, and, hence, the most mentally challenging. As one commentator put it, the balance beam confronts the gymnast with a “wall of doubt.” Yet against these odds, Raisman delivered an extraordinarily assured and supple performance.

“You ask her about feeling the pressure,” said commentator Tim Daggett, “and she says, ‘I don’t really feel it.’ I think it’s because she labels it something different in her head. Some kids feel anxiety, feel pressure – she feels excitement. It’s just how you label that.” Daggett’s was the kind of psychological insight that might not have been heard a generation or two earlier, but it became a familiar aspect of sports commentary in the twenty-first century.

 

It Works

Another notable aspect of “sports psyching” today is how open champion athletes are about using methods from New Thought. When Sports Illustrated named Cornell wrestling champ Kyle Dake as its college athlete of the year in 2013, the wrestling legend described a regimen that will sound familiar to anyone who is a fan of the of the 1926 mind-power classic It Works.

In fact, anyone who needs a reminder of the importance of writing down your goals need only consider Dake’s story. For 3 ½ years the young wrestler filled a red-covered spiral notebook with 2,978 affirmations, written at night and in the morning, affirming his weight-class victories over the course of four wrestling seasons.

Sports Illustrated put it this way:

Once in the morning and once at night as a freshman Dake wrote, 2010 141 lb DI NCAA National Champion. Twice in the morning and twice at night as a sophomore he wrote, 2011 149 lb DI National Champion. Thrice in the morning and thrice at night as a junior he wrote, 2012 157 lb DI National Champion. Four times in the morning and four times at night as a senior he wrote, 2013 165 lb DI National Champion.

On March 23, 2013, Kyle Dake made history as the first college wrestler to win an NCAA title in four different weight classes.

The facts are clear: on the field, in the ring, and on the mat, New Thought works. If you love an aspiring athlete, and want to help him or her achieve greatness, send the champion off to school or competition with a copy of Creative Mind, a heart filled with faith, and notebook for affirmations. And when you witness their success, let it return you to your own practice with renewed vigor.

MITCH HOROWITZ is the PEN Award-winning author of Occult America and One Simple Idea, an acclaimed study of positive-mind metaphysics, now out in paperback with new exercises and techniques. Mitch is vice president and executive editor at TarcherPerigee, a division of Penguin Random House. Visit him at www.MitchHorowitz.com.

Tim Botta’s artwork appears at http://timbotta.tumblr.com/ and Fine Art America.