72 Science of Mind AUGUST 2016 ScienceOfMind.com ScienceOfMind.com AUGUST 2016 Science of Mind 73

From the classic halftime locker room speech to recent mind-body studies of peak performance, the benefits of a motivated mind have long been a source of intrigue in sports and physical achievement.

Although motivational techniques are not new to athletics, athletes themselves from college wrestlers to Olympic medalists, have never been so open about discussing their spiritual and mind-power programs. What they share is like a master class in the power of New Thought.

Probably the greatest pioneer to openly embrace New Thought and Science of Mind on the playing field is former San Francisco Giants pitcher Barry Zito. The Cy Young Award winner was an avowed reader of Science of Mind found-er Ernest Holmes and mystic Neville Goddard.

Zito came from a family steeped in the metaphysical. In 1969, his maternal grandmother founded the Teaching of the Inner Christ Church in San Diego, a denomination that emphasizes the divine creative forces inherent within the mind. Barry’s mother, Roberta, was an ordained minister at the church. He also grew up hearing his father Joe’s injunctions to affirmative thought, which fueled his daily pitch-ing practice.

“I’ve been raised by a family that has always told me that I could do anything I wanted,” he says. “Even from the time I was 7, 8, 10, 12, 15,

if you asked me I would say, ‘I’m going to be a big-league pitcher.’ I didn’t know how or where or when, but I saw the end result.”

Zito augmented his beliefs, of course, with intensive training. Joe Zito built his son a pitcher’s mound in the family backyard, and at age 7 Barry started practicing seven days a week. Well into his major league career, the pitcher continued to work out daily, including on vacations.

In the early 2000s when Zito was pitching for the Oakland Ath-letics, he pasted an affirmation inside the rim of his cap: “Be still and know.” It came from Scripture and also from a passage in Ernest Holmes’s first book, “Creative Mind,” from 1919. Zito credits the slender volume with resurrecting his baseball career after a mid-2001 slump. The pitcher and his father huddled to read “Creative Mind” together “for five, six, seven hours a day. I made notes and I made affirmation tapes and put up signs in my room affirming who I was and the power that I have.”

Zito went on to win a remarkable 11 of his next 12 games. He famously rounded out the 2001 season with a 17–8 record and a 3.49 ERA. The southpaw whose second big-league season had looked like it was headed for disaster instead won two consecutive American League pitcher-of-the-month awards by the season’s end.

“You could call it a miracle,” Zito says. “The bottom line is that I went from being one of the worst pitchers in the league, and then, post-‘Creative Mind,’ I went from being well below average to being named pitcher of the month for the American League for August and September.” He often speaks of his career as divided before and after his discovery of this influential book.

After several rocky seasons with the Giants starting in 2007, Zito was sidelined in early 2011 by a foot injury. This time he augmented his mental preparedness with the daily practice of Transcendental Meditation, a mantra-based form of meditation that is credited with promoting both relaxation and mental focus. He came roaring back in the 2012 season, pitching for the first time in the World Series, which Zito helped the Giants sweep. One sportscaster called it “the 2012 rebirth of Barry Zito.”

Spirit RunnerFor sheer mental toughness, few athletes can compare with

Olympic runner Gail Devers. The three-time gold medalist is an extraordinary anomaly in the history of sprinting and hurdling.

Devers was struck with a crippling bout of the thyroid disorder Graves’ disease in 1988. Fearing ejection from competition if found using banned substances, Devers refused the drugs that were in-tended to mitigate side effects from the radiation therapy required

SpiritTHE

OF

WinningHOW NEW THOUGHT HAS TAKEN CENTER STAGE IN THE LIVES OF CHAMPION ATHLETES

BARRY ZITOPitcher

MITCH HOROWITZ

74 Science of Mind AUGUST 2016 ScienceOfMind.com ScienceOfMind.com AUGUST 2016 Science of Mind 75

to treat her enlarged thyroid. The results were as unexpected as they were calamitous: Devers developed excruciatingly painful lesions on her feet, and sores and scales all over her body and face. Her weight plummeted. Her feet swelled so severely that the 5-foot-3-inch runner could barely squeeze into size-12 men’s sneakers — and eventually couldn’t walk at all. Family members had to carry her to the bath-room. Devers’s feet grew so swollen and infected that doctors consid-ered amputation.

A combination of drugs and a program of steady, determined training allowed her to emerge from the ordeal to win a gold medal at the Barcelona games in 1992. She continued to run competitively more than 15 years later, into her early 40s. Devers won track competitions well past an age when most of her contemporaries were retired.

A devotee of positive thinking, the Olympian credited her come-back to a rigorous program of focused thought. “I think positive begets positive, and the same is true on the opposite side. We’re magnets,” she says. Like many Americans, Devers calls herself spiritual but not religious. “My af-filiation is that I have a connection with God, bottom line,” she says. Devers, like Zito, has professed admiration for Science of Mind.

“There’s a force out there in nature that allows or puts things in place, and sets it in place for people — whatever you call it. Even in science there is a force of nature that allows things to keep moving in the right direction. That’s how I look at life, that’s how I live my life. … There [are] all kinds of forces out there; now, I choose, and what seems to bond with me is, the positive.”

Devers’s mental-training program encompassed several methods:• Consistent Prayer. “I’m constantly praying. Do I have a certain

time that I sit and meditate? No. Is there a certain way I do it? No. I’m constantly calling on God and asking Him to help me through my day.”

• Sacred Contracts. “I actually sign a contract with myself for any goal that I set out to do, no matter what it is, because that holds you accountable.”

• Journaling. Devers wrote constantly, to relax, to sort out ideas

and to digest the events of the day. “That’s how I clear my head.” She also gave inspirational writings to friends.

• Deep Faith. Devers claims her Olympic comeback was one-part grit, one-part faith. “Nobody gets where they are by themselves, there is something or some force out there that has helped you. For me, it’s asking God to come into your life. I tell kids all the time we get into trouble when we ask man to help us. … When He created me, He gave me a box of potential, and all He asks is that we keep reaching into that box, and He’ll keep blessing it.”

In dealing with issues of illness and recovery, Devers exemplified how positive-mind principles are not necessarily a substitute but an augment to medical treatment (which for Devers includes a lifelong intake of a synthetic thyroid pill). In effect, Devers’s approach was an updated version of the Emmanuel Movement, the positive-mind ministry of the early 20th century that combined metaphysics and traditional medicine. Affirmative thought multiplied Gail’s sense of both medical and training options.

For example, in 2001 she began training without a coach. Most run-ners would never consider such a move — yet it coincided with some of her greatest successes. Three years into her self-coaching, Devers made history with back-to-back victories in the 60-meter dash and

60-meter hurdles in the U.S. indoor championships. “A lot of people say you cannot coach yourself in a technical event, there’s no way,” she says. But the fiercely indepen-dent-minded runner saw it as a natural progression of her inner development.

Do Things ProperlyIn many regards, the grand-

daddy of sports motivation — someone who combined both spiri-tual beliefs and ethical formulas — was UCLA’s legendary basketball coach John Wooden. Coaching at

UCLA from 1948 to 1975, Wooden led his team to an unequaled 10 national championships, 88 consecutive victories and a more than 80 percent win record. Wooden did not profess any one mind-power philosophy. Rather, he engaged in what might be considered the core

GAIL DEVERSRunner

JOHN WOODENCoach

THE Spirit WinningOF THE Spirit WinningOF

76 Science of Mind AUGUST 2016 ScienceOfMind.com ScienceOfMind.com AUGUST 2016 Science of Mind 77

American success metaphysic: an indomitable belief in self-develop-ment and fair dealing, even in the face of individual limits. The coach told his players — including superstars Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Bill Walton — that the factors within a person’s control, such as attention to detail and dedication to hard work, matter more than innate talent.

“I’ve had some players that didn’t have great natural ability,” he told me shortly before his death in 2010, “but they learned to do things properly. And maybe they couldn’t do them with the grace and quickness that the more natural athlete could, but they would still get the job done. You couldn’t have great teams if they were all like that, but I don’t think you can have a great team without some like that.”

Wooden would humble hotshot players at the start of each season by instructing them on the first day of practice on the proper way to put on their shoes and socks, so as to avoid blisters. “I would not permit fancy stuff in the teaching of my players at all.” It was a Wood-en hallmark: He spoke rarely of coaching but more frequently of teaching. As a result, many players, and a large number of fans, saw Wooden not so much as an athletic coach but a life teacher.

How You Label ItIn the 21st century, sports com-

mentators and journalists also look more closely at the positive-mind dimension of athletics. This was on poignant display in the 2012 Olympic women’s gymnastics com-petition.

Gymnast Aly Raisman delivered one of the games’ most extraordi-nary performances on the balance beam, a uniquely mental sport. The beam is 4 inches wide — everything in nature tells the athlete that she must fall.

It is the least natural of all events, and, hence, the most mentally challenging. As one commentator put it, the balance beam confronts the gymnast with a “wall of doubt.” Yet against these odds, Raisman delivered an extraordinarily assured and supple performance.

“You ask her about feeling the pressure,” says commentator Tim Daggett, “and she says, ‘I don’t really feel it.’ I think it’s because she

labels it something different in her head. Some kids feel anxiety, feel pressure — she feels excitement. It’s just how you label that.” Daggett has the kind of psychological insight that might not have been heard a generation or two earlier, but it has become a familiar aspect of sports commentary in the 21st century.

It WorksAnother notable aspect of

“sports psyching” today is how open champion athletes are about using methods from New Thought. When Sports Illustrated named Cornell wrestling champ Kyle Dake as its college athlete of the year in 2013, the wrestling leg-end described a regimen that will sound familiar to anyone who is a fan of the 1926 mind-power classic “It Works.” In fact, anyone who needs a reminder of the impor-tance of writing down your goals

need only consider Dake’s story. For three and a half years, the young wrestler filled a red-covered spiral notebook with 2,978 affirmations, written at night and in the morning, affirming his weight-class victories over the course of four wrestling seasons. Sports Illustrated put it this way: “Once in the morning and once at night as a freshman Dake wrote, 2010 141 lb DI NCAA National Champion. Twice in the morning and twice at night as a sophomore he wrote, 2011 149 lb DI National Champion. Thrice in the morning and thrice at night as a junior he wrote, 2012 157 lb DI National Champion. Four times in the morning and four times at night as a senior he wrote, 2013 165 lb DI National Champion.

On March 23, 2013, Kyle Dake made history as the first college wrestler to win an NCAA title in four different weight classes.”

The facts are clear: On the field and in the ring, on the mat and on the court, New Thought works. If you love an aspiring athlete, and want to help him or her achieve greatness, send the champion off to school or competition with a copy of “Creative Mind,” a heart filled with faith and a notebook for affirmations. And when you witness their success, let it return you to your own practice with renewed vigor. z

This article is reprinted with permission from HarvBishop.com.

ALY RAISMANGymnast

KYLE DAKEWrestler

THE Spirit WinningOF THE Spirit WinningOF