Basketball cybernetics, pt 3

Choose a goal and let it happen - the most unbelievable formula for success

My new career as a junkyard dog, making a living in the painted area, was taking off. It was a home game, still early in the season. I can remember the bright lights of the gym, the noise of the crowd, the sound of the buzzer that signaled a substitution or the end of the quarter, the red neon numbers on the scoreboard high above the far end of the gym. The cheerleaders in their white home uniforms lined up against the painted cinderblock wall behind the basket.

We were on defense. The shooter for the other team missed. I was crashing the boards for the rebound but this big raw kid on our team got the ball. He turned around and lunged forward, and his knee collided with my upper thigh.

Under the force of the impact, my knee went backward. I crumpled to the floor.

I knew instantly it was bad. In fact, it was the end of my breakout season.

I spent three months on crutches with my leg in an immobilizer, and then I started a long spring and summer of rehabbing the knee and regrowing my atrophied muscles. The great news was that we found a sports doctor in Swartz Creek who specialized in knee injuries. He said that I could heal the knee without surgery and prescribed a very specific and strict rehab regimen.

There were times during that summer when the knee still hurt so badly and felt so weak that I wondered if I would ever make it back. (Funny, how nine months can seem like such a long time when you’re a kid.) But I stuck with the program and by the time the 11th grade season started I was back in action, the knee feeling almost as good as ever.

I couldn’t actually play ball for most of that summer. Just running, bicycling and lifting weights. But the craziest thing happened. By the middle of my junior season (my first season on the varsity team), I was a better shooter than I’d ever been.

Let It Happen!

I need to rewind a little bit. Before the start of the season, Coach Adams held a basketball workshop. It was the first and only workshop I remember from my entire Christian school career where someone brought in a team of outsiders who weren’t (at least in my memory) explicitly Christian.¹

The premise of the workshop was that by consciously relaxing and visualizing, we could improve all aspects of our basketball game - from jumping higher than ever before to raising our shooting percentage to reacting more calmly in high pressure moments.

They called it basketball cybernetics. I was pretty skeptical. Remember: any kind of mental activity not specifically championed in the King James Bible was considered suspect in our religion, if not a blatant invitation for the devil to come in and wreak havoc in our minds.

But Coach Adams was already helping me become the player I desperately wanted to be and if he thought there was something to this, I was definitely willing to entertain it.

And it didn’t take long to overcome my skepticism. After explaining the principles of psycho-cybernetics, the presenters guided us through a group visualization exercise, imagining that we could jump higher than we ever had before. At the end of the visualization, I watched a couple guys who had never been able to leap high enough to dunk the basketball grab a ball and dunk it.

They had gained six inches of vertical leap just by relaxing and visualizing. This was crazy!

It was also super cutting edge in 1983, at a small Christian school in rural Michigan.

At the end of the workshop, Coach Adams handed out a little 8 x 12-inch poster of a basketball hoop with the words Let It Happen written above the backboard. He told us to post it somewhere at home and sit in a chair in front of it and imagine shooting for at least 15 minutes a night. We were to see the ball swishing through the net and keep repeating the mantra “Let It Happen” as we did.²

I don’t know who else on the team did it, but I did. I didn’t think about it this way at the time, of course, but maybe the silver lining of blowing out my knee partway through the season was that I couldn’t go to the gym and work on my shot, but I could pull one of the chairs from around the dining room table and set it in front of the poster I’d taped to the closet door next to the little bathroom my brother and I shared in our little house in Flint — and shoot imaginary baskets every night after school.

The Let It Happen part was really interesting.

I’ve been working with meditation and visualization techniques for so many years now that I’ve become pretty good at creating or calling up mental pictures.

But — perhaps because of my eye trauma or other childhood trauma experiences³ — concentrating on inner pictures did not feel easy to me back then. I would imagine shooting the ball at the poster and my mind would go into all sorts of resistance. This is stupid! This is never gonna work. How can the ball go through the hoop when it’s really a two-dimensional flat picture of a hoop? Or I’d shoot, and the imginary ball would veer to the right and bounce off the front of the rim.

Let it happen.

Breathe.

Let it happen.

With some practice, I was able to overcome most of the mind gremlins most of the time. And, maybe because I’d recently witnessed the miracle of guys jumping high enough to dunk the basketball when they’d never been able to do it before, I was able to find enough faith to keep practicing despite the resistance. Also, I really, really wanted to become a great shooter.

These factors — relaxation, visualizing rather than striving, having a clear goal and impressing the subconscious mind with that goal — are all central to Maltz’s elucidation of psycho-cybernetics.

“The new science of cybernetics has furnished us with convincing proof that the so-called subconscious mind is not a ‘mind’ at all, but a mechanism — a goal-striving ‘servo-mechanism’ consisting of the brain and nervous system, which is used by, and directed by the mind,” Maltz wrote. “The latest and most usable concept is that man does not have two ‘minds,’ but a mind, or consciousness, that operates an automatic, goal-striving machine. This automatic, goal-striving machine functions very similarly to the way that electronic servo-mechanisms function, as far as basic principles are concerned. But it is much more marvelous, much more complex, than any computer or guided missile ever conceived by man.”

Maltz goes on to say that, like a computer program or the course-correction technology that enables guided missiles to hit their target, this “Creative Mechanism” within us is impersonal and will pursue any goals that are set for it:

“Like any other servo-mechanism, it must have a clear-cut goal, objective, or ‘problem’ to work on.

The goals that our own Creative Mechanism seeks to achieve are mental images, or mental pictures, which we create by the use of imagination.”

Turning mental pictures into real life experiences

One of the aspects of the game I found most challenging was shooting free throws. It’s one thing to brick a shot or shoot an airball in the flow of the game. But everything comes to a halt when someone gets fouled and goes to the line to shoot a free throw.

Before basketball cybernetics, I was basically guessing at how much energy to put into launching the ball at the hoop from the free throw line. I shot a lot of free throws in practice — especially because one of my key objectives as a low-post player was to draw fouls from the opposing defense. You get the ball near the rim, fake the defender into the air and then lean into him while you shoot. If you’re on your game, you not only get fouled by the defender. You also make the shot and get the opportunity for a three-point play. (You get the chance to shoot a free throw and so score three points instead of two.)

Plus, the more fouls the defender accumulates, the more careful he has to be about not fouling out of the game. Meaning, I get more room to operate and it’s easier to score more points for my team.

But my confidence, and my free throw shooting percentage, remained low.

The more I practiced the mental imagery techniques and remembered to let it happen, though, the better my free throw shooting got in real life. I’ll share one example from my senior year. We were trailing by two points at Juniata Christian. We were a better team than they were but they had this weird, claustrophobic gym with bizarre lighting that made Juniata a really difficult away game.

We were struggling throughout the entire game and were down by two points with a few seconds left in the game.

I got the ball on the wing, turned and drove toward the basket and, with 1.5 seconds left on the clock, the defender fouled me. I hadn’t started shooting yet, so I went to the free throw line for a one-and-one. That’s basketball lingo for a certain foul situation: you get to shoot a free throw; if you make it, you get to shoot a second free throw. If you miss, the ball is live again and the game goes on.

With only a second and a half left, the game was probably over unless I made the first free throw.

I stepped up to the line. Did my pre-free throw ritual — three bounces then backspin the ball into my shooting position, middle finger pressing into one of the grooves on the basketball — and took a deep breath. Saw the ball swishing through the net. Let It Happen. Bent my knees, straightened, and released.

Swish.

Now I get the second free throw. Make it and the game goes to overtime. Miss it and we lose by one.

Same ritual. Let It Happen. Swish.

We won that game easily in overtime. On the long bus ride home, everyone was yelling and laughing, reliving moments from the game, talking about our next opponent. We were on our way to enjoying the most successful season in the history of our school. We would go on to win our conference in the regular season, win the post-season conference tournament — against our hated rivals, Genesee Christian, in a double-overtime thriller — and fall one game short of winning the state championship. Everyone was fired up, even the coaches. And I was in a dreamlike state. Aware of the noise and the good feelings, but locked into this beautiful reverie of seeing and feeling how it felt to shoot those free throws and somehow know the ball was going to swish through the net…

Onward

I’ve been thinking a lot about the ideological subversion agenda I briefly wrote about here. The state of demoralization that Bezmenov spoke of in 1984 seems so rampant nowadays among a large segment of the population.

But I can also see how that demoralization agenda — which really comes from the Parasitic matrix, regardless of what people, groups, government organizations, or media it appears to be funneled through — has been always lurking in the background of my own life. Seeking to rob me of my joy, to sow the seeds of self-doubt, to minimize the incredibly powerful gifts that Creator has given us to make ourselves more joyful and successful and make the world more beautiful and abundant.

My basketball cybernetics success set the stage for my life’s journey of learning to master the mind and help many others do the same. But it’s a perspective I’ve lost sight of and had to fight my way back to more than once in the intervening years.

I’m glad to be re-finding it again and glad to finally act on the idea I’ve had in the back of my mind for the last couple years: writing a post to honor Coach Adams and the outsized positive impact he had on my life. Looking back on those early days has been fascinating at a time in which, once again, I’ve been reconnecting with some of the core principles in my ongoing journey of mind over matter.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this little series and I’d love to hear about your own experiences in the comments.

1. This may have been part of the reason Coach Adams didn’t return after my 10th grade year.

2. OK, he didn’t use the word mantra. That would have been one big step too far.

3. In my work with clients over the years, I’ve noticed that one of the three principle sensory pathways in the brain (visual, auditory, or kinetic) is often much harder to consciously access than the other two for most people. My theory is that the ‘suppressed’ or ‘repressed’ sense is the pathway that was primarily active when the client experienced an intense trauma in childhood. The person who heard their mom being abused through the wall at night may have difficulty consciously accessing the auditory system. The person who saw a horrific car accident as a child may find it hard to consciously access ‘positive’ mental pictures or take control of mental movies.