How Meditation Helps Jamal Murray To Become a Top Basketball Athlete

Master Dao Shi was interviewed by Chris O’Leary Sports Reporter, of the Toronto Star in 2016. We just remembered about this article so we've reposted it here.

The original article can be found on Toronto Star's website here:
https://www.thestar.com/sports/basketball/kentucky-s-jamal-murray-finds-the-calm-before-the-storm/article_d674ba10-a0ce-5772-9060-e5ba42fecef2.html

By Chris O’Leary Sports Reporter

Going on two straight years now, Jamal Murray’s life has consisted of noise.

The NCAA recruiters who trekked north to Orangeville Prep last year are this year’s NBA scouts, camped out in Lexington, Ky., where Murray has shone as a freshman with the Wildcats.

Wins and losses, good plays and bad, and every in and out of his 20 points and five rebounds per game roll through the critique cycle on repeat. Mock drafts have been forecasting where the 19-year-old from Kitchener, Ont., will begin his pro career, jostling him throughout the NBA’s lottery every week since October.

And that’s just the simple basketball stuff. There is still the attention and fanfare that playing well — really well — at one of the biggest basketball programs in the NCAA brings. There’s also the endless stream of you’re-the-next-Steph-Curry praise to you’re-straight-garbage trolling that social media heaps on athletes.

And as loud as the last two years have been for Murray, March Madness starts on Thursday. From the moment the Wildcats’ opponent is revealed on Selection Sunday, everything — the praise and the criticism, the TV audiences and the packed arenas, the tweets and, most important, the pressure — will start to climb to deafening levels as Murray tries to steer a middle-of-the-pack Wildcats team deep into the tournament.

The six-foot-five guard has a plan for the noise; it’s one that he’s had in place probably longer than he can remember. Meditation and kung fu help him navigate these eye-of-the-hurricane moments.

“I think it’s made me the player that I am today,” Murray said recently. “If it wasn’t for that, I probably wouldn’t be the same player — I probably wouldn’t be in this spot.”

Basketball and meditation have crossed paths in the past. Phil Jackson earned the Zen Master moniker while coaching Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls, and later brought his teachings to Shaquille O’Neal, Kobe Bryant and the L.A. Lakers. But Murray’s time with meditation started much earlier than Jackson’s prodigies.

His father, Roger, says that, even as a baby, Jamal lit up when he had a basketball in his hands. Having benefitted from meditation and kung fu himself, he introduced them to his son when he was three or four years old.

“We’d sit together and relax and I’d tell him, ‘You can’t say anything. You can’t laugh, you have to keep your emotions,’ stuff like that,” Roger said.

Of course, there are limitations in trying to corral a toddler and getting them to sit still.

“You make it fun,” Roger Murray said. “It was a progression.”

It progressed to the point of Jamal doing pre- and post-game meditation through high school. He said he has had to scale it back to pre-game this year but the impact has still been tremendous.

“The kung fu (built) mental toughness and then, the kung fu and meditation, we went over different scenarios and different situations,” Jamal said. “That led to me being more relaxed in the game and seeing things slower.

“Now I have a resting heartbeat of 34 beats per minute, so it just kind of slowed my body down and made me think clearer.”

The National Institutes of Health (via the American Heart Association) says the average resting heart rate for a well-trained athlete is 40 to 60 beats per minute. For an average person, it’s 60 to 100 beats per minute.

Dao Shi is the chief Shaolin instructor who teaches meditation and kung fu at the Shaolin Temple Quanfa Institute in downtown Toronto. A 35th generation traditional Shaolin disciple, he was also a big fan of the Vince Carter-led Raptors.

“The first purpose of meditation is to clear your mind,” he said. “If you want to do really well, you can’t worry about all the different problems or stresses you have in your life. What meditation does is it takes away all the many, many thoughts that you have.

“The second purpose is it helps you control your emotions. You try to get into a state of neutrality.”

The pursuit of that state of neutrality is what pulled Raptors centre Bismack Biyombo into meditation a little more than a year ago.

“I’ve meditated before games, meditated . . . to take good action in stressful moments. I find that’s how meditation has helped me,” he said.

“Before I was too stressed and there was too much going on. Overall it has helped me and I know I still have a long way to go, but it’s one step at a time. You can’t master it. You take away your anger, you help your anger management in game situations.”

“When you close your eyes, you’ll see things, think of all sorts of things. To think of nothing at all is actually very, very difficult to do,” Shi said. “So meditation is a tool and a skill that you can acquire to improve your focus and then reduce your mental stress. It’s allowing your brain to sleep without sleeping. It needs rest, too.”

Roger Murray practised kung fu and saw it as something that could apply to basketball when Jamal started playing it.

“You think about kung fu or martial arts, you think about fighting but there’s also a mental part,” Roger said.

It might be the mental part of kung fu that aligns it with basketball. The one-on-one battles have similar elements, where you’re studying and anticipating the moves of your opponent. As Shi explains it, he starts to sound like a basketball coach.

“Shaolin kung fu is about self-defence first,” he said. “It’s from a self-defence that you think about offence. That’s the strongest way.

“You go in there thinking only about offence and you’re going to get destroyed. Your opponent will be smarter than that, they’ll be able to take advantage of your weaknesses.

“It becomes like a chess game.”

A lifetime of basketball, meditation and kung fu have taken Jamal Murray to his biggest stage yet. The numbers — 10 straight games of more than 20 points to end Kentucky’s regular season, and 24.5 points per game in the SEC playoffs — have gotten better as the NCAA Tournament has gotten closer. But it shouldn’t be surprising.

While an arena full of fans are creating chaos, Murray is calmly playing chess in his own world.