In high school my history teacher was also the crew coach. One class he started off the class talking about sports and how it was important to have rituals. Most in the class weren’t athletes so he turned to me and said – John – when you play squash do you have any rituals? And I responded that yes, I like to start my warmup on the backhand side. He responded to me (and to the class) – so if you started out on the forehand side you wouldn’t win, right? I didn’t want to contradict him publicly so I said yes, but I strongly disagreed. There is a big difference between habit, or ritual, and superstition.
Many athletes have superstitions that they follow very closely every time they are going to compete. They actually start to believe that the motions that they go through have a power of their own, and if they don’t adhere to the correct order of movements then there will be negative consequences.
At a young age I recognized that these athletes were allowing thoughts to control them. But a true champion is their own person and is ready to adapt to any environment and any circumstance. They would never let an arbitrarily chosen set of movements determine their destiny.
I do have habits that are born out of experience. I do like to start out warming up on the backhand side because it is an easier movement on my body and as I am warming up I am less likely to twinge something. But every so often I start on the forehand side just to prove to myself that it is only a habit – not a superstition.
When you travel to play you have less control over your environment. I am in Bari, Italy right now about to play in the Italian National Championships (45+), and there are so many things that I normally do to prepare for a match in New York that I am not able to do here. It would be easy to start coming up with excuses as to why I didn’t perform as well as I could have, but that would be the easy way out. Instead, I am reminded of what I consider to be one of the greatest accomplishments in squash – in 1985, Jahangir Khan won the British Open, jumped on a plane to NYC, and the next day started the North American Open with the hardball and won that too. I am quite sure he was not planning his excuses, but instead was focused on what he needed to do to accomplish his goal. If Jahangir had been beholden to superstitions I am quite sure he would not have been able to accomplish this.
So I head out, with Jahangir as inspiration, determined not to compile excuses, but instead to focus on what it will take to accomplish my goal.