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Dying or getting well
Doing Sport Psychology: Mark B. Andersen (ed.). Human Kinetics 2000. 294 pages
paperback, large format, £19.50. ISBN 9-780736-000864
During the last 15 years sport psychology has been the growth area in sport and
exercise science. No surprise, then, that books have proliferated, both
theoretical and applied, in the usual hierarchy: books designed to help
competitors become better competitors; books aimed at helping coaches to help
the competitors; books for the people training the coaches; and books for those
training the people who will train the coaches. Aimed at graduate students,
this book falls into the last category.
It's a big book, nearly A4 in size, 300 pages in double columns, so there's a
lot here. This is because all but one of the papers, from 24 hands, are based
on extensive transcripts of tape-recorded sessions between sport psychologists
and athletes, players and coaches. The aim is to show how the 'sport psychology
service' is delivered to the client. And in a book of this size you can cover
most of the field: goal-setting, self-concept, coping with injury and personal
difficulties (even attempted suicide), handling the really big occasion (here
the Winter Olympics).
Graduate students will presumably mine it for their own theses and
dissertations. But it's a mine with more coal than diamonds – not that coal
isn't a valuable commodity, of course, and there are valuable insights, such
as the importance of instilling doubt in the athlete's doubts. But some of the
dialogue is pretty pointless – an interviewee takes half a dozen lines excusing
himself to go to the toilet, for instance, and other passages are really just
chat. Surely a bit more editing would have been permissible? The psychologists
themselves often seem over-earnest, a bit humourless, somehow always putting
themselves at the centre. In one conversation, in which a graduate student and
his tutor stroke each other's egos and deeply enhance their own self-esteem, a
revealing comment emerges: 'It makes you think this whole bloody profession is
deeply and hopelessly narcissistic.' What can you say?
There's no doubt that there's a lot of good stuff here, and the right audience
in college and university departments will get a lot from it.
Of course, it's impossible to know what the sportspeople would do if the
psychologists weren't there. Much the same as people in the Old West did
without doctors, one suspects: die or get well.
Ramin Minovi
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