JohnFMurray.com

And Murray, who has consulted for NFL teams – that he refuses to name – says Cincinnati Bengals head coach Marvin Lewis has a bead on performance that should pay off.

Lewis gives players three strikes before they are out. The first strike is a breakdown that leads to a meeting with the head coach. And the meeting itself is the second strike. So if you’ve screwed up one time, you’ve really screwed up twice.

The third strike is when the same thing happens again.

“I like Marvin Lewis’s disciplinary approach,” Murray said. “NFL players respond to that. They want direction. They want to feel like somebody is in charge of the ship. The problem with a lot of coaches is that they try to please everybody.

“There has to be a little fear, consequences that are real. There has to be a bite – otherwise you’re just barking.”

Today’s Super Bowl XXXIX brings local sports fans one final evening of professional football from a 2004-2005 season that was disappointing for avid Cincinnati Bengals fans but fairly entertaining for everybody else.

Performance expert and sport psychologist John F. Murray of West Palm Beach, Fla., believes the Super Bowl is an annual event that gives everybody a chance to look for lessons into achieving peak performance.

This year Murray picks the Philadelphia Eagles.

He arrived at this conclusion by extrapolating from the play-by-play behavior of players and teams’ mental make-up during the intense pressure of post-season playoffs.

He calls his gauge the Mental Performance Index and used it last year to correctly predict that the Tampa Bay Buccaneers would upset the Oakland Raiders by at least two touchdowns.

The Bucs won 48-21, a margin of about four touchdowns.

“When you think about it, performance enhancement is far more important in business than in sports,” said the sport psychologist who is known as the “Football Shrink.”

“In business, money is on the line. And like professional football it’s extremely competitive.”

Keys for success

Murray has worked with NFL teams and has testimonials from many sports figures: Dave Wannstedt and Jimmy Johnson, former head coaches for the Miami Dolphins, plenty of college tennis coaches and tennis pro Lindsay Davenport.

Though Murray, 43, can talk for hours on the topic of performance under pressure, he says his strategy has eight broad, mental keys for success:

Discipline and hard work.

Passion and having fun.

Resilience or bounce-back.

Confidence and expectations of success.

Intense focus on the task at hand.

Setting and achieving goals.

Controlling emotion and energy levels.

Visualization and imagery.

Dealing with pressure

But nothing separates peak performers from the almost-as-good as the crucible of pressure.

“When lights are shining and the moment is there, super performance can emerge more easily,” said Murray, the author of “Smart Tennis: How to Play and Win the Mental Game” (Jossey-Bass).

Companies that want to encourage peak performance should order up ground-zero evaluations of individuals and then treat people as individuals, not as a group, since the best approaches spurn one-size-fits-all.

When asked to choose one aspect that companies should focus on, he did not hesitate:

“Taking care of the customer is No.1,” Murray said. “Do you give them what they need? Do you find out what they need and provide quality service that is focused and passionate?”

Forget about talent, creativity, goals, vision and leadership.

I would not agree to “forget about” those other factors, but assert that customer service is indeed top priority!

And that’s a good thing, says John F. Murray, a clinical and sports performance psychologist in Palm Beach.

”It occupies the mind in a very constructive, challenging way,” Murray said. “It’s healthy. You’re learning more about the nuances of vocabulary. It’s a challenge.”

On the other hand, maybe it’s just a good way to kill time. Anyone who says baseball is a timeless game has never spent time inside a big-league clubhouse, where players and coaches can spend as many as seven hours a day sandwiched around a 150-minute game. That leaves a lot of time to fill, which is where crosswords come in for most.

Baseball has sure come a long way from the 1950s, when Yogi Berra used to spend his clubhouse downtime reading comic books.

Murray said it’s no surprise that most of baseball’s crossword players are pitchers, especially relief pitchers, because they’re the ones with the most free time. Unlike position players, relievers don’t take daily batting practice — especially in the American League — and they might go a week or more without appearing in a game.

At the height of his frustration in the mid-1990s, then-Green Bay Packers general manager Ron Wolf let out a howl of exasperation that could be heard all the way to Dallas.

“They could put seven helmets and four players out there and we’d find a way to fall over a helmet,” Wolf said of the Cowboys.

Wolf was worn down by an eight-game losing streak in a lopsided series. Three of the losses came in the postseason, the worst being the NFC championship game in January 1995. It wasn’t until the season after the Packers won the January 1997 Super Bowl that they finally exorcised their Dallas demon and ended the streak.

Donovan McNabb, the Philadelphia Eagles’ Pro Bowl quarterback, knows how Wolf felt. McNabb has lived through the agony of losing three consecutive NFC championship games, two of them at home.

He can only hope the Atlanta Falcons roll out their black helmets and play four-man defense today at Philadelphia’s Lincoln Financial Field, where he will try one more time to reach the Super Bowl.

By going 0-for-3 in the championship game, McNabb also has stepped into elite, if somewhat infamous, company in the NFL. Quarterback Jim Kelly of the Buffalo Bills lost four Super Bowls and Fran Tarkenton of the Minnesota Vikings was winless in three. The Cleveland Browns’ Bernie Kosar lost three times in the AFC championship game.

And John Elway of the Denver Broncos didn’t win his first Super Bowl, either, until he had lost three of them.

This is no place for the faint of heart or queasy of stomach. It is where history is made, reputations are forged and dreams are smashed.

Unlike the Packers of the 1990s, the Eagles have no single nemesis to confront. They lost to the St. Louis Rams, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Carolina Panthers the past three years at the threshold of the Super Bowl.

“It’s unfortunate what happened to us the last three years, but it’s just a different feeling this year,” McNabb said during a news conference last week. “We’ve had a special season; things have really been moving in a positive direction.”

Getting teams or individual players over the big-game hump is a job that often falls under the purview of sports psychologists.

Harry Edwards, a sports sociologist, retired Cal-Berkeley professor and longtime consultant for the San Francisco 49ers, watched as coach Bill Walsh crafted a dynasty after one of the most traumatic defeats in team history.

The defeat came in the 1987 playoffs, when the 49ers, with a 13-2 regular-season record, were upset at home by the Vikings in a conference semifinal, 36-24. San Francisco already had won two Super Bowls under Walsh, but the Minnesota loss was particularly devastating.

The 49ers came back the next year to beat the Chicago Bears in the NFC championship game and the Cincinnati Bengals in the Super Bowl, the last of Walsh’s three NFL titles.

“The key to it was how the leadership of the organization handled that crushing disappointment,” Edwards said. “I remember before the Super Bowl against the Bengals, Bill said there were going to be ebbs and flows in the game. That took out the idea that if something bad happens [as in 1987], ‘Here we go again.’

“If the Eagles go out on the field thinking, ‘Here we go again,’ they’ll lose.”

John F. Murray, a sports psychologist in West Palm Beach, Fla., believes the Eagles should embrace the potential for losing to relieve the pressure of winning.

“I would let them go to the possibility they might lose again,” he said. “That’s outcome. In sports psychology, you focus on performance, not outcome. Outcome can never be controlled, just as you can never control when a tsunami hits your house.

“We choke if we blow up the magnitude of the situation. It comes down to what’s going on inside each person’s head.”

Losing big games regularly plays havoc with the head, Gil Brandt said.

“I don’t think there’s any question that it gets into your mind,” said Brandt, the Cowboys’ personnel chief through their formative years into the Super Bowl era.

Brandt watched the phenomenon weave its damage in the 1960s, when the Cowboys were Next Year’s Champions, the title of a book that chronicled their early failures in big games. The Cowboys lost consecutive NFL championship games to the Packers at the dawn of the Super Bowl era in 1966 and 1967, then lost to the Cleveland Browns in the playoffs the next two seasons.

Dallas didn’t get to the Super Bowl until the 1970 season, and didn’t win the Super Bowl until the 1971 season. How did the Cowboys get over the hump?

By trading for tight end Mike Ditka, flanker Lance Alworth and cornerback Herb Adderley, who brought mental toughness to the team.

“Those three veteran players had a dramatic influence on our team,” Brandt said. “You can add a descending veteran player and it gives the team the thought, ‘They’re trying to help us win.’ The Eagles went out and got [Jevon] Kearse and [Terrell] Owens, and the players said the team tried to do everything it could to win.”

Three decades later, the Packers endured their six-year losing streak against the Cowboys. They lost to Dallas in the divisional round of the playoffs after the 1993 and 1994 seasons, and the NFC championship game the next year. All but one of the eight losses came in Dallas.

“We couldn’t get them [to play] in Green Bay,” Wolf said. “It was like a nightmare. It got to the point they played a [quarterback] named Jason Garrett and beat us. Obviously, it’s a psychological thing when you put out a guy like that and win.

“It’s like seeing Indianapolis and New England now. Indianapolis can’t go to New England and win the game.”

The Packers won the Super Bowl in the 1996 season after losing a regular-season game in Dallas, but didn’t have to face the Cowboys in the postseason. In 1997, they finally got the Cowboys in Green Bay and punished them, 45-17. End of streak.

Some teams never make it over the hump, though. The Browns of Kosar and tight end Ozzie Newsome endured three championship losses in four years, all against the Broncos, and never reached the Super Bowl.

The first loss in the 1986 season was highlighted by Elway’s 98-yard touchdown drive to force overtime, where the Broncos won, 23-20. The second, a year later, was punctuated by Earnest Byner’s fumble inside the 5-yard line as he was about to score the tying touchdown. The Browns lost, 38-33.

Two years later, they were blown out by the Broncos, 37-21.

Even though Newsome, as a front office executive, helped the Ravens win a Super Bowl four years ago, it didn’t take away the sting of those three defeats.

“In that I had the opportunity to win a Super Bowl, it has been softened,” the Ravens’ general manager said. “Not being able to go and play in it, it is some of the emptiness that I have.”

There was some satisfaction in going to the championship game three times, he said.

“It was a great accomplishment, but not as big as the Bills going to four straight Super Bowls. That was a lot tougher to do, and a lot tougher to deal with,” Newsome said.

Even while the Bills were losing four straight Super Bowls from 1991 through 1994, coach Marv Levy was never concerned about a psychological minefield.

“No, I really wasn’t,” Levy said, “because I made up mind, it wasn’t going to prey on me. I knew I couldn’t change the previous outcomes.”

Levy, of course, can feel empathy for the Eagles’ plight today.

“I admire their resilience,” he said. “They’re going to battle back. They didn’t fall apart because they suffered a tremendous disappointment.

“I don’t know if their story is going to parallel ours, but if they win, I will feel good for them.”

You take a quick peek behind to see how many people are watching and waiting to tee off after you, and hope this first drives finds some part of the fairway and -

Stop – you’re doing it all wrong.

Welcome to the Brain Game, the frequently frustrating facet of the game that happens between your ears and often does more harm than good. It’s that evil little inner voice that can sap you of enthusiasm, energy and confidence.

The Brain Game is the reason sports psychology continues to gain popularity, particularly for golfers and tennis players.

“In golf, there’s a lot of time to think, and it’s very difficult to fight fear or to try to be perfect, and people get in their own way,” said Lynda L. Cunjak, a psychologist and sport coach with an office in Highland Park. “You have to be able to train your mind as well as your body.”

You can train your mind, but like the game itself, it takes time and practice.

“Golf is the ultimate stress sport. In golf there’s not too many things to do, but there’s too much time to think about it,” said Robert Gilbert, an associate professor at Montclair State’s department of exercise and physical science education who teaches courses in sports psychology.

“The whole secret of sports psychology is to keep your mind off your mind.” It’s about fun and focus

Suggestions from John F. Murray, a clinical and sports performance psychologist in Palm Beach, Fla., whose clientele includes many golfers:

1. “Remember it’s fun, so have fun. Having fun in itself will take care of so many mental blocks. It erases so many problems.”

2. “Keep your focus on the moment. Don’t let your mind wander. Keep it in the present. Golf is only one shot. Even though you may shoot 72 shots if you are a scratch golfer, it’s really only one shot. It’s one shot repeated 72 times.”

PRE-COURSE PREPARATION: The Brain Game begins several hours, or even days, before you arrive at the course. It starts with your focus and commitment to avoiding the emotional highs and lows that come during a round.

“You can decide days before you play what is the perfect mental state to have,” said John F. Murray, a licensed clinical and sports performance psychologist in West Palm Beach, Fla., whose list of clients include many mini-tour golfers. “And you don’t let the moment or the disappointment or the excitement in any way, shape or form disrupt the process that you decided is beneficial to perform.”

The Brain Game also includes lots of positive imagery, before and during the round. Imagine yourself at the first tee hitting a good shot. Imagine a good chip, and a putt that finds the cup. Imagine it and you have a better change of doing it.

“You don’t want to just see it,” Gilbert said. “You want to see it, hear it, feel it, taste it.”

PRE-ROUND PREPARATION: When you arrive at the course, leave your troubles behind. Bad week at work? Problems at home? An unpleasant drive to the course? Forget about all that.

“I hear people say that they just need to clear their mind and get rid of those distractions, those stresses in life,” Murray said.

“You are going to be distracted by negativity and by bad events – those events always are going to be around you. So do you respond like [Green Bay quarterback] Brett Favre did when his father died, or do you respond the opposite way and let it destroy your performance?”

PRE-SWING PREPARATION: When you arrive at the first tee, the focus should be on your pre-swing routine. You must have a pre-swing routine, because it keeps you focused on what’s in front of you, not around you.

“Golf is such a mental sport in a sense that so much of the time is spent preparing for the next shot, so you have to be able to prepare the mind with what I call preshot routines,” Murray said.

“So what you’re doing between shots is just as, if not more, important than the shot, because that’s already an ingrained skill that hopefully you have.”

“Most people think it’s about the mind – it’s about the body,” Gilbert said. “Your acting can change your attitudes, your motions can change your emotions and your movements can change your moods.”

BATTLING ADVERSITY: Be prepared to work through adversity. Don’t let an errant shot or a bad hole destroy the round.

“Just like in life, everybody has a terrible day, and you have a choice,” Cunjak said. “You can either continue to obsess about the terrible hole, or you can say, ‘OK, I [goofed], but I have eight more holes to go and I’d really like to have a good time.’Ÿ”

IT TAKES TIME: Mastering the Brain Game takes time. A lot longer than 18 holes. It could take months.

“I don’t think there are any quick fixes out there – that’s a mistake,” Murray said. “If you look at a graph of an arrow going upward, which indicates success, there are many, many faults or failures along the way. But over time, you do improve. So you don’t want to get caught up in the short-term approach to that.”

“Mastering your thinking is not that difficult,” Cunjak said. “It has to be cultivated like any other skill. And if you’re motivated, you’ll do it.”