By David Hauser

Michael Sam came out this week.

Relatively unknown on the national stage beyond the scope of college football enthusiasts and NFL “draftnicks” as an All-American defensive lineman and AP SEC Defensive Player of the Year, now his name, image, and clips of an interview with ESPN Outside the Lines’ Chris Connelly are being strewn across the mediasphere for society to react to and judge.

Through these initial and brief media openings into Michael Sam’s world, a few things seem clear.  He appears comfortable and confident, stating clearly and firmly, “I’m not afraid of who I am” in response to Connelly questioning what it is like to be setting out on such a landmark moment in American Sports as an openly gay athlete.

His comments also suggest a young man with tremendous courage—courage not just to “be true to one’s self,” which is hard enough for most of us, but to be one’s self while preparing to walk into the perils of an NFL locker room fraught with oddly expressed versions of masculinity, hazing, and the emotional sensitivities of a sledgehammer.  Furthermore, his comments also suggest courage to be entering the 24-hour news cycle that at times can be as damaging and dangerous as the NFL playing field itself.  But as much as Sam communicates courage, confidence, and comfort discussing this new frontier in American sports, it is impossible to see Michael Sam without noticing how young he is.

Michael Sam, at the ripe age of 24, is taking a leadership role on a civil rights issue that many wiser and more experienced 50 year olds still dance around with stiff and politically correct talking points.  What is so refreshing about Michael Sam’s entry on to the national scene is that it does not seem contrived.  He has the feel of a man just talking about who he is and wanting to describe himself before others can dictate a narrative of “who he is.”

Perhaps only a young person can be this brave.  It also suggests something about this new generation.  The “25 and under folks” are the progressive group of 18 and 19 years olds from 2008 who were in large part responsible for electing this country’s first African-American President (Sam would’ve been 18 in 2008).  At some point in the last 5-6 years we hit a tipping point with the LGBT movement, where verbalizing anti-gay remarks were enough to suspend the most financially profitable show on television, rather than a former age when openly pro-gay sentiments in media could be prone to scare advertisers away.  I am not well versed enough to know precisely what was the moment or action that finally tipped society toward social justice on this issue.  However I will say it is Sam’s generation, and their increased tolerance for difference, their greater valuing of equality, and belief in fairness, that has opened the space on the national scene for Michael Sam to speak honestly and comfortably about who he is.

In the Fall of 2008, bubbling with idealism and optimism of what felt like a genuinely new chapter in American history, I entered a PhD program in psychology at Arizona State University in hopes of changing the world for the better.  I was immediately thrust into an opportunity to teach new undergrads a course on Career Development.  I promptly adapted this course to fit with what I felt I knew a little more about, exploring one’s values and interests amidst a diverse range of human skills and expression (since as a student in a protracted run of graduate school at the time, I’m not sure how equipped or deft I was to be teaching others about job marketability).

I recall early in the semester a lecture and discussion I put together on the idea of “diversity in the job place” and how these young people were going to need to figure out how to adapt to differences, even sexual orientation differences, to fit within the ever evolving job marketplace of the 21^st century.  I had grandiose plans of speaking from my perch of a podium and teaching these new young minds the importance of being open to differences in others.  Perhaps somewhat biased by the arid and abrasive politically climate in Arizona at the time toward Mexican immigrants, I simply assumed I had an uphill battle.

Much to my dismay and surprise, I was the only vocal voice in the classroom of 36 projecting a notion of ignorance.  Mostly I was ignorant to a new age of young people who grew up on the Internet and were talking about sexual orientation with greater nuance and an expanded openness and tolerance than I was used to hearing from my peers when growing up.  For at that point, I thought I was young enough to still have a pulse of the young people and not yet aware that I was talking to an entirely new generation built on the values shaped by the vast freedom of information offered by the infinite connections to others via the Internet.

Two particular students’ voices stood out that day.  One male voice came from a Phoenix suburb who led the group discussion politely, but with enthusiasm and earnestness that “his generation” saw things differently, saying something to the effect that “[sexual orientation] isn’t a thing to us, it doesn’t matter if you are gay or straight, it’s just about who you are.”  The other voice was an outspoken ex-soldier from the War of Iraqi Freedom, who in his first semester in college was still trying to fit his robust personality and series of experiences from wartime into the quieter trimmings of a state university student body with limited success, as peer students were puzzled of how to absorb his typically verbose, strong, and not always popularly held opinions.  This ex-soldier spoke with some gender narrowness, but spoke of his personal transformation in his own worldview based on his recent experiences abroad stating, “a man is a man and it’s not so much about “that” [gay/straight], but your actions and how you carry yourself.  Everything else is just your personal business.  A man should get to choose to be whoever he wants to be.”

Likely there were voices that did not speak up that day in the group of 36 that held different views, perhaps less socially-just LGBT sentiments.  But their voices were not heard.  For those voices were not of the majority opinion anymore and no longer offered the safety in numbers found within groupthink.

This is just one example, in one specific location and time.  The “small sample size” alarm bells are surely ringing loudly as this is far from scientific evidence of cultural change.  Since 2008, there remains a genuine problem with bullying in schools and on social media. YouTube comment sections are still far too comfortable a venue for the “f” word.  Young people are still far too often resorting to hurting themselves or even suicide based on the agonizing struggle of seeking acceptance from peers. But we are somewhere very different in 2014.  A lot has changed in what feels like a short amount of time.

It is evident something happened in the last decade, but I suggest the elected officials had little to do with it.  It has been the young people, under the age of 25, who are taking the lead on changing the cultural temperature toward the LGBT community.  It is the shadowy hacker group Anonymous that values equality for people and free information that is changing the world around us.  It is the Reddit message boards threads that are re-writing the social script, especially for boys and adolescent males, that being a man is not how 30-something athletes like Richie Incognito suggest it to be. It is 12^th Man and Seattle Seahawks fan, Macklemore, singing about “Same Love.” And today it is Michael Sam.  The youth are rising and teaching the rest of us.

Not long ago, figures like Matthew Sheppard were tortured and killed for living too openly, making themselves too known.  Michael Sam will never again be unknown and this is most certainly progress.  Of course we are still not “there,” we have not arrived at the harmonious idyllic village upon the hill where everyone can simply come as they are without fear of repercussions.  But the pragmatic question left before us is: as a collective can we continue to work toward opening the space for others to make themselves unabashedly known?

By David Hauser

Regardless of how he performs this Sunday in Super Bowl XLVIII, Peyton Manning will go down as one of the five greatest football players ever.  Manning’s excellence in execution has made him one of the greatest sportsmen of his generation (regards to Brett Hart).  It is his gaudy regular season statistics, his un-guardable ability to be both quarterback and on-field offensive coordinator at the same time (OMAHA!), and his scholarly approach to the game—being so detailed in his preparation and execution that even his two-time Super Bowl-winning MVP little brother still sits in his shadow.

But in football, as in life, every pro still has a con.  For Manning, as much as his regular season masterful execution has become his calling card, the quality that leaves NFL talking heads drooling all over themselves is his occasional (dare I say, consistent) track record of tightening up in the biggest games—his Achilles’ heel as he writes the final few chapters of his storied career.

Manning has two decades of performance data on the national stage, dating back to his four years in creamsicle orange at the University of Tennessee.  His quantitative numbers (win/loss %, personal statistics) have always been so outrageously excellent that he is hard to quantify or make sense of, as he literally has no historical peers or comps.  He remains the greatest SEC Quarterback ever and perhaps the greatest statistical professional quarterback in history (with all due respect to Warren Moon’s Canadian Football catalog).

However, the underlying qualitative story and narrative of the Manning career dating back to his college days is as “the guy who couldn’t win the big game.”  In college, the rap was “he can’t beat Florida” (the alpha dog of the SEC in the mid- to late 90s).  Perplexing as it is looking back, Manning’s UT Volunteers went undefeated and won the National Championship only after Peyton left Knoxville for the NFL (all it took was Tee Martin (who?) replacing Peyton at the helm to finally beat Florida … and everyone else who stood in the Volunteers way the year after Peyton left).  As a Colt, Peyton led his team to the playoffs virtually every season after taking over leadership of the team as a rookie for the previously fledgling franchise.  He created legends out of his cadre of offensive skill players – Marvin Harrison, Reggie Wayne, and Edgerrin James.  But this legendary offense always seemed to find themselves falling a little too short when January came around.

Some might suggest this tightening/choke narrative changed for Peyton in 2006 when he finally conquered his vaunted rival Patriots in a superb comeback win in the AFC Championship.  This followed by the great re-branding of Peyton as “Super Bowl Champion” a couple weeks later when his Colts defeated the Chicago Bears in SB XLI.  But if you investigate beneath the final result, this was one of the sloppiest, most poorly executed Super Bowls in the last decade.  The true hero was Colts rookie defensive back, Kelvin Hayden, who forced the game’s critical interception, returning it for a touchdown, the turning point of an otherwise sluggish and rain-filled Super Bowl.

At 37 years old, Manning just completed the best statistical regular season of any quarterback, of any age, the NFL has ever seen.  That is not supposed to happen.  Yet in his 20 years as a major American athlete, he has only the one game we can look back on and definitely say, “Yeah, that Peyton Manning, he’s clutch” (his 18 point comeback in the 2006 AFC Championship).  This is not insignificant.  For in America, the field is the arena for which we crown our greatest warriors.  And the natural adjectives of a true warrior: stoic, unfailingly courageous, unflappable remain beyond the descriptors that will be used to describe the Peyton Manning legacy.  Unless …

Cue the spotlight: New York City.  Super Bowl XLVIII.  The world’s most important city, in the most culturally consumed American event of the year (a day that quite frankly, “the powers that be” are remiss in not offering up the subsequent Monday as an “observance holiday” … for recovery, you know).  A historically great defense standing in the way of hishistorically great offense, or as Nate Silver pointed out earlier this week on the Colbert Report, this is only the eighth Super Bowl ever that has actually pitted the two best teams of that season against each other.

The stage is set, but is Peyton Manning destined to choke once more, or in this great battle of New York (East Rutherford, NJ), will he finally be able to shift his narrative into the clutch?

The psychological research suggests that there are two major obstacles in Manning’s way.  First is what University of Chicago psychologist, Sian Beilock, describes as the “Curse of Expertise.”  Dr. Beilock, who presents this cutting edge research in her 2011 volume Choke (along with an upcoming Chicago area FAN Event speaking engagement Feb. 18, free to the public), suggests our mind’s process for performing athletic/sports mechanical motion explains part of the story of why people “choke.”  What is sometimes colloquially referred to as “muscle memory” in conversations about athletics, actually consists of different memory processes within the brain: explicit memory, procedural memory, and the use of working memory.

Explicit memory is a description of recall of certain information, or the ability to remember phone numbers or where you left your car in the endless maze of a mall parking garage.  Procedural memory, however, is the way the mind and body work to construct and remember a golf swing or how to operate a cell phone, or more apt to this discussion: how one accurately throws a football.  Paradoxically, Beilock’s Human Performance Laboratory has shown that individuals with greater expertise and more experience have a tendency to be more prone to tighten up in their execution of mechanized, seemingly route procedural tasks in pressurized situations.  Beilock says, “pressure causes a performance hiccup based on what we are doing and the type of memory that is driving how we execute that particular skill.”  She goes on to state that “higher working memory individuals” perform the best in practice situations, however under pressure, a majority of high-powered individuals panic and resort to “cognitive short cuts” that the “lower powered individuals” normally use (and thus are more familiar with).

Essentially, throwing a football is an unconscious mechanically executed action, especially for someone like Peyton Manning who has thrown a football over 750,000 times in his life.  This unconscious action draws on working memory and procedural memory in the brain to repeatedly perform the same action.  Those who practice the most, theoretically make perfect or “expert.”  And what is unique about Manning is that one of his greatest strengths, as discussed above, is that he is an “expert among experts” with his throwing motion—no other NFL QB is praised more for the execution of mechanics in the NFL (perhaps Andrew Luck is joining this conversation, but he probably has “only a paltry” 200,000 throws in his young life).

Manning simply has a flawless delivery.  Conversely, quarterbacks like his opponent Sunday, Russell Wilson or the 49ers Colin Kaepernick or even little brother Eli, have all been knocked for their inconsistent mechanics at times, but have also all overcome such blemishes with their remarkable abilities to improvise on the fly; a playground-like ability to run and evade pursing defenders while throwing to receivers down field.

Peyton Manning runs as though he is wearing concrete shoes (your Sopranos New Jersey Super Bowl joke/reference of the week!).  Whereas Colin Kaepernick in the tightest of games in the NFC Championship last week improvised and made this touchdown throw, seemingly defying all laws of human mechanics and likely re-writing a few Kinesiology textbooks in the process.  Or looking at the most clutch play of the 2013 season, the Packers’ Aaron Rodgers on 4^th and 8 with a minute and change on the clock in the final regular season game of the year–in which if he failed on this one final play his team would not make the playoffs and the game would be over (not to mention the archrival Bears would make the playoffs)–with a defender rushing down his face he managed to scramble out of harms way for one split second, evading the defender, and on the run made this impossibly clutch 48 yard TD pass to win the game.

And that is precisely one puzzle piece in the mystery of choking.  Scrambling, improvising, evading, and throwing on the run actually frees the brain up from thinking too much.  When these guys are on the move, their expertise is no longer a “curse,” because they are improvising their mechanics on the fly, not trying to consciously tell their arm and body to execute exactly what they practiced.

Malcolm Gladwell described the curse of expertise as too much carefulness and second-guessing in pressure situations.  The instinct of the well-seasoned, ardently practiced, veteran executor in a pressure filled moment is to, “to work harder, to buckle down, to take the [task] of their ability more seriously.”  And paradoxically, this often makes their mechanics tighter and their corresponding performance worse.  It is simply too much thinking about an unconscious muscle memory action.  Whereas the secret to the success in the clutch for Rodgers or Kaepernick is they “just do it,” and their running/improvising allows their conscious brain to stay out of the way.

Gladwell goes on to tell another slice of the story of choking, which once again for Peyton Manning is a threat he is quite exposed to.  This is what Stanford psychologist, Claude Steele, refers to as the “stereotype threat.”  Steele and his colleagues suggest that the stereotype threat can interrupt successful performance in pressure situations for “any group that has historically been depicted in negative ways.”  This body of research has shown literally that white men perform well and fine on laboratory jumping and athletic tasks, that is until they are given a cue in sync with the stereotype that “white men can’t jump.”  When this stereotype is made known to the white male research participants conscious minds, they perform significantly worse on jumping tasks and athletic tasks.  One of Steele’s protégés, Julio Garcia, suggests “the usual prescription for failure [for these participants] is to work harder and take the test more seriously” when they are made known of there group’s stereotype, in essence choking because of the awareness of this stereotype.

In the drone of 24-hour sports analysis, there is perhaps no greater stereotyped group than “the Hall of Famers who never won it all.”  Decades later, sports pundits Charles Barkley and Dan Marino still receive scorn for their respective empty trophy cases.  And while Peyton Manning no longer fits neatly within this stereotype with his 2006 Vince Lombardi trophy, there is no question he is not too far from this conversation either.

Since Manning’s one Super Bowl win, he has a losing record in the post-season.  Last year, despite having likely the most talented team in the playoffs, his Broncos gave away their home divisional playoff matchup to the Baltimore Ravens, in one of the most epic playoff choke jobs ever.  This season, Manning’s Broncos have been fortunate in the playoffs to be in the weak AFC, only needing to survive and advance against quite inferior opponents neither of which pushed Manning into many late game pressure filled moments that required him to slay his one weakness.  That will likely change this Sunday when Manning squares off against the most vaunted defense in the NFL, the Seattle Seahawks.

Quite frankly, this Seattle defense fraught with talent, has done themselves no favors in the lead up to the big game.  Foolishly, Seattle defensive back, Richard Sherman, has absorbed much of the pre-Super Bowl spotlight and hype based on some of his on field/off-field antics and cockiness.  If Seattle was more psychologically mindful and aware, perhaps they would have known if there was no sensational and hype filled storylines, then that would create a vacuum that could only be filled by the ubiquitous question from the last 20 years, the stereotype threat of all stereotype threats, “can Peyton win the big game?”

And for us mere mortals, not playing Sunday, what does this all say about us and how we perform under pressure on an entrance exam or in a big pitch/meeting?  It suggests a need to expect anxiety in big moments.  We must do our best to anticipate when we might get triggered by heightened anxiety, knowing such tightness and locking up can exist, but setting realistic expectations about this fact.  And when we can expect something, we can do something about it.  In short, you can learn mindfulness skills and breathing techniques to keep one’s self calm, composed, and in some control of regulating one’s own anxiety.  This is often where something such as psychotherapy can be helpful.

But for our protagonist, Peyton, will he be able to breathe through it, manage himself and stay composed if the game comes down to a final mechanical action that he must make?  Can he Break on Through to Other Side and finally rid himself of the stereotype of “the guy who can’t win the big game?”  I guess that is why they play the game.  And this is why we crown champions.  For it is only those who conquer under pressure that we deem our true warriors.