The Science of Swish
No other species has a better shooting percentage than Homo sapiens. And yet we still miss more free throws, clutch putts, and wastepaper pitches than we should. Here's how to tap into your primal marksman
Joe Darrah is holding four tomahawks in one hand and a king of spades in the other. He pins the playing card to the target a thick log slice bolted to an old table and walks back to where I'm standing, 20 feet away.
"What do you need for good aim?" he asks.
"Vision, repetition, concentration," I say. I've done my homework.
He hands me one of the tomahawks. "Close your eyes," he says. "Now don't think. Just throw."
I squeeze my eyes shut, mentally apologize to whatever cat is about to die or whoever owns the window I'm about to shatter, and let fly.
Thwock!
I open my eyes and see the tomahawk sticking a few inches from the card.
"What were those three again?" Darrah asks.
"Vision, repetition, and..."
Thwock! Thwock! Thwock!
Without looking, Darrah whips around and buries the other three tomahawks into three different targets. The last is dead in the middle of the card.
"So," he says, "explain what we just did."
I can't. I'm not sure if he can, either.
When it comes to instant gratification, nothing beats a bull's-eye. The whole process of taking aim and letting fly can last for as little as an eighth of a second roughly the amount of time a sensory impulse takes to travel to your brain and cause your muscles to react and the result of nailing your target is a weird, almost embarrassing sense of personal awesomeness. No matter how lousy your day is going, all you need to do is swish a McWrapper in the trash can, and for a few seconds you're a god. Darrah still enjoys that glow, and he's been sinking sharp steel into hardwood for 45 years. "You can tell the throw is good as soon as the tomahawk leaves your hand," he says. "At that moment, it's like the whole universe came into alignment just for you."
William H. Calvin, Ph.D., a professor of neuroscience at the University of Washington and a specialist in the evolution of the human brain, explains that this surge of joy has been programmed into our DNA for 2 million years, ever since primitive man relied on marksmanship for life's two greatest prizes: babes and breakfast. Judging from the behavior of our close genetic cousins, chimpanzees, hunting was how we acquired mates as well as meat: When a male chimp kills a tasty rodent, he's often surrounded by flirting females offering to trade sex for a snack. It's only after the monkey business that he surrenders a little meat.
But unlike chimps, humans are not equipped with lethal jaws and lightning dexterity. Our Stone Age ancestors had only one natural weapon: the ability to turn something lying on the ground into something flying through the air. We had to be amazing with rocks because we're awful with everything else. Strip us naked and we humans are the wimps of the wild kingdom. We have no offense or defense, no fangs or claws, no speed, and compared with the competition hardly any muscle. All we have on our side is a flair for geometry. We can estimate distance, trajectory, and speed in the blink of an eye and translate that data into precise commands that are then fired off to every muscle from our toes to our fingertips.
"Throwing with accuracy makes demands on the brain that no other activity makes," says Calvin. "Humans seem to be the only creatures in existence with this capability."
And that's just aiming at stationary targets; think about the complexity of aiming at and hitting a fleeing animal. Stone Age rabbits weren't just standing around waiting patiently to sacrifice themselves in the name of human evolution. They were darting off in mad bursts of speed, which meant a hunter had to mentally process three different movement sequences his, the prey's, and the weapon's to calculate the exact point where rock would meet rabbit.
"That kind of sequential thought requires intellect of a higher order," says Calvin. Specifically, he's talking about imagination the ability to project into the future, visualize possibilities, and think in the abstract. That's why Calvin believes language, literature, medicine, and even love are all rooted in our ancient ability to hit a hare at 20 paces. "Throwing is about finding order in chaos," he says. "The more you're able to think in sequence, the more ideas you're able to string together. You can add more words to your vocabulary, you can combine unrelated concepts, you can plan for the future, and you can keep track of social relationships."
But just because you're hardwired with this circuitry doesn't mean you're maximizing its potential. So the lingering question, the one that put a tomahawk in my hand, is this: If we go back to the fundamentals and master the mysteries of aim, can that help us master everything else?
Calvin thinks it can. "Evolution doesn't give many chances for extra credit, but throwing is one of them," he says. "Sequential movement, and all that comes with it, is one of the few instincts you can improve through practice."
Darrah was in kindergarten when his dad, a U.S. Army Airborne Ranger, put a Special Forces trench knife in his hand and taught him the rules of chicken. By the time Darrah was a teenager, he was flinging razor-sharp bowie knives around girls in a traveling circus. Now, at age 50, he's a seven-time world champion with both knives and tomahawks, and he's also deadly accurate with the blowgun, bullwhip, and atlatl, an ancient spear-throwing weapon.
Darrah's neighbors in the suburban village of Berwyn, Pennsylvania, are so used to lethal weapons whistling across his front yard that no one pays any attention when we begin to practice with a pile of tomahawks. One of our targets is a custom-built board with five log slices bolted to it in an X configuration, and each slice has a playing card pinned in the middle. The other target is a holdover from a TV show Darrah filmed for ESPN: It's an old door with an eye-level rectangle of bulletproof glass, so you can acquire a feel for throwing a weapon around a human target by seeing a person's face through the glass.
"Don't think about your arm. When it's cocked behind your head, you can't see it anyway," Darrah says as he begins feeding me 'hawks. "You're just guiding the 'hawk along its way into the target." Each tomahawk has a 12-inch hardwood handle and a cold-forged steel head sharp enough for a shave. He's handing them to me so quickly I barely have time to windmill one before two more are ready. I'm way too rushed to "think" them into the target, but at least I'm managing to hit logs and not the neighbors.
Then something strange happens. Darrah hands me a 'hawk and then stands back and watches. Now that I finally have a chance to really aim, I take my time and run through all of his pointers. Left foot forward; wide stance; easy overhand motion; tap the car keys in my right pocket on the follow-through to make sure I'm staying straight; and...
Clank!
The tomahawk shanks off the edge of the target, dropping into the dirt. Joe hands me another. Left foot forward...
Clank!
"What am I doing wrong?" I ask.
Darrah smiles. "Here comes the Zen stuff. You're trying to control your throw, and you can't." Don't aim, he says; just look. Don't rehearse; just throw. Don't analyze; just feel. "You have to enter yourself and let the rhythm come. Once you do that," Darrah says, "you can do all kinds of crazy things."
Whatever. They're his tomahawk handles I'm splintering. I grab a handful of 'hawks and start windmilling one after the other, with no aiming, rehearsing, or analyzing.
Three throws later, I split the king of clubs down the middle.
"You want proof this can change your Life?" asks Tom Amberry, D.P.M. "Look at me."
Back in 1992, Dr. Amberry was coming to the end of an extremely successful surgical career. He was known among podiatrists for his "time-and-motion technique," which greatly reduced the duration of certain foot surgeries as well as the number of post-op complications. His innovation was in reversing the usual relationship between speed and precision: Instead of slowing down in an effort to be more careful, he accelerated. The upside to speed, he discovered, was that his body picked up on tiny deviations even before they registered in his brain. That way, Dr. Amberry could tell from any little hitch in his flow if his scalpel was leading him into trouble, much the way Darrah knew on release if his throw was good and could make instantaneous corrections to his next attempt a split second later.
But before he could speed up his surgeries, Dr. Amberry realized that he had to formulate an efficient sequence of actions in other words, the same kind of sequential thinking that helped our Stone Age ancestors kill prey with surgical precision. "If I picked up an instrument, I planned my steps so I used it for everything necessary before I put it down," he says. Then after refining those steps into one seamless motion from initial incisions to closing sutures he was able to accelerate his actions so that they became automatic and practically self-correcting. In essence, he had turned a skill into a reflex.
Dr. Amberry never heard of Joe Darrah or Professor Calvin, but he became the human link connecting their theories: (1) that great aim is a muscular reflex ("Don't think; just throw") and (2) that the sequential thinking necessary to develop this reflex is the foundation of some remarkable human achievements. Except Dr. Amberry went about it backward: He applied his aim reflex to innovative surgery first, and only later tried it out on raw marksmanship.
When Dr. Amberry retired at age 69, he started playing hoops to stay in shape. And what did he discover? That even though he hadn't touched a basketball in 50 years, he'd been practicing free throws the whole time in the operating room. "It was time and motion all over again," he says. "Foul shots and surgery required the same approach."
After studying the sequence of actions necessary to sink a free throw and then practicing for an entire year, Dr. Amberry sped up his shooting and wowed everyone: He was able to drain his shots for 12 hours straight, entering the Guinness Book of World Records for making 2,750 consecutive free throws. Soon, he was humiliating NBA stars in free-throw contests. (Sorry, Kobe, 84 percent doesn't cut it.) Most of the awed spectators focused on Dr. Amberry's form: three dribbles, thumbs in the seams, elbows tight, deep knee bend, no more than a quick glance at the hoop. What they missed was the real show going on inside his head.
"It's craftsmanship over showmanship," Dr. Amberry tells me. He's been jovial and jokey until this point, the master storyteller letting the war stories roll, but as we come to the end of our phone conversation, his tone becomes quiet and firm. "It sounds simple, but it's the key to everything you'll ever do. I never think about whether the shot is going in that's showmanship. I only focus on the job at hand that's craftsmanship."
Funny thing, but while Dr. Amberry couldn't convince many NBA players to take his advice ("They'd give me 5 minutes"), hundreds of regular guys listened. That bugged him for a while, until it dawned on him why amateurs were more interested in perfecting their shots than the pros: They were looking for something more important than a bump in their summer-league roundball stats.
"I've taught guys, and they come back to me later and tell me it's like a mantra," Dr. Amberry says. "They slow down, breathe, look for rhythms in their everyday lives. One man, a professor, tells me he has a lot more confidence in front of his class."
"Hey," he adds, "do you have a basketball?"
"Not anymore. I just bought some tomahawks, though."
"Tomahawks..." he mused, apparently pondering whether flying steel could be as effective at tuning up my sequential-thinking skills as surgery was for him. "Yes, they could work."
So after we hang up, I immediately grab my five new tomahawks and head out to the yard. I tip an old picnic table on its end and begin tacking up playing cards. I'm not exactly sure what I'll take away from going caveman, but it could be a lot more than I was aiming for.
- it was my mental block, actually my visual block. - the eyes didn't line up.
