Episode 883: Surviving The Yips, Rick Ankiel The Phenomenon, Finchy’s Tears and Bristow’s Dartitis
Strange things sometimes happen to sportspeople. Men and women who have spent their entire lives doing nothing but excelling at their chosen professions can suddenly have shocking, career-ending collapses as the basic mechanics of their sport prove beyond them.
It’s happened to Eric Bristow, to Anna Kournikova, to major golf champion Ian Baker Finch. And it has happened to Rick Ankiel, the author of “The Phenomenon – Pressure, The Yips, And The Pitch That Changed My Life.”
You can get the rest of it today at bookstores and online. To tide you over, here’s Chapter 16 of The Phenomenon: https://t.co/oDbMyapk4V
— Tim Brown (@TBrownYahoo) April 18, 2017
Ankiel was one of the hottest pitching prospects in baseball at the turn of the millennium – but one inning in front of a national television audience in the playoffs in 2000 changed everything.
He threw five wild pitches in that one inning (the record for CAREER wild pitches in the playoffs was 6), and he never regained his confidence again. His desperation to fix the problem took Rick down some dark paths, before his career and life take an incredible turn for the better.
We speculate wildly about whether this went beyond a psychological issue, and was in fact neurological, and there’s also Finchy’s tears, Kournikova’s double faults, and a debilitating case of “dartitis”.
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