Monday night, the Golden State Warriors completed a comeback that had only been achieved nine other times in the history of the NBA Playoffs – they rallied from a 3-1 deficit to win a seven–game series. The defending champs, having just won more games than team ever had in a regular season, were on the verge of being eliminated and had their season’s place in history clouded forever. They dug in with a Game 5 win at home, but found themselves in trouble with six minutes left in Game 6 in Oklahoma City. And then … well, what happened next is what we need to talk about today. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then why Golden State won Game 6 and eventually Game 7 and the Western Conference title is in the eye of the beholder, too. Did Golden State win it, or did OKC choke? Personally, I have never really liked the word choke when it comes to sports. It’s a really harsh term, it’s normally unfairly applied and sportswriters and broadcasters should be penalized for piling on when using it. Choking is the act of having something SO in-the-bag – SO secured in the thrill of victory that there is no way this could possibly go wrong. But then it does go wrong. I wrote an article a while back that reminded you that for every great moment in sports, there is an infamous moment in sports. For the 1980 U.S. Hockey team, there are the Soviets. For Kirk Gibson, there is Dennis Eckersley. For Doug Flutie’s “Hail Mary” for Boston College, there are two Miami Hurricane defensive backs that have to live with that outcome for the rest of their lives. But did they choke? The beauty of sport is that the outcomes are not scripted. There is no pre-game meeting to make sure everyone is on the same page about who is going to win, how long the game will take or how it will end. Sport gives us the modern day David vs Goliath matchups and, unlike politics and most other places, David actually has a chance to win in athletic contests. That means that sometime the favorite loses. It happens. Just the odds of it say it ought to happen more than just once in a while. Heck, the NCAA men’s basketball tournament IS us watching all those games on that first Thursday and Friday hoping that Bryce Drew can make a shot at the buzzer for Valpo to upset Ole Miss in 1998. Are all those higher-seeded teams that lose to teams in the tournament chokers? You know, the ones you had to Google to find out where they’re located. Of course not! So when is it a choke job and when is it not? The answer … only the person/people involved really know for sure. I can sit here in my lofty tower and say “well if team X would have done this or not done that they would have finished the job.” But choking means you personally and/or collectively let the tension and pressure of a moment cause you to fail, not your skill or lack thereof, not your heart or desire. You just get so nervous that you can’t walk and chew gum at the same time. It’s when your mental self impedes your physical self to the point that you cannot function to the level required. People who are really smart but have trouble taking tests often fall into that category. The material is in there, but the pressure of the thought that they are taking a test over what they know just tears apart their ability to think. It crushes them. Ten minutes after the test is over, if you pull those people aside and ask them one of the questions on the test, not only do they give you the correct answer they tell you how they came to that answer in perfect detail. It’s really incredible. Sporting events are tests, where people and teams test themselves against other people and teams. But not everyone who loses chokes, and the standard we hold our athletes to when it comes to this is critical. It’s a sliding scale. A professional athlete or team should be expected to perform at a higher standard and not let the moment collapse them compared to a college athlete, and high school athletes even less. As a matter of fact, we should go farther to celebrate high school kids who live in the moment because they just haven’t had those experiences in their young lives yet. It’s one of the positive things I see in summer/AAU sports – it gives you a chance to try and fail in the summer so you know what is coming in regular games. So when you are leaning over the fence talking with your neighbor about a sports team this summer, be careful how you use the word choke … you might just gag on it.
