Every now and then a story comes along that might be very minor in the scheme of things, but there is just something about it that so resonates, that everyone talks about it.
A case in point this week concerns the most unheard of professional golfer we’ve never heard of, Ryan McCormick, who turned up for the second round of a tournament at the Landings Golf and Athletic Club in Savannah, Georgia last Friday with his mouth taped firmly shut.
When asked what the hell he thought he was doing, he replied: “Mmmggm, mmmdggg, mmmwwagg, mmmhhaa.”
Only afterwards, with the tape off, was it clear. It was all to do with his anger issues. In course of his professional career and most particularly in recent times, McCormick had struggled to contain his emotions. After putting the ball out into Marlboro country, or missing the single putt that would have earned him another $10K, he would throw his clubs and all the rest, which would see his game further deteriorate.
Ryan McCormick with tape on his mouth.Credit: Getty Images
“Been having not so fun time this year on the golf course. Pretty angry and mad,” Ryan explained. “So I figured I’ve tried a lot of things and I just figured I’d shut myself up, so I put tape over my mouth.
“I mean, at this point, I’ve tried about everything. I’ve read a lot of books. I’ve talked to people. Just too angry on the golf course so I have run out of ideas.”
We’re here for you, Ryan!
Bring it in tight, Brains Trust.
Let’s start by looking at just where anger fits into elite sport overall.
Can we begin by agreeing that hugely successful golfers rarely, if ever, have short fuses? The very nature of the game is that as most shots you hit off the tee – bar a hole-in-one – will be imperfect, so those who lash themselves for imperfection won’t go far. When I think of angry golfers I mostly think of whoever has recently been dealing with Greg Norman up close and personal in recent times, or those merely contemplating his latest fatuous remarks. No champion golfer springs to mind who is prone to hurling clubs and so forth.
Cricket? To begin with, as a breed, great batters tend to be prickly at worst, but rarely furious.
A large part of Steve Waugh’s strength was famously to just completely shut down whatever had happened on the last ball, and always focus on the next ball – culturing a cool calculated to beget concentration. And while Allan Border was ever and always “Captain Grumpy” – and that worked for him – Captain Choleric never could have. After all, the whole purpose of sledging a batter in cricket is to provoke the anger whereby they lose concentration, so a naturally angry batter is unlikely to prosper.
Richie Richardson holds Curtly Ambrose back from Steve Waugh in 1995.Credit: AP
In bowling, of course, it is quite the reverse swing. Though Pat Cummins is of a naturally sunny disposition and has been hugely successful, there is no doubt that the best thunderbolts from the likes of Dennis Lillee, Jeff Thomson, Merv Hughes, et al, were delivered with fury. As a matter of fact in talking to Dennis just last week – happens all the time, he won’t leave me alone – he did indeed mention in passing that the fastest ball he reckons he ever bowled was against a batsman that had mightily annoyed him. And though the bloke actually got his bat on it, the ball kept ploughing through to the stumps regardless!
In rugby, anger can work and for what it’s worth, the two best matches I ever played were when I was powered by a white-hot anger against opponents that had done me wrong early in the match, meaning I went looking for them for the rest of the game and their teammates were just collateral damage. If I could have bottled that anger and sprinkled it over me every match I played, my performances would have been two-fold.
Against that, there are at least two Wallaby forwards I can think of who, had they taped their mouths shut right after taping their ears, really could have been twice as effective. (Has anyone, ever, won an argument with a rugby referee? The sheer waste of such angry arguments was always obvious to the rest of us, but not them. Anything beyond “Awww ref,” upon receipt of a penalty is a waste of time.)
Rugby league? The interest lies in the coaches – with the two most successful right now being on opposite sides of the coin.
Craig Bellamy doesn’t mind letting his emotions show.Credit: Getty Images
For the angriest man in the game is also the most successful – Craig Bellamy. Seriously, when the camera pans to him in the box, does he ever look happy? Rather than the cat that swallowed the canary, he always looks like the cat the canary has just pooped on in passing, and I’ll never forget him going onto the field immediately after Cameron Smith captained the Storm to their last grand final win, still raving mad about some refereeing decision or another. It works for him.
Ivan Cleary on the other hand, who has coached the Panthers to the last four grand final wins on the trot, was perpetually smiling even before registering that achievement.
Interestingly, no hugely successful sportswomen I can think of have displayed anger issues at all. (Yes, yes, yes, smarty-pants, Sam Kerr aside. On the pitch, I mean.) And if there has ever been a photo taken where Ash Barty wasn’t smiling, I haven’t seen it.
As far as I can see, it is in tennis where there is most variance on anger issues.
Perhaps the most beloved figure the game has ever produced, John McEnroe, seemed always to be angry and would actually go out of his way to work himself into a fury – despite his father’s efforts from an early age to curb that anger.
“My dad used to manage me the first 10 years of my career, God rest his soul,” McEnroe once recounted. “So he would say to me ‘John, you don’t need to do this. You know, you’re better than them. Just play. If you question an umpire, just don’t curse’.”
But John did, anyway, and he turned into one of the game’s greats. And yet that still didn’t stop him once counselling Andy Murray to rein in his own anger.
“It all depends how you let that anger out,” he said of Murray, “and it can become a case of diminishing returns. It inspires some people, and it could help Andy at times, but I have also seen it hurt him.”
What fascinates is that, after McEnroe, if you go to the next three most beloved tennis players of all time – Bjorn Borg, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal – all of them were remarkable for their cool on court, and all had “creation stories”, if you will, whereby the anger was either beaten out of them, or the calm was nurtured.
John McEnroe appeals the umpire’s decision during Wimbedon in 1982. Credit: Getty
“When I was 11 to 12 I was swearing and throwing rackets,” Borg is quoted in Borg Versus McEnroe: The Greatest Rivalry, the Greatest Match by Malcolm Folley. “I was the worst a kid could behave on the tennis court.” But then his local tennis club in Stockholm suspended him for six months to think about it. “Since that point, I hardly opened my mouth again.”
Problem solved!
Roger Federer, meantime, was blessed with a sage father.
“I knew what I could do, and failure made me mad,” Federer said of his youth, quoted in The Master: The Brilliant career of Roger Federer by Christopher Clarey. “I had two voices inside me, the devil and the angel, I suppose, and one self couldn’t believe how stupid the other one could be. ‘How could you miss that?’ one voice would say. Then I would just explode. My dad used to be so embarrassed at tournaments that he would shout at me from the side of the court, telling me to be quiet, and then on the way home in the car he might drive for an hour and a half and not say a word.”
Cool customers: Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer.Credit: Getty Images
Bit by bit, Roger got the message.
And finally, Rafael Nadal’s uncle and lifelong coach Toni, steered him right from the first.
“Rafa ended up getting used to my tennis philosophy,” Toni once said, “assuming a very high demand that I placed on him. When he was a child and we trained, the first thing I did was to ask him to smile and have a positive attitude. He never threw a racquet because that would have allowed frustration to overcome him. I am bothered by the complaint and frustration, considering that it begins from a feeling of personal overvaluation, of believing that you cannot fail. I did my best to fix that in his approach.”
Well done, all!
Ryan McCormick, clearly, likely had no such sage counsel in his youth and so finds himself at 31, the talk of the town, and for all the wrong reasons. Still Ryan, as you might say, “Mmmggm, mmmdggg”. Go well.
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