You refer to self-fulfilling prophecies birls. No disagreement from me on that.
But Faldo never really played under pressure with his new swing. He was no doubt a master of self control (on the golf course anyway
). How he would have reacted to true pressure is another question.
Real pressure is playing the last 4 holes with OB left and trees right for your tour card when your bank balance is low and you can't stand the thought of working in Tesco for another year.
On the other hand, I hear Tesco does a very nice share option incentive scheme, so that should sweep a few beads of sweat off the old noggin' when the ball starts going sideways!
It's a very difficult topic because how and why people feel pressure is very individualised, and often happens with no reference to past exploits or any subjective psychological analysis one may have put in place about oneself. Some people feel pressure in conditions they usually excel in, and vice versa. Small subconscious elements from one's past can rear up out of the blue. An innate fear for something, exacerbated by an element within a given situation, may throw one off the deep end and one is left wondering why
I always like to draw the analogy with sexual attraction. Everybody has an ideal of someone they're attracted to: height. weight, hair and eye colour, etc, but how many times have you met the person who checks all the boxes and yet, mysteriously, leaves you cold; conversely, how many times have you been attracted to someone who shouldn't, but does, make you passionate?
Fight or flight is interesting, but very few, if any of us, are all one, or all the other, so it's a case of dovetailing what you are into a situation you're comfortable with. ekennedy made the excellent point that some tour pros are brilliantly comfortable at everything until Sunday afternoon; fascinating, and probably true. Is it irreducible from there? Probably not. Again it's a function of our brain, and complexity abounds.
Anecdotal stuff will serve us so-so in the interim, and the more prescient a person is, the more he will derive from understanding pressure re. himself. It's up to each of us to plough our own furrow.
