At this young age, Lardon had his first real experience with the zone, back in the United States at the USTTA junior championship match at Caesar’s Palace in Vegas. “I had been meditating, and I fell into this dreamy zone, the ball was moving in slow motion, I could do anything I wanted. I was winning everything. Then a friend started talking, and he said things like ‘this is going to be a huge upset’ and as soon as he said it, it was over. I fell out of the zone and lost the next three games and the championship.”
Michael had gone on to Stanford and then medical school, all the while building his research around the zone state.
“In the early 1990s, I tried to look at the action of the brain, what was happening neurologically. Sports psychology doesn’t do that too much. My hypothesis was that the top athletes were just getting more efficient at processing signals—we studied top Olympians, triatheletes, John McEnroe, all these guys who talked about time slowing down.”
As the technology for testing got better, things got more interesting. Michael was working with the Scripps Research Institute doing EEG testing on athletes playing a video game they’d designed. There’s a thing called the p300, a positive wave at 300 milliseconds when stimulus hits the brain—everyone has it. When a sound enters your ear, you can watch it on the EEG (after a mathematical manipulation making an event-related brain potential, or ERP). Everyone’s brain does it, almost like a heartbeat on the EKG (think of that little squiggly jag, beeping on the monitor in hospital TV shows). It’s the reaction time of electrical activity in the brain. People with dementia have it at 350 milliseconds, slower than normal. “Our hypothesis was that top athletes would have a faster time—that electric signals would move faster in their brains,” Dr. Lardon said.
“The philosophy of the study comes from David Spiegel at Stanford, one of my heroes, a brilliant guy whose father, Herbert, was a scientific leader in hypnosis. David put people [hooked to an EEG] in a hypnotic trance, and then had two paradigms. One, he had them imagine there was a screen that blocked out a light that was being shot at them. What Spiegel found was that when people imagined this screen, there was a reduction in the p300 amplitude—as if the light was really being reduced. Then he flipped it, and had them imagine a giant magnifying glass that strengthened the light coming into their eyeballs. And there was an enhancement of the p300.
“I thought this was a landmark study, because what it tells you is that states of consciousness actually change the way you biologically process stimuli. So you think, hey, the baseball is coming and it is what it is—a ball moving ninety-five miles per hour, there’s nothing I can do about it. But there is something you can do about it, you can affect the way you process it.”
Ted Williams, one of baseball’s greatest hitters, had always talked about how he could see the baseball hit the bat, and count the stitches, that was what Schjeldahl was referring to. In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell writes of a tennis coach who had studied these things and found that “in the final five feet of a tennis ball’s flight toward a player, the ball is far too close and moving much too fast to be seen.” The event happens in three milliseconds, far, far too short a time for the human eye to see it. But Ted thought he could. To him it was real. And just because it is “physically impossible” does that mean Ted was imagining it? I think the short answer is no. If everything else speeds up, then time slows down.
Dr. Lardon continued, “In doing this testing, we thought we were going to see a faster p300 from top athletes, but we didn’t see that. What we saw instead was another wave, called the N50, a negative potential at fifty milliseconds that everybody has . . . but in great athletes, that potential came early, with more amplitude. So it wasn’t the cortical process that was different, it was the priming pathway. It was as if they were picking it up earlier.”
Michael talked about an insight he had, in terms of explaining this. His older brother had been deeply involved in very fancy stereos when they were growing up in New York. “He was into the high-end stuff, the twenty-grand stereos—the best stereos reproduced sound by making the circuit as fast as possible. Things we thought were cool, like equalizers, actually interrupted the flow and you lost depth of field, or lost the imaging quality of a great stereo. All those conductors with gold inlay were to make circuits as fast as possible . . . more beautiful was faster.
“I was John McEnroe’s courtside guest, watching him and Andre Agassi, and I could just feel how they were both picking the ball up much quicker than you or I.”
There have been plenty of studies that show that “experts” are much more efficient than amateurs at performing the same tasks. Their brains are more efficient and use less energy—giving you more energy to deal with anything outside of the practiced task. Of course, what defines expertise? Ten years of study or more, that same old line.
Dr. Lardon continued to an interesting further hypothesis. “In your brain there are these bands, alpha, beta, and then the gamma—they’re brainwaves, electrical activity. Now, in schizophrenics, the gamma band is disrupted—they have trouble processing information. If you and I are talking, and you had a dream last night, you can differentiate between the two. For schizophrenics that boundary is knocked down. I have a little buzz right now in my telephone. A schizophrenic wouldn’t be able to listen to you over that little buzz.
“There’s something called a Kanizsa image. Like drawings by Escher, they fool you, visually. First you see one thing, then, as you look longer, you see another thing in the negative space. They discovered during studies on composers, at the moment of recognition of the other thing, the gamma band reveals itself in the brain. What’s thought now is that the gamma band has to do with cortical synchronicity. When the gamma band comes then the motor and sensory parts are firing as one—like an in-tune engine.”
I thought then about the Special Forces guys training with that M-wave monitor that showed coherence between brainwaves and breathing—again, like an in-tune engine. And I instantly started to think about all the pattern recognition, how a lot of guys in a fight would see patterns in an opponent and start cracking him up, inside his own pattern. It kind of made sense, in a grand, cosmic scheme of things—feeling and finding patterns without thinking about them.
“So right now I’m involved with Scripps and we’re testing this further, trying to correlate the gamma band and the zone experience. I feel like it’s the closest we’ve ever been to understanding what’s going on.”
Dr. Lardon told me an interesting story about watching a professional actress unwinding after an evening’s performance. “I watched her backstage, and for twenty minutes she was coming out of this hypnotic state, it reminded me of the zone. I’ve seen it so many times in interviews with athletes after a great performance. They are in this trance—this sort of egoless place. They often don’t have much to say.” It seems Schjeldahl was right positing that to ask artists or athletes about their time in the zone would get you “scandalously dopey” answers.
Dr. Lardon talked about how he’d seen it in so many professional golfers who asked him for help. It was usually after they had done well and won a major tournament, and fame was upon them. “Suddenly the ego gets involved—and when it does, I bet there’s no gamma band happening. Now, we don’t know where ego lies, neuroanatomically, but my theory is that it interferes with your circuitry, like the stereo. The ego is treble and bass, you lengthen the circuit, and now it’s not so fast or efficient.”
Dr. Lardon had been working with a fighter and was very confused by the world of fighting, the intrusive promoters who were asking him to violate doctor-patient confidentiality. He mused, “The way that fighters are propped up in the media is basically antithetical to the parameters of the zone, of ‘no-mind.’ They have to badmouth each other, threaten to rip his heart out . . .” I could almost hear him shaking his head. It was a long way from the PGA tour.
I thought about Frank Shamrock’s shit-talking—specifically designed to keep you out of the zone. During the recent
“Dream Fight” between Manny Pacquiao and Oscar de La Hoya, head games and mental strategies were in play. Freddie Roach made a big stink, a few days before the fight, about the way Oscar tapes his hands, rolling the tape to create extra knuckles. He took it to the commission and got a partial ruling, and like in the old days he got to go watch Oscar get his hands taped prefight (which is how it used to be done; a trustworthy man from your camp would be in the opponent’s locker room and watch him tape and glove up, making sure he wasn’t putting a horseshoe in his glove).
Freddie said, “I had a real point, but if you can mentally fuck with a guy on the day of the fight, then you’re doing your job. It’s a mental game. Look at what Hopkins did to Trinidad. They say it never got to Oscar, but I know it did,” he laughs his dry laugh. “Oscar reads the Internet.” And Oscar’s mental flaws were on display like never before—constantly casting about for a new trainer, someone to tell him what to do—and coming into the fight lighter than Pacquiao was surely a sign of machismo gone wrong. Manny, deeply in the zone, shut Oscar out and beat him up worse than anyone in his career. He fought perfectly, and seemed unhittable, a work of art.
Maybe it wasn’t what art can tell us about fighting—maybe it was what fighting and sports can tell us about art. Art as sporting event? Was that what David Salle was telling me? Csikszentmihalyi had begun his research talking about the “flow” with composers and poets, not athletes. He talked about looking for places to find ecstasy, sports arenas and temples under the same roof.
From my very first real fighting experience in Thailand, I saw that the best fighters were the most humble. But, much like jiu-jitsu, you start to see it’s a “chicken or the egg” question. Is it that great fighters lose their ego? Or is it that you cannot become great unless you lose your ego? Your ego keeps you out of the zone? Guys who can naturally control big egos do better?
“You have to live through it,” Dr. Lardon said. “The eighteenth hole at the PGA West is all water up the left, and if you hit it there you don’t have a job. When you’re not at peace with that, then you’re in trouble.”
But what about the huge egos of guys like Michael Jordan, who needed control over the court? Or Kobe Bryant? Their monstrous egos obviously don’t keep them out of the zone—Jordan’s the defining athlete of the concept. I would imagine it’s because they can compartmentalize and, in the moment, remove any trace of self-consciousness from what they do. They control it, like they control everything else. And they’re at peace with it, with taking the pressure shot. They’re at peace with failure or success; as Schjeldahl wrote, they take an “impersonal joy” in what they do. They see themselves from the outside, as impersonal constructs, which may lead to the oft-ridiculed referencing themselves in the third person.
Andre Ward told me, concerning his faith, “My faith and understanding is that God placed me here for a reason. He has work for me to do. That encourages me and keeps me going. I’ve said this before, and so does Virg, as a professional, that without God I wouldn’t be in this business. I just wouldn’t.”
Andre paused. “God has me here for a reason, he’s in control of everything and his will will come to pass. My job is to work hard, give him all I have in preparation, and leave it to him. It’s everything, the centerpiece, the cornerstone of my career. He’s brought me this far, he’s not going to leave me high and dry. He won’t pull the rug from under me, there’s work to be done.” I could hear in his voice two things—a way to avoid ego and a way to avoid fear. His faith was perfect for fitting him into the zone.
I thought of Liborio, of the importance of acceptance, of Manny Pacquiao, almost a kind of fatalism. The mentality that accepted the possibility of the worst, with a deeper understanding and without fear, because fear would keep you from attaining the no-mind.
What does all this mean, in a practical sense? You have to be simple, uncomplicated, pure, just to have a shot at falling into that zone state. And of course you need your ten thousand hours, too. Jordan and Kobe worked harder in the gym than everyone else. You can’t just stay superrelaxed, talk a bunch of shit to keep your opponent out of the zone, or have the deep philosophical revelation and win the fight (the Karate Kid trap). You need to have outworked him in the gym. The more you immerse yourself in the subject, the deeper you go, the closer you come. There’s no secret to the zone, the void. It comes only after mastery.
THE LONG KOAN
Paul Theroux, the great travel writer and novelist, calls it the “awkward question,” when an innocent adventurer, back from some hellhole, gets asked, “Why?” at a cocktail party or on the street. Fighters and adventurers will go to great lengths to avoid answering. Dr. Horton replies, “Why not?,” something I used with mixed results for years. Something I’d probably still be saying if I hadn’t taken the money to write the first book.
Theroux stuck it to Gerard d’Aboville, about rowing a small boat across the Pacific in 1993, with “enormous personal risk.” Gerard resisted the question, and then Theroux recounts the answer.
“Only an animal does useful things,” he said at last, after a long silence. “An animal gets food, finds a place to sleep, tries to keep comfortable. But I wanted to do something that was not useful, not like an animal at all. Something only a human being would do.”
The art of it, he was saying—such an effort was as much aesthetic as athletic. And that the greatest travel always contains within it the seeds of a spiritual quest, or else what’s the point?
The why? of fighting is the elephant in the room, and I would be remiss if I didn’t take a stab at it in a book about the mental side of fighting.
Any attempt to understand why begins with the nature of the beast, with understanding what fighting is. Paul Lazenby wrote an article about the Japanese fighter Masakatsu Funaki. This is the same Funaki that Frank Shamrock fought and who trained Ken. Now he was fighting long past his prime and getting beat up; the same old story. Paul had also lost to Funaki and was aware of Funaki’s legend—he’d started the “first ever pro-wrestling group with no preordained finishes,” called Pancrase, in 1993—the year the UFC started in the United States.
Paul’s article was about the debt he felt was owed to Funaki. Funaki had recently fought as a shadow of his former self, just an old man getting pounded on. Paul was disgusted by some disrespect he overheard from fighters who couldn’t remember what Funaki had been in his prime. As Paul noted, “It becomes painfully clear that the Herculean task of laying the groundwork for the sport that we know and love has taken more from Funaki than he could ever recover.”
I had the same feelings when I listened to Thomas Hearns talk about making a comeback, with his mouth full of cotton, at the age of forty-six. Boxing writers, that sagacious lot, implored him not to fight. They didn’t want to see him lose to a no-talent club fighter. A guy who couldn’t carry Hearns’s jock-strap when he was in his prime might get to say he beat Tommy Hearns? Why would Tommy want to fight again? But the pundits, fans, and outsiders weren’t walking in his shoes. Hearns had lost some of his biggest fights, and the shadows couldn’t let him go. I understood his need and felt like we owed him something.
What is the debt we owe great fighters? Is it owed them because of what they’ve shown us about courage and resiliency? Is it about what they have given to inspire us? The insight into the human heart and mind? The simple thrills? Why is there such reverential tragedy to Muhammad Ali, and now to Evander Holyfield? Why do I find such compassion and even love in my heart when I listen to Gabriel Ruelas?
The price you pay as a fighter is real, a throwback to the old days, the days when human life wasn’t so precious. Throughout the past three or four centuries, a human life has become increasingly valued—but this is an exception not the norm of human history.
Prizefighting’s roots lie in a time when life was cheap. The world has changed, and prizefighting has continued through it, undergoing paradoxical changes. The paradox of fighting lies in something Gabriel Ruelas (who knows bett
er than most) asked me: “How safe can you make a sport that is about hurting people?”
Carlo Rotella wrote in his book Cut Time:Boxers hurt each other on purpose, a simple truth with unsimple consequences . . . In boxing, hurt is what people do to each other, an intimate social act, a pessimistically stripped-to-the-bone rendition of life as it is lived outside the ring. Hurting each other is all there can be between two boxers in an honest bout.
You, the fighter, you are paying a price. Fighters give us something irreplaceable—even the opponents, the bums, deserve to be respected for that. They can lose their wits, their intellect, their wisdom, everything a man has. Joe Frazier said, “Boxing is the only sport you get your brain shook, your money took, and your name in the undertaker book.”
There is an element of tragedy in fighting, even in victory. We feel gratitude to fighters because we owe them for our joy and excitement—for showing us the truth of courage. There is acting in a prizefight, and play-acting and image, but there is also something very real happening, something that can’t be faked. Even an expertly “worked” (fake) match isn’t as exciting or enlightening as a great fight.
Fighting is tragic, even in victory. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t worthwhile. Most of us in the first world live in the safe society, as Jon Wertheim wrote, where “aggression has become a bad word and testosterone a banned substance. Danger is something to be avoided . . . something to be neutered.” We have discovered that some things are worth the price. Fighters and those who train, who take shots to the head, they know in their hearts it can be costly. But there are reasons to fight and reasons to feel alive; there are prices worth paying.
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