Secrets Of Streaks and Slumps

By Tom Callahan

Last week in Oakland, a pitcher for Baltimore named Mike Boddicker won his first game in a couple of seasons. A 20-game winner in 1984, Boddicker had accumulated 13 losses since his last victory and was 0-8 this season. The losing pitcher for Oakland, Dave Stewart, had been 8-0 at one time this year but had now dropped three straight. Earlier the Orioles lost 21 games in a row, while the A's were winning 22 of 26. Streaks and slumps were converging.

Before the recent Masters tournament, a streaky golfer named Raymond Floyd, who was in a bit of a slump, predicted that the Scot Sandy Lyle would win. Lyle was hot, and it was Floyd's experience that even the cold shots of a warm player bounce out of the creeks and sit up in the rough. Needing a birdie on the final hole, Lyle drove into a fairway bunker, fell into an ideal lie, struck a perfect shot and won.

No evidence supports what Floyd knew. In fact, just in time for the basketball playoffs, Stanford Psychologist Amos Tversky released a study that seems to make a myth of the shooter's hot hand. "Very often," says Tversky, "the search for explanation in human affairs is a rejection of randomness." But randomness has a difficult time explaining Larry Bird. Stumbling through the lane in the deciding game of Boston's series with Atlanta, Bird made such an improbable wrong-handed hook shot that he demanded the ball back on the next play, explaining later, "I wanted to see how hot I really was." Missing only once, he scored 20 points in the closing quarter. Afterward, players for both teams mentioned an unnatural "look" in his eye. As the next series started, it was gone.

On a tennis court, Arthur Ashe calls it the "zone." Jimmy Connors says the / ball grows to the size of a watermelon. By myriad accounts, the streaker's game, whatever the game, seems to be played in slow motion. Wayne Gretzky speaks of hockey that way. At the height of his batting powers, Ted Williams claimed he was able to read the spinning labels on 78-r.p.m. recordings. Pete Rose could count the stitches on a curving baseball. To Race Driver Jackie Stewart, nothing in the world seemed as serenely slow as a car responding well at 200 m.p.h.

But when a fender touches the wall, all hell breaks loose. "Streaks just happen; they're never planned," says the old football coach Bud Wilkinson, whose Oklahoma teams once won 47 straight games. "There's always a suspicion of mysticism and inevitability. If you really believe something is going to happen and your opponent gets to thinking the same thing, it's pretty powerful. Bad streaks especially -- slumps -- have a kind of life of their own." In an unsuccessful stint in St. Louis, Wilkinson tried to persuade the Cardinals to compete against themselves. "If you can do that, you erase the scoreboard," he says. But it does not always work.

Golfer Mike Reid toured for eleven years, until last October, without winning a tournament. He was the first golfer ever to bank $1 million and no championships. "I went at it very egocentrically," he says. "I thought everything revolved around me and my ball, as if what the other players did wouldn't matter." For a year or two, he patiently waited his turn. "Then I got to the questioning stage, from there to the doubting stage, from there to the changing-everything stage." After a while, the kidding of friends and the kind telegrams from strangers stopped. "In the locker room, the other players didn't know what to say. I could feel their helplessness as much as my own."

Finally, Reid and his wife came to a conclusion. "Both of us had to let go of wanting it so bad," he says. "We looked each other in the eye and said, 'It's all right if it doesn't happen.' You know, it wasn't two weeks later that it did."

Some look for moral messages in sprees and schneiders. Joe DiMaggio's 56- game hitting streak, the ten-year hurdle of Edwin Moses, even (perversely) the 41 consecutive losses of the Columbia University football team are considered gold stars. Regarding Brooklyn First Baseman Gil Hodges' hitless World Series of 1952, the New York Times puzzled, "If he were a drinker or a playboy, it would be understandable. But he's a fine, clean-living paragon of good behavior." When the slump carried over into the next season, Hodges became the particular project of several orders of nuns.

"To a ballplayer," he would later write, "a slump is a plague -- second only, perhaps, to the black death. And he is convinced that it is an evil designed just for him. I thought so too, until recently. After a game one night, an old friend -- a salesman -- dropped by for a visit. 'How's business?' I asked. 'Fine -- for everyone but me,' he moaned. 'I don't know what's wrong. I'm working just as hard as ever but selling nothing. It's gotten so bad that I'm convinced I won't make the sale even before I walk into a buyer's office.' While he spoke, the thought hit me. 'This guy's in a slump.' "

In 1978 Rose threatened DiMaggio's record with a 44-game hitting streak, the longest in the history of the National League. The caravan of newsmen chronicling Rose's every twitch, starting with what he had each day for breakfast, left out the commonly known fact that a paternity suit was imminent and his life away from the field was a shambles. Always his favorite place, the diamond had become his only haven, and every night he got a hit. "Damn, I'm going bad," he muttered aside one night to one of the reporters, who said, "Huh?" Rose threw up his arms. "Hell, I'm hitting everything on the button, and only one a night is falling in."

Everyone goes through streaks like that.