MVP

Meet the newest fan of the Jacksonville University Dolphins. Friday afternoons I generally enjoy a light, "shoot-around" workout at my health club, followed by a jacuzzi and a sauna, and then an espresso at my favorite cafe, where I write in my journal and start to get focused in on the shape and content of my message for Sunday morning. Often I'm all alone in that part of the gym at that hour on a Friday afternoon, but last Friday I noticed a young man working very hard on the other court, so after I'd finished with my own lazy workout, I wandered over and offered to rebound and pass for him if he wanted to work on his catch-and-shoot. Turns out his name is Mike DiBendetto from Belmont: a second-year walk-on guard for the Dolphins. Quick, great work ethic, nice soft touch on his "J"...just feeding him the ball wore me out, but I guess that's the difference between 19 and 49. In any event, I'm kinda looking forward now to following his progress next season. Good Luck Mike!

My own shooting slump came back with a vengeance Sunday. Nothing went down for me, and I mean NOTHING -- jump-shots, little bunnies in the lane, treys, wide-open lay-ups...short off the front of the rim, flat off the back of the rim, half-way down and around the rim before kicking out again...it would have almost been comic if it hadn't been so tragic. And embarrassing. These were not bad shots either -- typically wide-open looks that most nights I would have drained without thinking...and perhaps that's part of the problem too. Thinking. At times when your shot isn't falling the only way to get it to fall is to keep shooting, but you also start to worry about shooting yourself right out of the game with a long string of missed attempts, and then when your teammates begin to doubt you and start forcing up their own shots rather than sharing the ball, the whole thing comes apart and you find yourself sitting on the sidelines thinking some more about why things aren't working. You start to shoot with hesitance rather than with confidence, and then you really ARE toast.

I have a few little shooting triggers I try to keep in mind when I'm playing, but I try also not to think too much about them either. The first of these is to Balance the Brain -- to keep all that extraneous self-doubt quiet and just let the flow of the game come to me and through me and help me find my rhythm again. My body remembers how to shoot, and has done it successfully tens of thousands of times; it's just my brain that sometimes gets in the way. The second is to Sharpen the competitive Edge -- to amp up my energy a little, so that I'm shooting to score rather than shooting not to miss. And the third is Focus on the Target -- to concentrate my attention on the little hook holding up the net on the front of the rim, and to feel the ball release off my fingers with good rotation, as I define the arc of my shot with good follow-through.

But the most important trigger is MVP: Mentally Visualize Perfection. It's about getting the image of a good shot inside my head, so that it drives out all those horrid bricks of recent memory. Imagining the perfect shot -- or even just "seeing" the ball through the hole -- really does help me forget the misses and put them behind me, in a way that is much more effective than simply "telling" myself "don't think about it." That works about as well as trying NOT to imagine the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man...

Looks like lots of good hoop ahead in the NBA play-offs. I'm going to miss Tony Parker and the rest of the Spurs, but both the Dallas/Phoenix and the Miami/Detroit match-ups promise to be very exciting. Don't really have a favorite team, but I do hope Gary Payton plays well. All four of these clubs play great basketball, and I'm really looking forward to watching them play. When I'm not out playing myself, that is....