Here is a posting for the hockey-crazy Ottawa readers. This is an interesting field of research on determining how perception and anticipation contributes to remarkable athletic skills.
Wayne Gretzky-Style ‘Field Sense’ May Be Teachable
In the otherwise unremarkable 1984 National Hockey League game between the Edmonton Oilers and the Minnesota North Stars, there are five seconds that Peter Vint will watch over and over. The star of this sequence is Wayne Gretzky, widely considered the greatest hockey player of all time. In the footage, Gretzky, barreling down the ice at full speed, draws the attention of two defenders. As they converge on what everyone assumes will be a shot on goal, Gretzky abruptly fires the puck backward, without looking, to a teammate racing up the opposite wing. The pass is timed so perfectly that the receiver doesn’t even break stride.
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Such talent has long been assumed to be innate. “Coaches tend to think you either have it or you don’t,” Vint says. Unlike a jump shot or a penalty kick, field sense — which mixes anticipation, timing, and an acute sense of spatial relations — is considered essentially untrainable, a gift. Gretzky himself once fuzzily described it as having “a feeling about where a teammate is going to be. A lot of times, I can just turn and pass without looking.”
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