The Sweet Spot in Time

As a kid, I spent a lot of time throwing rocks. The best place to do it was under a bridge, where there were always plenty of rocks and bottles--targets as well as missiles. You set up the bottles on one mudbank, then crossed over to the other side and you were in your own private shooting gallery. It was the only childhood activity I knew that ever involved anything like a warm-up. You would start out just lobbing the rocks, gradually working up the pace ("velocity," as the ballplayers now say) until you were zinging them in pretty hard, beginning to get the range. Finally, everything warm and working well, your arm loose, feeling strong, you'd find yourself really powering each throw, rearing back in unaffected natural windup bringing them home. There is peculiar appeal in such rhythmic, repetitive activity, and this was one you could really bear down on. I think that was important.

I never indulged in baseball fantasies--bottom of the ninth with two men out, that kind of thing. I knew perfectly well what I was doing: I was throwing rocks, that was all. It was enough. I can still summon up in memory the way the rocks sizzled into the mudbank--and, now and then, sizzled into an old whiskey bottle with a satisfying pop! (Environmental damage hadn't been recognized yet; whiskey bottles were expendable because only they brought no cash refund.) I never did get to play much baseball, but I always had a strong throwing arm. Mostly, I recall the haunting power I felt on that occasional throw when I knew as the stone left my hand that it would hit its target.

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Biomechanics is the study of the mechanics of animate objects. It tells us that every human movement, from raising a cup of tea to the lips to pole-vaulting 18 feet, is a product of levers moving through arcs. The joint is the fulcrum; the limb, or segment of limb, is the lever. Complicated movements require the arcs to be linked in series, but the arc is the inevitable basic unit, since at least one end of every segment is attached somewhere. This reductionist notion leads me to propose a Sweet Spot Theory of Performance. It is a way of perceiving good athletes (and various other performers) that can add a certain richness to the enjoyment of sports (and various other activities) for spectators as well as for participants.

If you've played any stick-and-ball game, you are familiar with the wonderful sensation of hitting the sweet spot. You swing the implement--bat, racket, golf club, whatever--as usual, but you meet the ball a little more accurately than usual, make contact more squarely. The ball simply takes off: a remarkably smooth, easy, yet forceful result. In one sense, the sweet spot is almost audible. When you hit it, there is a characteristic sound--a sharp click (golf), crack (baseball), whock (tennis). A clearer signal comes not from the sound or the sight of the ball's flight, however, but from the startling information you get through the implement itself. It doesn't vibrate. No shock is transmitted to the hands. It is as if new force is created within the implement, exploding the ball into flight, driving it away harder than you actually swung at it.

Hitting the sweet spot is such a compelling sensation that a large part of our insistence on playing those stick-and-ball games may come from the desire to re-experience that click! of a perfectly hit shot. It can seem almost a mystical experience. There is nothing unreal about the actual spot, however. A biomechanist told me about the lab procedures for determining it. "The sweet spot is not a figment of the imagination," he said, "it is a mechanical reality in the implement, the center of percussion. Set up a baseball bat with oscillating machinery and you can determine the exact spot where, if you hit a ball there, minimum jarring will be transferred back to the hand. That spot will also likely give you the best shot. Of course, when you put a human being on the end of the implement, the problem gets much more complicated." At any rate, golf-club manufacturers who advertise they've increased the size of the sweet spot in their irons may or may not be fudging, but at least they're working with real-world physics.

We throw the word perfect around much too freely in sports, but for the moment, let's assume that the 450-foot home run, for example, is a perfect stroke. It very likely comes off the sweet spot of the bat, but it also has a great deal of force behind it, which by some statistical miracle is lined up so that it is applied in a straight line through the dead center (another sweet spot) of the round baseball, as well as through the center line of the round bat. Furthermore, this towering blast, as the sportswriters like to say, comes off a bat that is swung in a near perfect trajectory: a sweet line, so to speak. The bat moves through so true and even a trajectory that the ball is caught not only at the optimum spot along the length and width of the bat but also at the perfect point in the arc of the swing to give it maximum force and distance. In effect, bat and ball meet at a sweet spot in time--a point in time in the arc. Or, perhaps, at an intersection of time and space. Thus, we say the athlete hit the ball with perfect timing. There is even more exquisite timing to come.

The Sweet Spot Theory of (Sports) Performance goes like this: All athletic movement--all human movement--is generated by muscles pulling across joints to make limbs move. Grossly over simplifying the baseball swing, for example, the batter cocks his shoulders and arms back away from the pitch, then begins the swing by rotating his shoulders toward the pitcher. After the shoulders get into motion, the upper arms start through, as in crack-the-whip; to the speed generated by rotation of the shoulders is added the speed of the upper arms as they are swung into action. After the upper arms are firmly launched, they pull the forearms into motion; after the forearms reach maximum velocity (actually, after the pitch has been met, or missed), the wrists "break," rolling over and bringing the hands through--the last and shortest pair of levers in the chain of action.

Each segment of this motion is an arc working off an arc; each is carefully timed to start as the previous arc reaches the best possible point. The superior athlete, according to my theory, anyway, is the one who in effect reaches the sweet spot of the arc for each segment of his or her skeleton as he or she goes through the athletic motion. The shoulders swing to the optimum point in the arc and at that instant the upper arms are launched into their arcs; at the optimum point of the arc traveled by the upper arms, the forearm motion is launched, and so on. Every good athletic motion has a crack-the-whip aspect to it, a chain of accelerating arcs, each taking the motion at the maximum from the arc before and using that speed to multiply its own acceleration. (Or, if less force is required, taking the motion at the best point in the arc for purposes of accuracy, and so on.) The sweet spots in the skeleton move around, of course, according to the purpose of the athletic motion, the implements used and hundreds of other variables. There are whole chains of sweet spots within the human frame, if we can only learn to use them. Reggie Jackson has learned how to use them. Lynn Swann has learned how to use them.

There's more to this theory. Every human joint--the fulcrum point of each of those arcs--has several components of motion available to it. Some joints, such as the shoulder, work easily through several planes of motion; some, like the knee, are structured to move only through a single plane--to and fro, or up and down, or back and forth, but in no additional directions. Because of structural anomalies within and beyond the joint itself, however--loose ligaments, misalignments and other angularities--no joint moves purely within a single plane. For the sweet lines, the true trajectories that will allow each segment of the skeleton to swing precisely through the sweet spots, angular displacement must somehow be removed. All else being equal, the better athlete should be the one who either has been blessed with superior alignment in the joints or somehow can overcome the misalignments and can control the trajectories and keep them true.

The good athlete must be able to damp out the assorted wobbles and wasted motions and other excursions that would otherwise screw up the true trajectories. The motor-learning experts say, however, that ballistic motions cannot be guided once they are launched, which would preclude that kind of control. If so, then the good athlete must launch these trajectories with a great deal more accuracy than can you or I. Of course, the motor-learning people don't get to work with Reggie Jackson very often. I suspect that the good athlete does both: Through practice, he or she learns to initiate motions with considerably more accuracy than the lesser athlete, and also learns to damp out extraneous motion as the act progresses. In fact, I think the really superior athlete can do a great deal more of this.

(There are artificial aids for controlling excess motion, of course. Knee braces in their various sizes and shapes are attempts to restrict that overburdened joint to motion in a single (continued on page 156)Sweet Spot(continued from page 138) plane--particularly after injury. For that matter, so is athletic tape, as it is commonly used to tape ankles. Orthotics, the running craze's newest status symbol, are another example--they are shoe inserts designed to help damp out extraneous motion all the way from the sole of the foot on up through the hip.)

The proprioceptive organs are the means by which we keep track of ourselves, internal measuring devices deep within the flesh that keep reading body position, change, rate of change, tension, loading. The job that those organs must do in telling the athlete when to fire off each consecutive body segment on its trajectory is truly remarkable. There is so much to go wrong. Witness high jumpers, who sometimes seem to set more records for inconsistency than for heights cleared. A world-class sprinter will run 10.1 one week, 10.2 or 10.0 the next, but a world-class high jumper will often jump 7'6" one week and then fail to clear 7' the next. The ranks of high jumpers are frequented by flashes in the pan, previously unknown performers who post a world-class mark and then never again come close to that height.

High jumping is a fiendishly complex series of movements, and if any one of them goes awry, the proprioceptive sequencing can go blooey. Everything from the speed (and angle) of the run-up to the last kick to get the heels over the bar is infinitely variable. Get a hundredth of a second off at any point in the sequence and the timing for all the rest can be destroyed. A great athlete may be able to rearrange this schedule of movement quickly enough to get the sequence back; the lesser athlete kicks off the crossbar--or balks at the pit--then retreats to the practice field, and often finds that the frantic rehearsal aimed at getting the timing back just makes matters worse.

When an athlete is hitting these internal sweet spots--when the timing is right and the motion is smooth--the skill levels are higher, the athletic motions quicker, more forceful, more accurate. Injuries will be lessened; the athlete is performing "within" himself or herself, under control, within the limits to motion beyond which human tissue is overstressed. And there is one more advantage to this smooth-running vision of athletics: endurance. As the exercise physiologists point out, unskilled performance is like running on a bent wheel. One scientist has even proposed a skill index based on oxygen consumption per minute per unit of body weight: To do something badly takes more muscle and thus more energy.

Not too long ago, there were two women skiers on the U.S. team whose results were so consistently equal that they were considered virtual competition twins. Yet one was so slim and delicate, so hyperfeminine, that she seemed unsuited to the rigors of international competition, while the other was exceptionally strong, a little pit bull of a ski racer. A friend of mine, writing about the ski team, asked coach Hermann Goellner how that could be--that despite their widely disparate levels of strength, they could post such similar results.

Goellner pointed out that the slim one was technically one of the best skiers in the world and the strong one definitely was not. The slim one had never needed muscles: She stood on her skis so well, skied with such grace and control, that she never had to develop the musculature to ski powerfully--and had not done so. The strong one, on the other hand, tended to ski in series of linked recoveries. She had had to develop the strength to snatch herself back from disaster time after time. She skied by forcing her skis to do what she wanted them to do; she forced her way down a race course--and she had developed the physique to go with all that forcing. She had also suffered through several knee operations and other injuries. The slim one stayed injury-free.

The more highly skilled athlete simply performs in a higher gear; there is less of the grinding inefficiency of multiplying mechanical advantage to accomplish the task. It is the athlete's job to learn to do the hard thing easily. The result is usually very graceful. "Grace," says ski teacher Denise McCluggage, "is a warmer word for efficiency."

Most athletes perform with considerable grace; some don't and still get the job done, of course. There is always the occasional eccentric athlete who gets away with motions that bear no connection with grace, who has invented a totally unorthodox way of accomplishing the task. Compare the silken golf swings of Gene Littler or Sam Snead with the lurching blasts of Lee Trevino and Arnold Palmer. Littler and Snead are used to illustrate textbooks, while both Trevino and Palmer risk falling down on every drive. Golf may place horrendous demands on the nerves, but it doesn't really press the individual to the limits of physical endurance--which makes an unorthodox style less of a handicap. As endurance requirements go up, efficiency (or grace) becomes more important; anatomy being what it is, the movements of one performer will come closer to resembling those of all the rest. Although there are considerable differences in the running styles of Frank Shorter and Bill Rodgers, the differences are much subtler than the differences between the golf swings of a Trevino and a Littler. Fatigue hones away roughness. (Roughness burns energy.) In any case, unorthodoxy will never be taught; smoothness will be. Coaches refer to any unorthodoxy of athletic style as herky-jerky.

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I keep thinking about that high jumper on the practice field, trying to get the timing back. He'll say he's "lost his rhythm." Rhythm is timing, certainly--a means of signaling to each body segment the proper moment to initiate movement. Rhythm in athletic motion means that each segment of the body comes in right on the beat.

(Initiation can be the hardest part of an athletic movement. That's where all those bat wiggles and free-throw eccentricities and tennis-serve mannerisms blossom forth. That's why the "yips"--the aging golfer's typical troubles with the putter--often involve difficulty with drawing the club head back, rather than with swinging it forward.)

I happened to hear violinist Isaac Stern discuss his art one night and a jazz musician discuss his the next. Both of those immensely talented individuals would sing wordless snatches--dum dum ti dum, and so on--to illustrate points about their very different styles of music. I am not a musician and could barely catch the significant differences they were demonstrating so effortlessly. I could discern, but I'm sure I did not fully comprehend, those differences--in emphasis and tone, but mostly just in timing. Each man would illustrate one way to play a phrase, then an alternative, varying the timing of the notes subtly without violating the form, changing in major ways the emotional content of the music without changing a note. I suddenly realized that for musicians--and for athletes--there must be a great deal more room, in effect, in the flow of time than there is for the rest of us.

I tap my foot to music and think I'm on the beat; any musician can demonstrate convincingly that I'm not, that I'm farther off than, for example, the (continued on page 217)Sweet Spot(continued from page 156) bad TV singer trying to lip-sync to prerecording. It is as if the exact instant of the true beat is surrounded by several microseconds of available time. If I get somewhere in the vicinity, within those few fractions one way or the other, it sounds OK to me. It doesn't sound OK to a musician (and isn't likely to hold an audience spellbound). Within that span of microseconds lies room I never dreamed existed, room wherein the good performer can place the note, the beat--or the movement--with delicate, deliberate control. In those microseconds, there is room for performing art.

Athlete, dancer, musician, all may fulfill the basic requirements of their task by getting precisely on the beat. In that sense, the beat is like a point in geometry: dimensionless, not even a millisecond long. It is met exactly. To perform that way is only a kind of defensive approach to the task, however. (See Harold Solomon, jokingly referred to as a human backboard, indefatigably putting the tennis ball right back into the middle of the court every time--every time--until his opponent crumples in frustration.) Technical brilliance can spring from that kind of precision: just playing the notes. A machine can be made to replicate the beat perfectly, but the rhythm it produces will always be identifiable, instantly, as machine-produced. It is "cold." To warm it up, put a hand on it. Introduce human error.

Or human control. The imaginative performer controls his or her material and does so by using those microseconds that surround the instant of the beat. It is another order of precision entirely. For instance, delay: The dancer delays a step and introduces dramatic tension into the performance; the tennis player delays a return and pulls the opponent out of position; the basketball player hangs momentarily before letting go of the jump shot and is fouled, receiving a bonus free throw. Hurrying the motion, moving it minutely ahead of the natural rhythms of the form, can have similar effect. Feints and fakes are chiefly composed of just this toying with time. The musician moves notes micro-metrically forward or backward in time and, in doing so, makes the music witty, or sentimental, or sad. Or square (a plodding, unvarying microsecond too slow). The athlete similarly varies the timing of movements and "plays" the opponent as well as the game. Put a human being on the end of the implement and the sweet spot in time also gets moved about.

But those tactical uses of time are well known and beyond the Sweet Spot Theory. More interesting to me is what control of the time sequence within the movement does for skill. Fiddling around with the timing of moves can go deeper than delaying a return in tennis. The tennis player can also delay or speed up different segments, different arcs or portions of arcs within the sequence of motion, with brilliant results as far as the stroke is concerned. That does not happen because the athlete focuses attention on the segments and arcs of the motion. (It is almost impossible to do that. We grasp movements with the cortex, not with the muscles. That's why your handwriting is roughly the same whether you write with pen on paper, using small finger muscles, or stand at a blackboard, writing with your whole arm.) It happens because the performer focuses attention on the inside of the move's time frame.

A former ballplayer named Don Hewett used to advise his children, "You have to have the confidence to take the time" (to make the catch, to get to the return, to control the implement). Focusing on time slows it down. Next time you're having trouble with any quick-reaction sport--squash, racquet-ball, even ping-pong or badminton--try telling yourself you have more time than you think you have. You'll find another several inches of incoming trajectory to work with, during which you can focus on and prepare to make your return. That few inches is enough: It is a few inches in time, if you have confidence enough to take it. All you've really done is make the sweet spot in time a little more accessible.

Most infield errors occur because the fielder starts his play before he catches the ball. A lot of dropped forward passes fall to the turf because the receiver starts avoiding tacklers before he finishes catching the football. This is the tiredest cliché in sports, of course--"Look the ball into your hands," even "Keep your eye on the ball"--but it illuminates a little more territory when it is understood in terms of available time. The good performer simply takes all the time there is--for the particular move. There is a sweet spot in time for catching a ball, just as there is for hitting one. The same capacities are at work, the same judgmental control of linked arcs--right down to the closing of the fingers--is involved. The sweet spot in time is merely the true finish of the move. Ah, but that is one hell of a "merely." (Follow-through is usually misapprehended. As it turns out, it is just a memory device to keep us from screwing up the motion that leads up to what we're following through. If you intend a smooth follow-through, that intention somehow takes you through the sweet spot of the move.)

Finishing the move is a startlingly important aspect of performing, though I have been unable to find a clear explanation of why it is so critical. In skiing, for example, if you don't finish one turn--carrying it out to its logical conclusion, metaphorically putting a stamp of completion on it--you will be in terrible shape to launch the next turn. The quickest indication of an unskilled dancer, gymnast, diver or figure skater is the hurried move, which, surprisingly, doesn't come from starting the move too soon but from neglecting to finish the move that preceded it. From cutting it off short of the sweet spot in time. It is a paradox: Taking time to finish one move somehow gives you more time to get the next one started right. (Finishing the move probably restores the neuromuscular machinery to equilibrium, and thus gives you a new starting place.) Just as a wide receiver must, as they say, "put the ball away" before he starts to run with it, so must any performer put away the movement at hand before starting the next. There will be time. Finishing the move makes time. (Mikhail Baryshnikov has time. So does Julius Erving.)

Confidence, as in the advice from Don Hewett, may not seem to be the ultimate tool for getting control of the time sequence of performance, but it certainly helps. Concentration, that utter mystery, helps more. (Concentration slows time, as all of us obsessives know perfectly well.) Confidence allows you not to rush; concentration lets you have the time to choose when to rush. People who have played golf with Jack Nicklaus come away muttering about his absolutely frightening powers of concentration. They used to say the same about Ben Hogan. The same thing must be true of all outstanding performers, in sports and elsewhere. (Golf's slow pace may just supply a setting that makes gimlet-eyed concentration more evident.) Unfortunately, concentration is that peculiar power that by its own definition slips away when you try to hold on to it. I suspect that good performers have a better way.

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I am haunted by the moment when the rock I threw went precisely where I wanted it to go. That moment hardly developed purely out of concentration, though it wasn't sheer accident, either. I think I probably stumbled onto several of the sweet spots in the same throw, and the result was simply a coming together, a moment when what my mind intended was matched by what my body accomplished. A momentary healing of the mind-body split, to overdignify it. It haunts me still because it was magic--pip-squeak magic, if you will, but magic, nonetheless. It moved me; out of all those mindless boyhood hours of rock throwing, it is the moment I remember. It was a moment when the amount of time between letting fly the rock and seeing it arrive at the bottle seemed to stretch out forever. Time stopped. My mind's eye can still trace the flight.

The sublime moment in dance is the male dancer's prodigious leap. Ballet writer Hubert Saal, reviewing a performance of Baryshnikov's: "The most exquisitely chilling weapon in the arsenal of this complete dancer was his ballon, his ability to ascend in the air and stay there, defying gravity." Other dancers have had some of that capacity--Nijinsky more than most, perhaps more even than Baryshnikov. No one has explained it. It is electrifying to watch; we know we are witnessing a nonordinary event. When we see it, we are moved. It is magic. Time stops.

It is my thesis--the Sweet Spot Theory--that this is true magic, the only magic there is. I am suggesting that there is a line between the banality of my rock-throwing experience--included here as a deliberately ridiculous example of Everykid's uncomprehending brush with performing magic--and the sublimity of Baryshnikov's great leaps. Along that line can be located much of the rest of what we refer to as magic in sports--from tennis players playing "in the zone" (Billie Jean King's last Wimbledon singles title) to Reggie Jackson's three consecutive world-series home runs to Bob Beamon's "mutation performance" long jump in the 1968 Olympics, a foot longer than anyone ever jumped before or since. On those occasions, something magic did happen. A group of world-class marathoners were recently surveyed about their best performances; most of them spoke of some particularly fulfilling moment when "mind and body" seemed to "come together." Several of them used the word: magic. It was magic when that happened.

In The Psychic Side of Sports, Michael Murphy and Rhea White have collected hundreds of stories of "mystical" experiences of athletes. The examples range from unusual bursts of speed or strength to whole games, even whole careers, that seem to exceed ordinary physical parameters. Not all of those examples can be reduced to fortuitous arrangements of limb segments and well-timed arcs of motion, but a surprising number of them have to do with strange dislocations--suspensions, really--of ordinary time.

Some of the most mystifying of those nonordinary experiences occur in the martial arts and other Eastern disciplines--movements too quick to see, uncanny reactions, moments when someone seems to disappear and rematerialize somewhere else. In The Ultimate Athlete, George Leonard describes a film of Morihei Uyeshiba, the founder of modern-day aikido, in which Uyeshiba is apparently trapped by two attackers, but between one frame of the film and the next--while the attackers move sequentially--he suddenly appears two feet away and facing in the opposite direction. That's what I thought happened with Renaldo Nehemiah in the 1979 World Cup II track meet in Montreal. Nehemiah hit the next-to-last hurdle (in the 110-meter event) heavily and was obviously beaten. Yet he won the race. I watched the slow-motion instant replay through three or four repetitions, and I still can't see how he got from where he was at the next-to-last hurdle to where he was at the tape. But then, there's nothing "mystical" about track, right?

Many of those Eastern disciplines make considerable use of meditation. As I understand meditation, one of its aims is to teach the individual to banish the distractions of past and future, to locus the mind on the reality of now, on the fleeting instant.

To stay securely anchored in the present is simply to concentrate without straining to do so: to attend. To stay in the present tense--to react, to respond only to the exigencies of the moment--is to take control of the time frame of performance. To follow with full attention what happens as it happens is to bring up to consciousness the possibility of the sweet spot in time--to spread out all those microseconds surrounding it, to expand time, if not to stop it. The sweet spot in time is never anywhere but in the present tense.

I suspect that the reason a ballistic motion such as throwing or swinging an implement can't be adjusted once it has been started is because we abdicate control. We choose a ballistic motion because it is a means of gaining additional force, yes, but also because it is a way of starting a motion and letting it finish itself, of putting the motion on automatic. We feel it is necessary to do so in order that we might think ahead, preparing for the next necessity. But to think ahead is to ignore the present, and therefore to rush time ahead, to accelerate its passing. It is only when we stop thinking ahead that we can slow time sufficiently to open the possibility of adjusting a ballistic motion. Don Hewett is correct: We abdicate control because we don't have the confidence to keep our minds within the time frame of the motion.

Golfer Bobby Jones once said he didn't think it was possible to swing a golf club too slowly. Jack Nicklaus is reputed to have the slowest backswing on the tour, and during the early part of his downswing, some observers swear that his hands actually slow further. I'm not sure how or why that could be true, but what I am proposing is that that level of performer--the individual who now and then can find enough room in the flow of time to adapt the rhythm of the performance to his or her personal will--just might be able also to find enough time to vary the motor input into the ballistic motion. To make corrections as time runs by, to keep chasing the elusive sweet spots--in time, in space, in all the multidimensional complexities of sport (or art) to the last closing of the door of possibility. I'm sure the motor-learning people won't buy this explanation, either, but then, they aren't having much luck explaining these levels of skill any other way.

For several years now, I've been trying to get a handle on the link that connects what seem to me to be sensuous sports--skiing, surfing, cycling and other sports and recreations that we practice non-competitively, for the sheer pleasure of the act. (Many of them can be made competitive, of course, and many purely competitive sports offer the same kind of sensuous pleasures.) Slicing across the face of a wave, leaning a bike into a high-speed turn, getting a solid edge-set in good snow--so that that, too, is an act you can bear down on--are experiences so similarly pleasurable and so distinctive a sheer physical joy that they must be related, but in ways I'd never been able to grasp.

Now I think that sweet spots provide the link. I think we play at these sports in large part just for the pleasure of getting the timing right, of feeling the physical forces fall into the sphere of our control. What's more, we get a different version of the same pleasure from watching others play at them. It can be ineffably moving to watch a performer control time, placing his or her movements--steps, motions, strokes, blows, notes--where he or she wants them in time, where the sweep of action will best be continued. Where the discipline and the performer's imagination combine to create something vivid in an otherwise rigid frame.

And that placement, that sensuous touch, that finger of magic on the precise point in time that is such a sweet spot, is so satisfying that it must be why we play.

"The more highly skilled athlete simply performs in a higher gear; there is less inefficiency...."

"Focusing on time shows it down. Try telling yourself you have more time than you think you have".