TRICKS THE NERVES PLAY

Waipa Post, Volume 32, Issue 1780, 8 July 1926, Page 7

TRICKS THE NERVES PLAY

" The worst feeling of nervousness I ever experience, is just before I go in to bat," says Mr G. L. Dalton in the London Daily Mail. "*-

The speaker was a well-known cricketer. There are plenty of county batsmen who suffer agonies of nervousness before they leave the pavilion, and Mr D. J. Knight, the Surrey amateur, 'has confessed to feeling far from happy when making his way to the wicket.

Yet golfers will tell you that the nervousness of a cricketer can be trivial compared with the feeling engendered! by competition play before a crowd of spectators. Alone with a partner on a Saturday afternoon you play perfect golf, but the appearance of a crowd is the signal for slicing, topping, and all the other iniquities a golfer can perpetrate. A. woman friend who excels at tennis confesses that she is nervous until her opponent has played into the net. It is not stage fright, for she happens to be the coolest of amateur actresses, but just one of those odd fears which are so difficult to explain.

■What is true of sport is true of other walks of life. The story is told of John Wesley that as a young man, while standing in the pulpit preparatory to preaching his 'first sermon, his nerves gave way, and he turned and fled from the chapel, to the amazement of the congregation.

The person who will slip down a side street to escape the "strain" of an introduction is by no means unusual,, ancS I know one man who invariably leaves a theatre five minutes before the end of the performance to avoid standing immobile while the National Anthem is being played.