This is not to deny that any tennis player needs an arm and a hand (and a racket!) to make a return, but simply to emphasize that the limiting factor in making a world-class stroke is not strength or brute force, but the executive control of fine motor movement to create perfect timing.
The key point, for our purposes, is that this is not something top sportsmen are born with. If you were to go back to the time when Roger Federer was learning technique, you would find that he was ponderous and sluggish. His movements would have been characterized by conscious control of the skill, lacking smoothness or unity. Only later, after countless hours of practice, were his skills integrated into an intricate set of procedures capable of flexible execution.
Today, Federer’s motor programmes are so deeply ingrained that if you were to ask him how he is able to play an immaculately timed forehand, he wouldn’t be able to tell you. He might be able to talk about what he was thinking at the time or the strategic importance of the shot, but he wouldn’t be able to provide any insight into the mechanics of the movements that made the stroke possible. Why? Because Federer has practised for so long that the movement has been encoded in implicit rather than explicit memory. This is what psychologists call expert-induced amnesia.
It is also worth noting that the development of motor expertise (skilled movement) is inseparable from the development of perceptual expertise (chunking patterns). After all, perfect technique is hardly useful if you fail to hit the ball – think of a totally blind person trying to play tennis. Highly refined, instantly chunked perceptual information is necessary to integrate the movement of the body with the movement of the ball (hand-eye coordination). Without this information the motor programme would be nothing more than a stab in the dark.
Great shot-making, then, is not about developing ‘muscle memory’; rather, the memory is encoded in the brain and central nervous system.
The ascendancy of the mental and the acquired over the physical and the innate has been confirmed again and again. As Anders Ericsson, now widely acknowledged as the world’s leading authority on expert performance, puts it: ‘The most important differences are not at the lowest levels of cells or muscle groups, but at the athletes’ superior control over the integrated and coordinated actions of their bodies. Expert performance is mediated by acquired mental representations that allow the experts to anticipate, plan, and reason alternative courses of action. These mental representations provide experts with increased control of the aspects that are relevant to generating their superior performance.’
In other words, it is practice, not talent, that holds the key to success.
Knowledge Is Power
At 3.00 p.m. on 10 February 1996, Garry Kasparov strode into a small room in the Pennsylvania Convention Center to contest one of the most anticipated chess matches in history. He was smartly dressed in a dark suit and white shirt and wore a look of intense concentration. As he sat down at the match table, he glanced across the board to the man on the other side: Dr FengHsuing Hsu, a bespectacled Taiwanese-American with a quizzical expression.
In the room, besides Kasparov and Hsu, were three cameramen, one match official, three members of Kasparov’s entourage, and a technical adviser. A strict silence was enforced, with the five hundred spectators packed into a nearby lecture hall to witness the event on screens fed from three TV cameras and live commentary from grandmaster Yasser Seirawan. The atmosphere was, by common consent, quite unlike that of any other chess match in living memory.
Kasparov is almost universally considered to be the greatest player in the history of the sport. His ELO rating – an official score measuring relative skill – remains the highest ever recorded: 71 points higher than that of Russian grandmaster Anatoly Karpov, and 66 higher than that of the great American player Bobby Fischer. Kasparov, at the time of the contest, had been the world number one for ten straight years, and his mere presence before a chessboard was enough to intimidate some of the world’s most revered grandmasters.
But his opponent on this day was susceptible neither to intimidation nor the other mind games for which Kasparov was famous. His opponent was oblivious to Kasparov’s status and reputation for guile and audacity. Indeed, his opponent was not even in the room, but many miles away in a large, dimly lit building in Yorktown Heights, New York. His opponent was a computer. Its name was Deep Blue.
The media, rather predictably, hyped the match as an historic showdown between man and machine. ‘The future of humanity is on the line,’ declared one newscaster. ‘The match goes further than mere chess, presenting a challenge to mankind’s sovereignty,’ intoned USA Today. Even Kasparov seemed to be seduced by the apocalyptic tenor of the pre-match hype, saying, ‘This is a mission to defend human dignity... It is species-defining.’
Kasparov’s opening move, pawn to C5, was typed into a computer adjacent to the match table by Mr Hsu (the brains behind the development of Deep Blue, on behalf of electronics giant IBM) and then transmitted across to the IBM Center in New York by a relatively new technology called the Internet.
At this point Deep Blue sprang into action. Powered by 256 specially developed chess processors operating in parallel, 32 concentrated on each eight-square section of the board, it was able to compute more than 100 million positions per second. A few moments later, Deep Blue’s response came winging its way across the ether, and Mr Hsu dutifully executed the instruction: pawn to C3.
For six games over eight days, the thrust and counterthrust between man and machine was beamed to a captivated world. Kasparov, an eccentric and hot-tempered Azerbaijani, was famous for his histrionics, often growling and shaking his head vigorously. Many had criticized Kasparov’s antics, accusing him of deliberately trying to disturb adversaries. But Kasparov was no less animated against his machine opponent, often rising from his chair to pace the room.
Just before the fortieth move in the final game on 17 February, Kasparov took his watch from the table and put it on his wrist. This was a familiar sign that the world champion believed the match was nearing its conclusion. The audience in the lecture hall held its breath. Three moves later Dr Hsu rose slowly to his feet and offered his hand to his opponent. The audience burst into wild applause.
Kasparov had triumphed.
The question is: How? How could a man unable to search more than three moves per second (this represents the current limit of human capacity) defeat a machine whose computing speed was measured in the tens of millions? The answer, as we shall see, will help us to unlock some of the deepest mysteries of expert performance, both within sport and in the wider world.
In the 1990s Gary Klein, a New York psychologist, embarked on a major study funded by the US military to examine decision-making in the real world. He was looking to test the theory that expert decision-makers wield logical methods, examining the various alternatives before selecting the optimal choice. Klein’s problem was that the longer the study went on, the less the theory bore any relation to the way decisions are made in practice.
The curious thing was not that top decision-makers – medical professionals, firefighters, military commanders, and so on – were making choices based on unexpected factors; it was that they did not seem to be making choices at all. They were contemplating the situation for a few moments and then just deciding, without considering the alternatives. Some were unable even to explain how they happened upon the course of action they actually took.
Here is an example of a fire lieutenant making a life-saving decision, as recounted in Klein’s book Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions:
There is a simple house fire in a one-storey house in a residential neighbourhood. The fire is in the back, in the kitchen area. The lieutenant leads his hose crew into the building, to the back, to spray water on the fire, but the fire just roars back