Tennis players are a funny bunch. Have you noticed how they always ask for three balls instead of two; how they keep pointing to their towel, not to remove sweat but to erase the demons from their minds; how they bounce the ball the same number of times before serving, as if any deviation from their routine might bring the world collapsing on their heads? It sometimes seems as if Wimbledon is less a tennis competition than a giant OCD convention.
But the superstitions, tics and rituals so beloved by the world’s top players are not confined to the court. They take even more bizarre twists when the poor dears get home after their matches. Goran Ivanisevic got it into his head that if he won a match he had to repeat everything he did the previous day, such as eating the same food at the same restaurant, talking to the same people and watching the same TV programmes. One year this meant that he had to watch Teletubbies every morning during his Wimbledon campaign. “Sometimes it got very boring,” he said.
Perhaps the most revealing insight into the surreal inner lives of top tennis players was provided by Serena Williams when she was asked why she had played so badly at the French Open last year. Was it her misfiring forehand? Her lack of fitness going into the competition? Her non-appearance at many top events during the season? Here is what the great lady had to say: “I didn’t tie my laces right and I didn’t bounce the ball five times and I didn’t bring my shower sandals to the court with me. I didn’t have my extra dress. I just knew it was fate; it wasn’t going to happen.”
So, there you have it.
All of which raises a number of questions. Is there something congenitally nutty about leading tennis players? Are they operating a covert Masonic lodge, membership of which requires the adoption of three bizarre rituals, or four if you are Miles Maclagan, coach of Andy Murray, who insists on using the same practice court at the same time every day. Or could it be that these multifarious superstitions tell us something of deeper importance not only about humanity but about other species on the planet?
The answer, I think, is to be found in the world of pigeons. Yes, really. These feathered fellows, you see, are the tennis players of the avian world. They obsess and compulse with the best of them. They ritualise for fun. Don’t take my word for it: that was the opinion of B.F. Skinner, the man widely regarded as the father of modern psychology. “A more superstitious bunch of winged vertebrates you’d be hard pressed to find,” Skinner said. Well, I paraphrase a little, but you get the point.
Skinner’s view was based on a groundbreaking experiment that he carried out in 1947 in which he placed some hungry pigeons in a cage attached to an automatic mechanism that delivered food “at regular intervals with no reference whatsoever to the bird’s behaviour”. He discovered that the pigeons associated the delivery of the food with whatever chance actions they happened to be performing at the moment it was first delivered. So what did the pigeons do? They kept performing the same actions, even though they had no effect whatsoever on the release of food.
Here is Skinner: “One bird was conditioned to turn counter-clockwise about the cage, making two or three turns between reinforcements. Another repeatedly thrust its head into one of the upper corners of the cage. A third developed a ‘tossing’ response, as if placing its head beneath an invisible bar and lifting it repeatedly.”
I know, I know. This is nothing compared with the weird behaviour going on at Wimbledon, but do you see the connection? The pigeons were acting as if they could influence the mechanism delivering the Trill in just the same was that Ivanisevic thought that he could influence the outcome of his next match by watching Teletubbies. To put it a tad formally, they both witnessed a random connection between a particular kind of behaviour and a desired outcome, and then (wrongly) inferred that the relationship was causal.
But did Ivanisevic really believe that his superstitions were effective or was he just having us on? Well, let’s hear from the man himself — this is what he said when asked if he had ever abandoned a ritual when it stopped working: “I didn’t. They do work. I won Wimbledon.” So, he really did believe. And what of the pigeons? They were, unfortunately, unavailable for interview.
The fact that pigeons and human beings share the tendency to wiggle their ears while walking backwards suggests that superstitious behaviour emerged quite early in evolutionary history. What is certain is that it is widespread, particularly within Homo sapiens. More than half of Americans admitted to being superstitious in a recent poll, and it is not just silly and gullible types either. At Harvard, students frequently rub the foot of the statue of John Harvard for good luck.
Even cricketers, perhaps the brightest and most sensible sportsmen of all (well, that’s what they tell us), are not immune to superstition. Jack Russell, the former England wicketkeeper, was among the most notorious, refusing to change his hat or wicketkeeping pads throughout his career, even though they became threadbare and smelly, something that really got up the noses of his team-mates.
When you keep an eye out for it, superstitious behaviour is pretty much everywhere. Here is Skinner again: “There are so many analogies in human behaviour. Rituals for changing one’s fortune at cards are good examples . . . So is a bowler who has released a ball down the alley but continues to behave as if she were controlling it by twisting and turning her arm and shoulder. These behaviours have, of course, no real effect upon one’s luck or upon a ball half way down an alley, just as in the present case the food would appear as often if the pigeon did nothing.”
But this raises another, deeper question: why do so many of us maintain rituals of various kinds when they have no real connection with the desired outcome? Or, to put it another way, why is superstitious behaviour so widespread, not just within our species but beyond, when it seems to confer no tangible benefits? It’s here that things get really interesting (and just a little complex). And, as with most interesting things, the answer is to be found in deep evolutionary history.
Imagine a caveman going to pick some berries from some bushes near his rocky abode. He hears some rustling in the bushes and wrongly infers that there is a lion lurking in there and scarpers. He even gets a little superstitious about those bushes and gives them a wide berth in future. Is this superstition a problem to our caveman? Well, not if there are plenty of other berry-bearing bushes from which to get his five-per-day.
But suppose that there really is a lion living in those bushes. The caveman’s behaviour now not only looks sensible but life-saving. So, a tendency to perceive causal connections that do not actually exist can confer huge evolutionary benefits, providing a cocoon of safety in a turbulent and dangerous world. The only proviso (according to some devilishly complicated mathematics known as game theory) is this: your superstitions must not impose too much of a burden on those occasions when they are without foundation.
And this is almost precisely what superstitions look like in the modern world. Some believe in horoscopes, but few allow them to dictate their behaviour; some like to wear the same lucky shoes to every job interview, but it is not as if wearing a different pair would improve their chances of success; some like to bounce the ball precisely seven times before serving at tennis, but although they are wrong to suppose that this ball-bouncing is implicated in their success, it does not harm their prospects (even if it irritates the hell out of those of us watching).
It is only when a superstition begins to compromise our deeper goals and aspirations that we have moved along the spectrum of irrationality far enough to risk a diagnosis of obsessive compulsive disorder. Take Kolo Touré, the Arsenal defender, who insists on being the last player to leave the dressing room after the half-time break. No real problem, you might think, except that when William Gallas, his team-mate, was injured and needed treatment at half-time during a match in February, Touré stayed in the dressing room until Gallas had been treated, forcing Arsenal to start the second half with only nine players.
When a superstition that is supposed to help you actually hinders you, it is probably time to kick the ritual into touch. With a rabbit’s foot, obviously.
