At the close of the game against Australian tennis player Nick Kyrgios, defeated Greek tennis star Stefanos Tsitsipas faced the press at Wimbledon, evidently downcast. He scratched his head. “I don’t know what went through my head,” he said.
His game against Kyrgios lasted three hours and 16 minutes, time for both players to receive penalties, the larger of the fines handed to the Greek tennis champion for smashing a ball into the crowd, narrowly missing a spectator.
When a journalist asked Tsitsipas why he had attempted to whack Kyrgios with the ball several times during the match, the Greek player shrugged his shoulders and responded, “Just to stop, you know, this needs to stop, it’s not OK.”
Back in the 1930s, Coleman R. Griffith, research director in athletics at Illinois University, wrote a paper on how physical education had a one-sided view of the fundamental nature of human beings. “When an athlete goes out on the field for a contest he does not leave his mind tucked away in a locker with his shoes, his watch, and his hat.” Indeed, while coaches busily measured height, weight, and speed, and the strength of various muscle groups, little attention at that time dwelt on the mind of the athlete and the use of psychological tactics to win in sport.
In Griffith’s view, the psychological factor is often “far more important” than the physical in sport. “It takes but a moment… to realise that the best athletes use almost every faculty
