Is there such a thing as being clutch?
The clutch player doesn’t lose the belief that he can get it done
Everybody wants to be “clutch.” At the moment, Mets second baseman Daniel Murphy has been the embodiment of the word with his seven post-season home runs so far.
Clutch is the most admired attribute in sports, the separator that differentiates our favorite athletes.
With all that, there is a debate about whether the term has been romanticized into an exaggerated character trait — the so-called “clutch gene.” Recent analytics by sports statisticians indicate that — given a sufficient sample size – professional athletes tend to perform at about the same level in regular situations as they do in so-called pressure situations.
In golf, the difference might not be those who come up big, but those who choke less.
Jaime Diaz of Golf Digest contemplates the “clutch factor” and it’s a great read…
