Bob Rotella has a business relationship with luck that flows one way. In the performance space, they have competing interests. Luck does what it likes and is accountable to nobody. Rotella, though, has clients who need reasons, explanations, solutions. Sometimes, Rotella says, they need to talk about luck.
He tells a story about Joe Daley, a journeyman pro golfer. Qualifying school used to be a gruelling, six-day marathon and in 2000 he came to the 107th hole of a 108-hole tournament with a PGA Tour card in his grasp. On that green, though, he took three putts, the second of which was a grotesque freak: the ball went into the hole, jumped out again and stayed on the lip.
Everybody was stunned. Daley dashed his baseball cap to the ground in a delirious funk. He shouted up to the TV commentary tower alongside the 17th green to ask if they had captured the poltergeist on film and then he called out for a rules official. Nothing could be done to extricate him from the barbed wire of his bad luck.
The steel cup in the hole had not been sitting properly, and Daley’s ball had met it at such an angle that it was fired back above ground. At one of the most critical moments in his career, he had been struck by lightning. Daley missed his tour card by one shot and in the seasons that followed he never made it back to the PGA Tour.
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But was that the shot that cost him? The 17th was a par five and with a short iron in his hand Daley had pulled his approach into a greenside lake. That shot had nothing to do with luck. “It’s just a crime for him to miss this green to the left,” they said in the TV commentary before Daley took his first putt.
The putt that jumped in and out of the hole like a ferret was for double-bogey. Daley should never have given luck an opening to whack him.
Golf has a complicated relationship with luck, and a lot of the time golf doesn’t try to fight it. Sometimes a drive down the middle of the fairway will land in a divot and occasionally a terrific approach shot will hit the pin and career off the green. Luck has no conscience about that.
Rotella has been the pre-eminent sports psychologist in golf for decades and the players he has worked with in the men’s and women’s game have amassed 88 major titles between them, Rory McIlroy and Pádraig Harrington included. He doesn’t try to pretend to his players that luck will play no part in their performance; instead, they devise coping strategies.
“There are players who have ruined their careers because they couldn’t deal with it and they think they are always getting bad breaks,” says Rotella. “There are all kinds of players who get lost in that. We take a lot of pride in the fact that that’s not what we’re going to do. So, when you see someone else whining or complaining and getting down about a bad break, we’re going to do the opposite of that.
“If you love golf, you love a game that is unfair by design. So, do you really love the game the way it exists? That’s why acceptance plays such a role. We spend a lot of time talking about that. It’s OK to accept that luck plays a role, but we have some control over luck by how we respond to it.”
In modern sport, luck is more harassed than it once was. It is surrounded now by reams of empirical data and verifiable explanations. In the minds of elite sportspeople, it has lost some of its agency over outcomes. They have become accustomed to versions of events led by cause and effect. In this rampant intellectualisation of sport, though, luck has become an inconvenient outlier: a known quantity with an unknown value.
In a goal setting meeting at the beginning of the season, or before a big match, nobody will stand in front of a group of players and say: ‘We’re going to need a bit of luck.’ They would immediately lose the room. The path to victory must be illuminated by quantifiable factors.
And yet, in post-match interviews, luck is often offered as a partial explanation for the outcome. Losing teams are regularly tormented by balls that “didn’t bounce their way” and related atrocities. Losing athletes are greeted by a chorus of “hard luck,” even if their defeat had nothing to do with chance. Just like the set piece phrases at funerals, “hard luck” is always meant kindly.
In that context, citing bad luck is sometimes a cop-out, or a thin veil for obvious failures; sometimes, though, people just nod and accept it. If sport was an exact science, would anybody care for it? Luck is the corrupting element that refuses to be sanitised.
But if you can’t account for it, must you still acknowledge it? Gary Keegan has been the most influential and successful performance coach in Irish sport over the last 25 years, from Olympic sports to rugby to Gaelic games. In a high performance environment, he believes, luck cannot be entertained.
“We would never refer to its existence to a player, because mentally you need them in the right place to do what they need to do,” says Keegan. “You won’t refuse a bit of good fortune, but you’ll never mention it to the players.
“The concept of luck can feed into an excuse mentality. It can infiltrate the mind and take accountability away from the player or the group. People say, ‘well, you make your own luck.’ But if you’re making your own luck, you’re making it through performance, through your application, through your behaviours.”
The conviction that winning teams and successful athletes somehow make their own luck is never contested. Gary Player’s old line, “the more I practice the luckier I get,” is the most quoted aphorism in sport and the most trusted. Without questioning it, people are prepared to believe that talented athletes who work hard are rewarded with good fortune, as if it operated along the lines of supermarket loyalty bonuses.
Professor Richard Wiseman from the University of Hertfordshire, though, took a scientific approach to this claim in his book The Luck Factor. He attempted to show how luck could be created, not in sport specifically, but in day-to-day life. By placing ads in newspapers, he assembled 400 people who considered themselves either “very lucky” or “very unlucky,” and formed what he called “Luck school.”
Over an eight-year period he engaged them in psychometric questionnaires, laboratory experiments and extensive interviewing. He also asked them to keep a “luck journal,” in which they noted down any good fortune they encountered.
From that research he set out four principles that he believed characterised “lucky people,” all of which were related in different ways to their state of mind. Essentially, they expected to be lucky, or were prepared to acknowledge good fortune in all sorts of manifestations.
“Lucky people are skilled at creating, noticing and acting upon chance opportunities,” writes Professor Wiseman.
In sport, that boils down to the belief that something good will come from repeatedly doing the right thing. But is that really luck?
During Ian Rush’s career, it would have been fascinating to know how many goals he scored for Liverpool after a goalkeeper spilled a team-mate’s shot. It might only have resulted in a goal or two in a season, but it would always have been described as “lucky”.
How many fruitless runs, though, would Rush have made to get that break? If he was “lucky”, it was because he expected something good to happen and never deviated from that belief.
The extraordinary thing, perhaps, is that even with the explosion in data harvesting and data analysis and sophisticated, drilled-down explanations across all the major sports, that luck is still a player in every arena.
Football and hurling have been latecomers to complex analysis, but every meaningful game and thousands of meaningless ones are subjected to rigorous reflection now. Just like in soccer and rugby and other sports, some stuff that is typically ascribed to luck would be recorded by the data analysts as human error. When a shot hits the woodwork, for example, it is invariably described as “unlucky” and yet the data analysts would record it simply as a “miss”: human error rather than bad luck.
Barry Cleary, the co-founder of GAA Insights, has been involved with a succession of intercounty teams and top class club sides over the last decade, and in that time he has come to accommodation with luck.
“When puck-outs go long [in hurling and football], you can study it all you want but there’s no science to it, it’s pure luck which way the ball bounces off people,” he says. “Honestly, I have studied this and the only way to give yourself a better chance is to have more tickets in the lottery.
“If you can get a plus-one on the breaks, or not be outnumbered, you give yourself the best chance, but that’s all it is, chance. When it comes to coaching, you know where the luck is and you try to eliminate the impact of the chance. You see Limerick in hurling, the ball will bounce against them on a puck-out, but they’ll be really well set up defensively, so they’re cancelling the impact of luck. That’s what a lot of teams, especially at the lower levels, don’t think about at all.”
Of all sports, luck is omnipresent in horse racing. “Luck in running” is a phrase heard every day at the races and it is one of the most common causes of winning and losing. Sometimes that will be down to jockey-error or a mistake by the horse, but given the nature of the game, that kind of luck is just absorbed.
Ruby Walsh was one of the greatest champions in the history of jumps racing and his granular analysis on TV is a masterclass in cause and effect. But in horse racing, luck is inescapable and sometimes it will be the only reasonable explanation.
He tells a story about Commanche Court, the most successful horse that Walsh’s father Ted ever trained. One year at Cheltenham, Frozen Groom fell in front of him and by the time Commanche Court had cleared the fence Frozen Groom had slid into his racing line.
“Commanche Court goes to jump him, but just as he leaves the ground Frozen Groom stands up, so I hit him a broadside and I get brought down,” says Walsh. “That was in March. Six weeks later I got to the third last in Punchestown when Micko’s Dream and Doran’s Pride both fall in front of me.
“I’m behind them on the take-off side of the fence and when I land Doran’s Pride has rolled in front us. But Commanche Court jumps him and he wins the Heineken Gold Cup. I couldn’t control either of those situations. That’s just luck and no luck. People want something that’s quantifiable and luck isn’t quantifiable.”
The unending battle continues.
Good luck.
