What happened to Kennedy that night illustrates a second major difference between panicking and choking. Panicking is conventional failure, of the sort we tacitly understand. Kennedy panicked because he didn’t know enough about instrument flying. If he’d had another year in the air, he might not have panicked, and that fits with what we believe—that performance ought to improve with experience, and that pressure is an obstacle that the diligent can overcome. But choking makes little intuitive sense. Novotna’s problem wasn’t lack of diligence; she was as superbly conditioned and schooled as anyone on the tennis tour. And what did experience do for her? In 1995, in the third round of the French Open, Novotna choked even more spectacularly than she had against Graf, losing to Chanda Rubin after surrendering a 5–0 lead in the third set. There seems little doubt that part of the reason for her collapse against Rubin was her collapse against Graf—that the second failure built on the first, making it possible for her to be up 5–0 in the third set and yet entertain the thought I can still lose. If panicking is conventional failure, choking is paradoxical failure.
Claude Steele, a psychologist at Stanford University, and his colleagues have done a number of experiments in recent years looking at how certain groups perform under pressure, and their findings go to the heart of what is so strange about choking. Steele and Joshua Aronson found that when they gave a group of Stanford undergraduates a standardized test and told them that it was a measure of their intellectual ability, the white students did much better than their black counterparts. But when the same test was presented simply as an abstract laboratory tool, with no relevance to ability, the scores of blacks and whites were virtually identical. Steele and Aronson attribute this disparity to what they call “stereotype threat”: When black students are put into a situation where they are directly confronted with a stereotype about their group—in this case, one having to do with intelligence—the resulting pressure causes their performance to suffer.
Steele and others have found stereotype threat at work in any situation where groups are depicted in negative ways. Give a group of qualified women a math test and tell them it will measure their quantitative ability and they’ll do much worse than equally skilled men will; present the same test simply as a research tool and they’ll do just as well as the men. Or consider a handful of experiments conducted by one of Steele’s former graduate students, Julio Garcia, a professor at Tufts University. Garcia gathered together a group of white, athletic students and had a white instructor lead them through a series of physical tests: to jump as high as they could, to do a standing broad jump, and to see how many pushups they could do in twenty seconds. The instructor then asked them to do the tests a second time, and, as you’d expect, Garcia found that the students did a little better on each of the tasks the second time around. Then Garcia ran a second group of students through the tests, this time replacing the instructor between the first and second trials with an African American. Now the white students ceased to improve on their vertical leaps. He did the experiment again, only this time he replaced the white instructor with a black instructor who was much taller and heavier than the previous black instructor. In this trial, the white students actually jumped less high than they had the first time around. Their performance on the pushups, though, was unchanged in each of the conditions. There is no stereotype, after all, that suggests that whites can’t do as many pushups as blacks. The task that was affected was the vertical leap, because of what our culture says: White men can’t jump.
It doesn’t come as news, of course, that black students aren’t as good at test-taking as white students, or that white students aren’t as good at jumping as black students. The problem is that we’ve always assumed that this kind of failure under pressure is panic. What is it we tell underperforming athletes and students? The same thing we tell novice pilots or scuba divers: to work harder, to buckle down, to take the tests of their ability more seriously. But Steele says that when you look at the way black or female students perform under stereotype threat you don’t see the wild guessing of a panicked test taker. “What you tend to see is carefulness and second-guessing,” he explains. “When you go and interview them, you have the sense that when they are in the stereotype-threat condition they say to themselves, ‘Look, I’m going to be careful here. I’m not going to mess things up.’ Then, after having decided to take that strategy, they calm down and go through the test. But that’s not the way to succeed on a standardized test. The more you do that, the more you will get away from the intuitions that help you, the quick processing. They think they did well, and they are trying to do well. But they are not.” This is choking, not panicking. Garcia’s athletes and Steele’s students are like Novotna, not Kennedy. They failed because they were good at what they did: only those who care about how well they perform ever feel the pressure of stereotype threat. The usual prescription for failure—to work harder and take the test more seriously—would only make their problems worse.
That is a hard lesson to grasp, but harder still is the fact that choking requires us to concern ourselves less with the performer and more with the situation in which the performance occurs. Novotna herself could do nothing to prevent her collapse against Graf. The only thing that could have saved her is if—at that critical moment in the third set—the television cameras had been turned off, the Duke and Duchess had gone home, and the spectators had been told to wait outside. In sports, of course, you can’t do that. Choking is a central part of the drama of athletic competition, because the spectators have to be there—and the ability to overcome the pressure of the spectators is part of what it means to be a champion. But the same ruthless inflexibility need not govern the rest of our lives. We have to learn that sometimes a poor performance reflects not the innate ability of the performer but the complexion of the audience; and that sometimes a poor test score is the sign not of a poor student but of a good one.
Through the first three rounds of the 1996 Masters golf tournament, Greg Norman held a seemingly insurmountable lead over his nearest rival, the Englishman Nick Faldo. He was the best player in the world. His nickname was the Shark. He didn’t saunter down the fairways; he stalked the course, blond and broad-shouldered, his caddy behind him, struggling to keep up. But then came the ninth hole on the tournament’s final day. Norman was paired with Faldo, and the two hit their first shots well. They were now facing the green. In front of the pin, there was a steep slope, so that any ball hit short would come rolling back down the hill into oblivion. Faldo shot first, and the ball landed safely long, well past the cup.
Norman was next. He stood over the ball. “The one thing you guard against here is short,” the announcer said, stating the obvious. Norman swung and then froze, his club in midair, following the ball in flight. It was short. Norman watched, stone-faced, as the ball rolled thirty yards back down the hill, and with that error something inside of him broke. At the tenth hole, he hooked the ball to the left, hit his third shot well past the cup, and missed a makable putt. At eleven, Norman had a three-and-a-half-foot putt for par—the kind he had been making all week. He shook out his hands and legs before grasping the club, trying to relax. He missed: his third straight bogey. At twelve, Norman hit the ball straight into the water. At thirteen, he hit it into a patch of pine needles. At sixteen, his movements were so mechanical and out of synch that, when he swung, his hips spun out ahead of his body and the ball sailed into another pond. At that, he took his club and made a frustrated scythelike motion through the grass, because what had been obvious for twenty minutes was now official: He had fumbled away the chance of a lifetime.
Faldo had begun the day six strokes behind Norman. By the time the two started their slow walk to the eighteenth hole, through the throng of spectators, Faldo had a four-stroke lead. But he took those final steps quietly, giving only the smallest of nods, keeping his head low. He understood what had happened on the greens and fairways that day. And he was bound by the particular etiquette of choking, the understa
nding that what he had earned was something less than a victory and what Norman had suffered was something less than a defeat.
When it was all over, Faldo wrapped his arms around Norman. “I don’t know what to say—I just want to give you a hug,” he whispered, and then he said the only thing you can say to a choker: “I feel horrible about what happened. I’m so sorry.” With that, the two men began to cry.
2000
PART FIVE
OUT OF LEFT FIELD
“I love you. We all love you. Now throw some strikes.”
“Help! I’ve changed my mind!”
SWIMMING WITH SHARKS
CHARLES SPRAWSON
Some say the bravest of swims was Ted Erikson’s in 1967, when he survived the thirty miles from the Farallon Islands to the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, a trek that took him through waters in which there are more shark attacks than anywhere else in the world. But Lynne Cox’s attempt on the Bering Strait was without doubt the most remarkable.
At 9:30 A.M. on August 7, 1987, Cox, a thirty-year-old marathon swimmer, jumped feet first from a rock on the shore of Little Diomede island into the frigid Arctic Ocean and set out for Big Diomede, nearly two and a half miles away. The Diomedes, tiny volcanic islands, situated between Alaska and Siberia, that rise abruptly from the ocean floor, are the peaks of a submarine ridge that once connected the two continents. The international date line bisects the channel between them and forms the boundary line between the United States and Russia. These territorial waters, which are strictly guarded, had not been open to boats since 1948, and had never been swum.
Cox’s father had come up with the idea of swimming between the Diomedes back in 1976, when American-Soviet relations were at a low ebb, to show just how close the superpowers were. It had taken Lynne Cox eleven years of negotiation, at the highest government levels, before the Bering Strait swim was authorized, and final permission from the Soviets had been granted only the day before. During those years, Cox had been training and, with the help of medical tests, preparing her body for water temperatures that would kill most human beings within thirty minutes.
Cox had been advised by the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory to expect a strong northerly flow of water through the channel, causing eddies and currents of up to three miles per hour, along with winds that could vary abruptly from periods of calm to gale force. Although the islands were only 2.4 miles apart, Cox would be forced by the currents to swim at least twice as far. The water temperature in the Strait, which freezes over during the long winter months, would vary from thirty-four degrees Fahrenheit to forty-four. She was warned about the presence of walruses and sharks, particularly the fifteen-foot Great Pacific shark, though it wasn’t known if Great Pacifics in the Strait would attack humans. Yet Cox refused artificial aid: She would not use a shark cage, or wear a wetsuit, or even coat her body in lanolin grease. Her only form of protection was her swimsuit.
She had arranged to be accompanied by two umiaks—walrus-skin canoes—belonging to the Inuits who lived on Little Diomede in a settlement of shacks clinging to a cliff face. The local mayor, a cynic who wore a baseball cap that said “Patrick was a saint but I ain’t,” had insisted on five thousand dollars as a fee for the boats, believing that this was a chance to make money for the desolate community, whose livelihood came from seal hunting and selling scrimshaw on the mainland. Cox, who had borrowed money from her parents to get to Little Diomede and was living on bagels and peanut butter for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, eventually bargained him down to five hundred dollars. Two Soviet naval vessels were due to meet her at the boundary.
When Cox entered the Arctic Ocean, the water temperature was, at forty-four degrees, comparable to a glass of iced water; if she had dived in head first, the sudden impact could have stopped her heart beating. Once she was in the sea, she said later, she concentrated on making her body move, to avoid focusing on the pain she felt. A dense fog had descended, which calmed the surface of the water but also made it impossible for her to see her destination. The umiaks started leaking immediately and had to be bailed out with empty Coca-Cola cans. One boat contained five journalists and the other three doctors, including Bill Keatinge, an erudite Englishman from London University, whose particular field of research was the effect of cold on the human body.
At the beginning of the year, Cox had got in touch with Keatinge and asked if there was a medical system that could register her temperature during the swim: It was essential that her inner body temperature never drop below ninety-three degrees. Keatinge recommended a thermosensitive capsule containing a tiny transmitter which had been devised for astronauts. She swallowed the capsule before the swim, and every twenty minutes while she was in the ocean she rolled on to her back and one of the doctors pointed a radio receiver at her stomach in order to register a digital reading. As a further precaution, a rectal thermometer on a lead was inserted into her body and the wire coiled into her swimsuit. If the capsule did not work, a reading could be taken from the thermometer.
The doctors were in a continuous state of apprehension, but Cox remained calmer than the seals in the Arctic Ocean; several rose to the surface to gaze quizzically at this intruder. Every so often, the boats got lost in the fog as Cox sprinted ahead, and she was forced to shout back through the mist to make sure that she was swimming in the right direction. She crossed the boundary after an hour and a half; then one of the journalists thought he could hear an engine, and suddenly the bow of a ship emerged through the fog. The Russians invited the two umiaks to follow them. As they crossed the date line, a journalist called out “It’s tomorrow!” and everyone cheered.
Fifty yards from shore, the fog cleared, and the cliffs of Big Diomede loomed above Cox. The closest point of land was a rock directly ahead of her, but a welcoming committee was waiting to receive her half a mile away on a snowbank. Cox knew that a deep trough developed where the island sloped down to the ocean floor, through which a sudden current, with thirty-eight-degree water, raced north into the Chukchi Sea. The ocean here was like a washing machine, with cold water churned up from below and driven out into the Arctic waste. To go that extra half mile would mean swimming against the current. “You should land now,” the doctors said, but she refused. The object of her swim was, in her words, “to reach out to the Soviets.” She explained later, “Touching a rock rather than someone’s hand would have meant so much less. I had to keep on reaching, going.” She swam close to the rock to avoid the strongest part of the current, then turned south. Finally, after two hours and six minutes in the water, she struggled up the ice on the beach and felt the warmth of two Russian hands hoisting her. She was engulfed in blankets and presented with a bouquet of flowers and a pair of sealskin slippers. Surprisingly, her inner temperature had remained constant for much of the swim, but after she’d had a brief interview with Soviet television and walked seventy-five yards to a recovery tent, her temperature dropped to ninety-four—borderline hypothermia. She was slurring her words and having difficulty walking. When she slumped to the ground in the recovery tent, a Soviet woman wrapped herself around Cox in order to keep her warm. The Russians and the Americans then celebrated Cox’s achievement with a tea party, prepared by a chef in a white uniform. Tables had been set out on the beach and covered with white cloths, and samovars were placed on top.
At the end of that year, Mikhail Gorbachev flew to Washington to sign the INF treaty, which would reduce the number of nuclear missiles. At an official dinner given by President Reagan in his honor, Gorbachev cited Cox’s swim as a symbol of the thawing relations between the two countries. “It took one brave American by the name of Lynne Cox just two hours to swim from one of our countries to the other. We saw on television how sincerely amiable was the meeting between our people and Americans when she stepped on to the Soviet shore. She proved by her courage how closely to each other our peoples live.” Reagan was mystified by this tribute. The national security adviser had to call the State Department to find out w
hom Gorbachev was referring to.
Today, at the age of forty-two, Lynne Cox lives with her parents in Los Alamitos, a few miles from the great beaches that line the California coast below Los Angeles. Los Alamitos is a quiet suburb distinguished by a good fish restaurant and avenues of palm and cottonwood trees. When Cox is not preparing for her swims, she writes articles and short stories, gives lectures to business executives, and coaches swimmers. (One current student is an opera singer who, like Frank Sinatra, feels that swimming might improve her singing.)
A large harbor scene painted by Cox’s mother hangs in her room. On top of a bookcase are the sealskin slippers; its shelves are crammed with copies of National Geographic. There are no trophies to impress the visitor—they were discarded or donated to a local museum years ago. The Coxes’ home is an unremarkable, well-ordered place, but from the confines of that domesticity Cox plans her forays to some of the most desolate and far-flung places in the world, often venturing into seas and lakes where no one has swum before.
The Only Game in Town Page 50