Jonah Lehrer summarizes a couple links about athletes choking. Good quotes and articles to read if you’re into that sort of thing. This David Foster Wallace blurb touches on the deliberate practice versus natural talent debate.

It’s not an accident that great athletes are often called “naturals,” because they can, in performance, be totally present: they can proceed on instinct and and muscle-memory and autonomic will such that agent and action are one. Great athletes can do this even – and for the truly great ones like Borg and Bird and Nicklaus and Jordan and Austin, especially – under wilting pressure and scrutiny. They can withstand forces of distraction that would break a mind prone to self-conscious fear in two.

The real secret behind top athletes’ genius, then, may be as esoteric and obvious and dull and profound as silence itself. The real, many veiled answer to the question of just what goes through a great player’s mind as he stands at the center of hostile crowd-noise and lines up the free-throw that will decide the game might well be: nothing at all.

Do some players actually perform better under pressure — make better shots under extreme, last-minute pressure than they would under merely high-pressure conditions?

The answer is no. Those reported to be clutch players are actually just great players who get more opportunities to make last minute shots, and score at the same percentages that they do in other parts of the game. Also, we tend to remember the great last-minute shots, and forget the last-minute misses.