By Tony Gallagher, The Province July 4, 2013
Assuming Roberto Luongo doesn’t refuse to report to the Vancouver Canucks this fall, he’ll be coming back looking to regain his top form as one of the best goaltenders in the NHL.
That’s what he’s been for many years and, while he’s been through a heap of turmoil over the last year or two as Cory Schneider emerged as a player, finding a way to overcome and essentially forget about that past and worry about the present is going to be his biggest challenge. What’s really interesting is that goaltenders who have reached Luongo’s level of success are already enormously qualified to do that with great aplomb if they get some help and lean on the techniques that have let them forget about bad goals that all goalies have given up, says Vancouver sports and performance psychologist Dr. Saul Miller.
“If your goal is to be the best you can be under any circumstance which is generally the goal of all professional athletes, when stuff happens in life, you either use it or it uses you,” said Miller. “When you have a bad experience, how do you use it?
“It’s difficult to say anything specific if I haven’t met or worked with the player, but you know that you can help the person. How you would help is difficult to say without an intimate relationship with the person and with what’s going on in his life. But, in general, a pro-athlete who has had moments of being one of the best in the game and moments of inconsistency in high pressure, highly visible situations has to have a short memory and tune out the past. He’s got to work on the ability to treat it like the last goal. It’s always the next shot. Regardless of what happened in the past, it’s always the next shot and there are techniques to focus on the present and not on the past. It’s that way for all of us in life.”
Miller works with eight current NHL players and has worked with players currently on the rosters of over half the teams in the league, as well as players and teams in Europe. He’s worked with NFL and major league baseball players and teams and has a wealth of experience. And he’s certainly not pandering for a job because he’s knows the Canucks already have, or at least had, former Boston University sports psychologist Len Zaichkowsky working with the team. But he’s worked with lots of goaltenders over the years so his observations might be interesting with Luongo very much on the menu these days.
“A goalie stops thousands and thousands of shots as he comes up through the ranks, in practices and games, and what he does in sticking out his right leg or his blocker is automatic. When you start thinking and it intrudes on that automatic process, that’s when your performance goes down,” said Miller.
Needless to say, a strong start will be crucial for Luongo and the team as it faces increased competition for a playoff spot given realignment. The traditional October swoon the goalie has traditionally experienced over the years is not going to go over well if it happens again this fall. Not only would it hurt the locals, it might well sink Lui’s chances of pursuing that second gold medal at the Sochi Olympics, something he might get a shot at with a strong showing out of the gate.
The high level of success Luongo has experienced would give him a strong sense of self, one of the keys to personal success, according to Miller, and Lui tapping back into that strength will be one of the keys if he is to succeed — along with superior preparation.
“When a hockey player has a strong shift or makes a good play he knows ‘that’s me’ which is learned behavior over the years,” said Miller when talking about sense of self. “But when there’s a bad shift or say defenceman makes a bad giveaway, he knows ‘that’s not me, I always make that play.’ And using techniques like that he can forget the mistake, forget the past.
“Goalies face more pressure in the game than any other player and perhaps more than anyone else in sport. Some say a cornerback in football has the toughest job, to make reads then a snap decision and when they get burned they look really bad. But goalies certainly have the most pressure in hockey and Jacques Plante said it best years ago when he said: ‘Can you imagine a game when every time you make a mistake a red light goes on and 15,000 people stand up and cheer?’ You have to be in the right physical and mental state to be able to manage that kind of work.”
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Andrew Phillip Chernoff 