Read and React
You can't react if you can't read. You can't read if you can't react.
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Read and React is the first principle of all human activity, as far as I'm concerned. Reading and reacting are interactive skills and can't really be separated; they form an interactive continuum, though it is clear they can be differentiated. You must read or correctly observe a situation in order to react properly to it, but you must also perform skilled movements in order to read a situation properly. Hence the interaction. But also a critical point is that the reading you render occurs in the context of skilled activity. What you read or perceive becomes the stimulus for your reaction or response. This has profound implications for the study or training of skills. It means that any study or training of skills that you conduct, any practice you engage in, must take the stimulus into account as a central feature -- else what would you be learning?
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These thoughts should remind you of that old adage: Look before you leap!" The idea is that you should at least wait until you've gathered some information before taking further action. "Looking for land mines" more or less sums it up.
Improving the Addage
A more reasonable maxim might be to observe what's happening, but then take steps to deal with whatever turns up. This is a read-and-react maxim. You are encouraged to perceive the local environment as accurately and as quickly as you can and react in a timely and effective way to what you find. When diving into water, for example, you would certainly try to avoid boulders but you would also like to see where your dive can be accommodated most effectively. Gaining your objective becomes foremost. It becomes the reason and guide for your search. The maxim doesn't discourage acting on your plans and in fact invites you to look for relevant and constructive information. It encourages you to take advantage of what is given to you. It may well be the first principle of sports, as well as of any other human activity.
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I'm sure you will agree that the game of tennis is nothing if not ball-oriented, consisting of shot exchanges between players on either side of a net. So you must know that your job as a player is to
That, I have to say, is a classic example of a read-and-react exchange. It's also the nub of the game; what the game is all about. The more accurately you read the path of the ball, and the more effectively you respond to it with your own shot, the better your game will be. But reading the path accurately and reacting competitively are easier said than done. A high order of skill and a lot of hard work are required to learn to perform the function well.
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Basketball
Basketball, now, to consider another illustration, apparently has very little in common with tennis. Yet it too depends for its success on the ability of the players of each team to read ongoing situations quickly and respond swiftly and effectively to them. Much as in tennis, the players' movements are highly interactive and center on a ball. It's up to you as a player to see and understand what the other players are up to -- where they are, where they're going, what they're trying to do. If your opponents have the ball, you have to be able to observe the action and interpret the developing play. You must see how the players are lining up. You have to read their body language -- their pattern of movement -- for telltale signs of their objective and coordinate your response with your teammates.
As Lakers' TV commentator Stu Lantz advises players, you have to adjust to what you see and take whatever the defense gives you. You should be aware of the other team's moves and respond accordingly. As in tennis, you need rapid response capabilities and a high level of skill. The game calls for quick and exceptional dynamic pattern recognition. Considerable training is needed to perceive events properly and react appropriately to them..
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What about golf? Here is a game that's different again from either tennis or basketball, except of course that it, too, is a ball sport. That is, you have a ball to hit. But in this case the ball is always stationary when hit -- no one throws or hits it to you and you never have to run to intercept it or make a move to a basket or a base with it. There is no running on a court, up and back, interactively, and there is no hitting a ball with an opponent, back and forth, each responding to the other's moves. In fact, other players aren't even needed to play the game; you can go out on the course alone and slam the ball to your heart's content without ever seeing the enemy. You simply move a ball from place to place, from one end of a course to the other, by hitting it. That's all there is to it. That's all, that is, until you try to move it from one end of the course to the other in the least number of hits against fierce competition. That's when all the troubles begin and nerves begin to fray. If nothing else, though, you may still be competing against yourself -- or rather, against your former self, namely the guy who played last week in your name and almost broke 100. And I'm here to tell you the effort can be very frustrating.
So there it is with golf! You have to hit a ball and you must do so in an advantageous way to achieve a minimum score. The shot you take has to match, or at least come into agreement in some way -- like a key to a lock -- with the setup that confronts you at the moment -- an arrangement of trees, bunkers, lake, slopes, wind, ... you name it! You must fit the shot to the setup. This is pattern recognition at its best and could do with a bit of visualization. With each shot it is incumbent on you as a competitor to read the local environment and design a way to take advantage of, or avoid, the conditions given to you.
This, again, in case you haven't caught my drift, is a read and react process. You must observe the environment, recognize and evaluate its salient features, make the appropriate estimates, and select the best shot to deal with the context -- i.e., the hazards and the obstacles to success. It may be a slower process than that in either tennis or basketball, but it is nonetheless a critical read and react function and demands a full bag of tricks to achieve success.
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