Chunking It

Well, o.k., my commitment to shot commitment hasn’t worked out so well yet.

In the parking lot after another drubbing from George W., he said, not unkindly, “You overanalyze too much.”

At first I presumed the redundancy was unintentional (overanalyze, too much?), but on reflection…

Oh, hell.  The guy is right, but why does it matter?  Why can’t I brood about why I hit that last shot too short while I’m waiting for the next serve?  Or tell myself how badly I suck after missing that easy volley?

Here’s why: chunking.  Or, more to the point: unchunking.

In his brilliant book, Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham and the Science of Success, Matthew Syed discusses the relative importance of practice versus talent in human endeavors and concludes that success relies heavily — and, to some extent, deceptively — on piling up hours of quality practice.  The reason is that we can only execute complex tasks by grouping the required information into patterns, a strategy that psychologists call “chunking.”

Syed illustrates chunking by noting how hard it is to recall a series of random letters but how easy it is to recall the same number of letters when arranged into words.  The same skills apply when we hit a forehand or anticipate where our opponent will direct the next ball.

(By the way, in The Inner Game of Tennis, W. Timothy Gallwey reminds readers that hitting a tennis ball is so complicated that we should congratulate ourselves on being able to do it at all rather than beating ourselves up when we fail.  Certainly you can’t run and hit a ball without some degree of “muscle memory” — another term for chunking -- but I can't remember the last time I congratulated myself for merely hitting a ball over the net.)

Unfortunately, we can be chunking along and suddenly our head asserts itself and everything breaks down.  When this happens under psychological pressure, we call it “choking.”  But in all cases it’s “unchunking” — breaking a situation (or a stroke) down into its component parts by bringing it from the unconscious mind to the conscious.  When this happens, the mind can’t process the details quickly enough.  Result: we hit a bad shot.

I hit a lot of bad shots because I’m thinking too much.  I know that because many of these bad shots result from indecisiveness.  On a tennis court one can only fall prey to indecision two ways: by not thinking at all (which isn’t usually my problem) or by overanalyzing in the midst of a point: I’ll hit it cross-court but I did that a bunch and he got them so I’ll go down the line but it looks like he’s leaning that way therefore how about a drop shot but that’s so low percentage and I’m out of position and now the ball is behind me and it’s so much harder but I have to act now now now just swing dammit.  OUT!

All this I know, but to know it, for me, is to think about it, which creates a vicious circle of unchunking.

The tendency to do this becomes worse because I took up the game seriously only as an adult.  As a consequence, I don’t slip as easily into "automatic" as people who began the game as juniors hitting countless drills.

So, somehow, I have to figure out how to chunk more (or unchunk less) without thinking about it, but figuring out requires thinking, which, of course, would unchunk everything.

Do I overanalyze?