Success vs. Joy
- XII -
Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory
Here’s an amazing story that illustrates this definition of concentration and underlines its importance. It is the story of James Wattana, a young man from Thailand who uprooted, and traveled to England in 1989 to compete on the professional tour, when he was only 18.
Wattana was from a lower middle class family. His mother managed a snooker club in Bangkok. In his third year in England, he reached the semifinals of the Mita World Masters, a snooker tournament in which the first prize was a towering £200,000 (at the time it was the biggest winner’s cheque in the game’s history).
Despite suffering from a virus Wattana was going well against the celebrated Jimmy White in a best of 19-frames match, and led 8-6. The audience at the National Exhibition Center in Birmingham was stunned when Wattana missed a straightforward pot that proved pivotal. He went on to lose 10-8.
Immediately after the match, in the pressroom, a reporter asked Wattana why he had lost after seemingly being in control. He replied with great candor, “When I led 8-6, my mind wandered to this [specific] street in Bangkok where there is a house [he specified the address] that I wanted to buy for my mother with the prize money.” His mind was momentarily distracted from the present – the irrevocable stroke, the frame, the match, and of course, the tournament.
It is remarkable how in one-hundredth of a second a thought that enters your mind can take you thousands of miles away – to some other part of the world or even to another planet. The mind has to be continuously reined in and supervised so that it does not run away.
It would be interesting to analyze frame-wise what must have gone through Wattana’s mind after his thoughts meandered into that street in Bangkok.
At that crucial juncture, his mind was only on the house, which he so deeply wanted to purchase. Though he subsequently missed ball after ball, he still remained confident. But he realized that concentration had been surrendered and he desperately tried to get his mind back from Bangkok and into the match arena.
But the mind has a mind of its own as Wattana discovered to his frustration. Hard as he tried, his mind refused to play ball because the subconscious desire for that dream house was so dominant.
Suddenly there was an urgent need for recovering his concentration and Wattana ordered his mind to come back to the table. The mind obliged but not fully and even as he got some concentration back, his opponent Jimmy White began to click into his own rhythm and fluency substituted weakness. Fear overwhelmed Wattana as he now saw his dream house disappearing. Note that the key words here are ‘his dream house’. His mind, almost as if in auto mode, had gone back into the dream house. Earlier he was savoring the moment when he would buy it, now he was fretting over the possible loss of something he never actually owned.
Living in the future is professional suicide. Living in the past is sometimes even more dangerous. The past can keep resurfacing. Wattana collapsed completely, lost the closing four frames in only 37 minutes and White went on to beat Malta’s Tony Drago for the title the following day.
This cautionary tale illustrates the frightening power that the mind possesses when it stays in the moment and the immense self-destruction it can bring by wandering into the future or the past.