Champions Are Weird On Purpose

Rafael Nadal lines his bottles up with the labels facing the court and won't step on a line. Novak Djokovic once bounced the ball 38 times before a serve. Bjorn Borg grew a beard for Wimbledon and drove the same road to the club for five years. Nick Kyrgios hits an underarm serve and gets booed. Every one of them a champion. Every one of them doing something that can't possibly matter. Except some of it does. NBA players who stick to their free throw routine shoot 84%. The same players who skip it shoot 71%. So which of this stuff actually works, which is rubbish, and why does the rubbish work anyway? This video looks at the strangest rituals in tennis and beyond, what a 1974 book called The Inner Game of Tennis worked out about them, and what fifty years of sports psychology have proven since: when a routine helps, when a superstitions hurts, and why the serve clock didn't speed the game up at all. Along the way, Michael Chang's underarm serve against Ivan Lendl, Wilt Chamberlain's 100 point game, Serena William's socks, and the one test that tells a routine from a superstition. Want To Help Support The Channel?:    / @a.c.e.v.x