For A Pro Sports Psychologist, Life Is a Nonstop Consultation

It’s just 48 hours before the Houston Tex and season opener, and the football team is in a scrimmage inside the "bubble," a special indoor practice field. Suddenly, the coaches crank up the prerecorded "crowd noise" to a deafening roar.

In a game, the noise in the stadium can reach 110 decibles. In practice, on Friday, it’s even louder than that. "We pipe in 130 decibels," or about the roar of a jet plane, says Fran Pirozzolo, the team’s staff psychologist. The idea is to create far more stress and communications problems than the Texans will actually face on the field.

Known as just "Fran" to his clients, he has for 20 years applied "stress inoculation" and other "mental toughness" techniques to a spectrum of high-performing professional athletes, from the New York Yankees (from 1996 to 2002) to boxer Evander Holyfield. Today his private clients include more than a dozen professional golfers on the PGA and LPGA tours.

His daily life is nonstop consultation, in person, by email and by phone. Driving home from the Texans’ practice, Dr. Pirozzolo gave a 20-minute pep talk by cellphone to one of professional baseball’s best pitchers, who he says can’t be named for client-confidentiality reasons. ("Some people think it’s a sign of weakness if they are seeing a psychologist," Dr. Pirozzolo says.) He invites golfers to his house on the 9^th fairway of the Woodlands Country Club north of Houston, sometimes hooking them up to a heart monitor as they practice putting. He believes a calm mind, reflected in lower heart rate, increases concentration.

For a sports nut, it doesn’t get much better. Dr. Pirozzolo’s house is almost a shrine to his career, with a glass case filled with trophies and World Series rings, from his years on the Yankees’ staff. He hobnobs with celebrities and politicians, including former Vice president Dan Quayle, and he co-authored a book, in 1997, with Sam Snead, the late golf legend.

Often, Dr. Pirozzolo’s clients call him when they are in a slump or in the dumps, typically, saying something like: " ‘I’m not enjoying this. I don’t get it. I’m angry all the time. I’m quitting,’" he says.

Usually, he recommends a combination of specific techniques. Among them: developing a split second of mental quietude just before a pitch or before the swing at a baseball or a golf ball. To help do that, the athletes pick a "trigger" word or mantra such as "zoom" or "whip" to keep them intensely focused and to ward off distractions.

He also recommends a "stair-step approach" to fixing problems. A struggling pitcher, who during practice only gets 40% of his pitches in a certain area of the strike zone, is encouraged to get to 50% and then move it up gradually. He doesn’t set a 100% goal. "If he had, he would set himself up for failure rather than success," Dr. Pirozzolo says.

One of his constant challenges, though, is to convince players to focus on the mental aspects to breaking a slump rather than just making physical adjustments. When a star pitcher recently told him he was working on a "mechanical flaw" to reverse some troubles on the mound, Dr. Pirozzolo shot back an email telling that it wasn’t enough.

Two hours later, Dr. Pirozzolo got a phone call from the pitcher, who said he was having trouble with teammates who considered him aloof. "You want to be dominant out there," Dr. Pirozzolo counseled him, but not with his teammates. He told the pitcher, "You need to start showing them that you’re there for them, that you’ve got their backs covered."

Dr. Pirozzolo thinks golf is behind football in developing the mental toughness that leads to the best level of play in competition. When he consults for a touring golf pro, Dr. Pirozzolo insists that during the important Wednesday practice round before a weekend tournament, the pro hit a terrible tee shot on purpose, topping the ball like a rank duffer and driving it just 100 yards. The pro is instructed to not tell fellow players or caddies it was on purpose and must immediately tee up another ball. The idea is to get used to the embarrassment of an extremely poor shot.

On occasion, Dr. Pirozzolo even acts as caddie for pro golfers during big tournaments. "I try to be embedded," he says, adding there’s no better way to give advice and support than to be walking next to the player, handing him clubs. An excellent golfer himself who stands at a muscular 5’8", Dr. Pirozzolo recently caddied for client Harrison Frazar, ranked No. 134 on this year’s PGA money list. When he caddies, Dr. Pirozzolo doesn’t offer advice on club selection, but tries to relax the client by discussing football or the golfer’s family, so that it seems more like a practice round than a high-stress tournament.

Sports psychology pays well-at least at Dr. Pirozzolo’s level. He makes less than $100,000 a year for his work for the Texans, where his official title is "player development coach." But he makes several times that amount on his consulting arrangements; some top athletes pay him tens of thousands of dollars a year in retainers and bonuses.

Dr. Pirozzolo spent 15 years as chief of the neuropsychology service at Baylor University’s school of medicine, often studying patients with Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease. In the 1980s, he began focusing on techniques to improve motor skills and various aspects of human performance. He started consulting informally for professional golfers, which gradually expanded into a business.

"Practioners are coming out of the woodwork in a geometric sense," says Roland Carlstedt, chairman of the American Board of Sport Psychology and a licensed psychologist. Dr. Carlstedt, whose organization seeks to bring scientific standards to the occupation, says that probably 50% to 65% of professional sports teams have hired psychology practitioners to work with players on performance. He says that many of them are "guru and proclamation driven" and says that only a small percentage can make a comfortable living exclusively by sports-psychology consulting-that’s how it should be, he says.

Not everyone in the world of golf instruction shares Dr. Pirozzolo’s maniacal focus on mental toughness. "You don’t have confidence without competence. You don’t have competence without the mechanics," says Joe Daniels, president of The Golfing Machine, Beaverton, Ore., a company that trains golf instructors.

Dr. Pirozzolo believes that at the pro level, lots of golfers with great "mechanics" simply lack the "rage to master" that defines the very best. He says that most professional athletes – golfers included-don’t actually crave the make-or-break moments, whether it’s batting in the seventh game of a World Series or battling for the lead of the U.S. Open golf championship on Sunday afternoon.

"They want to get it over with," Dr. Pirozzolo says. He thinks many tour players focus on the start of the tournament rather than envisioning themselves in the heat of battle to win on the last day-Sunday. "That’s a flaw," he says.

To help golfers and football players think like world beaters, Dr. Pirozzolo prepares audio tapes in which he first tries to get the athlete to relax into a semihypnotic state, and then to imagine that tackles on the football field or the specific golf holes that will confront the golfer in the tournament ahead.

"Hear the sound of the stadium and feel what winning feels like. And let’s get comfortable with this feeling. This is your time. You live for this." Says one tape he made for a Texas football palyer.

Some players swear by Dr. Pirozzolo’s advice. Among them is golfer Hank Kuehne, the 1998 U.S. Amateur champion and currently a regular on the PGA Tour ranked No. 90 in tour winnings this year. Mr. Kuehne says he has embraced a number of Dr. Pirozzolo’s golf techniques such as focusing on his Sunday performance rather than Thursday. He also is a big fan of visualizing important shots in advance.

"I imagine very difficult tee shots," says Mr. Kuehen. "An then I go out and actually hit them."

Of course, all the meditation and mental toughness sometimes isn’t enough to win. In the Texans’ season opener on Sept. 11, Dr. Pirozzolo’s team got walloped by the Buffalo Bills, 22-7.

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