Winning One For The Ripper

There are enough believers around the country to have hired Beausay to profile the personalities of more than 300 National Football League players, 100 motor racers, a wide assortment of pro and college basketball, football and hockey players, sky divers and even a women's semipro tackle-football team. "The girls tested out the same as their male counterparts," he says.

Beausay was first turned on to a study of the athletic psyche back in the early 1960s by Bill Glass, who played defensive end in the NFL, first with the Detroit Lions and later with the Cleveland Browns, where he was once rated All-Pro. The two met through a mutual friend and immediately started picking each other's brains. All his football life Glass had listened to coaches ascribe victory and defeat to whether or not a team was "up" for a particular game. "'But never did I hear a coach define what 'up' meant or just how to attain that state," says Glass. "I decided to find out for myself. It was a difficult search because the only advice available on the subject was in books on salesmanship."

Enter Beausay. At dinner one night the psychologist and the defensive end were discussing the game that Glass would soon be playing against the New York Giants and their outstanding quarterback, Y. A. Tittle. Glass sought a method by which he could get prodigiously "up" for a busy afternoon of playing sack the quarterback. Beausay introduced the concept of autosuggestion.

"What is the chief obstacle you must overcome to get at Tittle?" Beausay recalls asking.

"The offensive tackle."

"How do you want to handle the offensive tackle?"

"I take a quick step across the line, throw him off and then shoot for Tittle."

Beausay distilled this description into an explosive three-word command—"Charge! Throw! Shoot!"—which Glass was to repeat to himself frequently during the preceding week and then during the game. The psychologist calls this Super Psyching. Neither Glass nor Beausay can now recall how often, if at all, Glass was able to shoot Tittle down when next they met across the line of scrimmage. But what did happen was that Glass soon became a master of this psychological pep pill, popping it in many forms.

"I would lie on my bed before a game and imagine that I had pulled down a motion picture screen and was watching a film of myself in action, constantly getting past the offensive tackle," says Glass. "This was putting positive pictures into my subconscious—in the same way that performing well in a real game would have done—and it built up my confidence."

When the tape cassette came into popular use Glass would record a series of commands on tape and play them back continuously during game weeks. A typical Glass-to-Glass taped Super Psyching might go something like this: "When the ball is snapped you are going to CHARGE. You are going to charge across the line of scrimmage and PURSUE, PURSUE, PURSUE. You are going to pursue for 40, 50 and 60 yards until you make the tackle or until the whistle blows." Always the trigger word would be "charge." The belief was that when repeated on the field it would activate the taped instructions buried in the Glass subconscious.