Excerpted from the book MIND GAME: An Inside Look at the Mental Health Playbook of Elite Athletes by Julie Kliegman. Copyright © 2024 by Julie Kliegman. From Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group. Reprinted by permission.
Mental health in sports might seem like a brand-new conversation, thanks to the likes of Simone Biles, Naomi Osaka, Kevin Love and DeMar DeRozan stepping forward and talking openly about their struggles in recent years. But the truth is that there’s a long, rich—and sometimes quite bizarre—history of sport psychology that paved the way for our modern-day dialogue. Coleman R. Griffith, working with the Chicago Cubs in the late 1930s, became the first sport psychologist to embed within a team, starting a practice that’s now common across collegiate and professional sports. He may have been the first, but someone else was arguably the most interesting character in the early days of the field in the U.S.
David F. Tracy, a hypnotist apparently without a doctorate degree in anything, improbably became one of the next faces of sport psychology three-quarters of a century ago. York University professor and Psychology Gets in the Game coeditor Christopher D. Green, likely restraining himself, called Tracy “kind of a flimflam artist.” But as Alan Kornspan, a sport psychology scholar, pointed out, “Tracy’s texts, and the things that he wrote about [sport psychology], were very similar to what we talk about today.”
