Playing Scared Read Online Free PDF Page A

stage fright. I have spoken in the Superdome three times. I have spoken to over a million people at one time. But when adrenaline hits my system, I go almost blind until it drains out. When I got up here, you did not know it, but I could not see you. I could not even see my notes.” 9
    A syndrome was named after Steve Blass, the Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher who woke up one day in 1973 to discover he could no longer find the strike zone. He had been among the dominant pitchers in the major leagues, with a ninety-mile-per-hour fastball and a nearly unhittable slider. The latter pitch was notoriously hard to control, but Blass was so sure of himself that he’d throw it even when behind in the count. He won eighteen games for the Pirates in 1968 and another sixteen in 1969. He was a member of the National League All-Star team in 1972 and finished second in that year’s voting for the Cy Young Award. When he collapsed, when “the Thing” brought him to his knees, it was like a real-life version of Groundhog Day : Inning after inning, as if in a dream, he walked batters, threw wild pitches straight to the backstop, and allowed a multitude of stolen bases. The most mystifyingthing about it was that when he threw alone with a catcher in the bullpen, he was as good as ever.
    Blass consulted psychologists, tried transcendental meditation, and ran down every tip, no matter how patently ridiculous, including, famously, one fan’s suggestion that he invest in a loose set of boxers. Forty years later, I phoned him at his home in Pennsylvania. A good-natured man who had spent the intervening decades as a Pirates TV color commentator, he didn’t mind talking about it. “Steve Blass disease” had become part of the baseball lexicon. He understood the fascination: “It’s so damn illusive unless you’re living it.” And though he never could figure out why it struck him in the first place, he all too clearly understood the physiology. “I would physically tighten up—and you can’t pitch like that. No flow, you’re just hoping the ball will go where you want it to, but you don’t expect it to.”
    Tightening up is the key, as etymology bears out. The word anxiety comes from the Old French anguere , meaning to choke, constrict, strangle, or cut off at the airway. It describes the very hallmark of performance anxiety—the rapid, shallow breathing that occurs when the muscles contract and you begin to shake. Utterance of the word forces the tongue backward, blocking off the throat. In other words, just saying the word embodies its very meaning. The harder you try to control these muscles, the more they tremble. So we choke, bite the apple, and gasp for breath.
    Google “stage fright” and you get more than seven million hits—a catalog of phobias, instant cures, and celebrities who wrestle with their anxiety. For some, it comes and goes likemalaria, showing up at the most unexpected times. Laurence Olivier was fifty-seven, long regarded as the world’s foremost actor, when he suddenly became crippled by stage fright while playing Othello. It never subsided, and for the next ten years of his career, he had to be pushed onstage, where his fellow actors were forbidden to look him in the eye. Mahatma Gandhi was only a young lawyer in England when he attended a small gathering of a vegetarian society, stood to read a few remarks, and discovered that he could not speak: “My vision became blurred and I trembled, though the speech hardly covered a sheet of foolscap.” Thomas Jefferson’s law career was disrupted by a fear of public speaking. His voice would “sink in his throat” whenever he tried to give a speech, according to one biographer. In his eight years as president, Jefferson delivered only two—the inaugural address for his first and second terms.
    When, in March 2012, U.S. solicitor general Donald Verrilli went before the Supreme Court in defense of President Barack Obama’s health care legislation, he was a player