Today, the mental side of elite sport is taken for granted. Professional teams employ sports psychologists and mental skills coaches. Visualisation, relaxation techniques, controlled breathing and the management of anxiety and confidence have become familiar parts of preparing athletes to perform under pressure.
It was rather different in 1978.
More than four decades later, Phil Gould recalled one of his earliest encounters with those ideas — at Penrith, through Roger Cowan.
Gould told the story during an episode of Six Tackles with Gus in September 2021. The discussion had turned to Parramatta’s use of a mental skills coach during the NRL finals and to the relative importance of the physical and mental sides of elite sport.
For Gould, there was little doubt. At the highest level, he suggested, the mental component accounted for perhaps 95 per cent of performance. Players needed to learn how to control their thinking under pressure, he said, and that was a skill that took time to develop.
Then he remembered Roger.
An Experiment at Penrith
Gould described Cowan as the man who ran the Leagues Club and someone who read widely about self-improvement. Roger had long been particularly interested in hypnosis and in techniques, he believed could help people get the best out of themselves.
In May 1978, he decided to try some of those ideas with the Penrith first-grade team.
Gould’s memory of the occasion, 43 years later, compressed the chronology a little. He recalled the match as only his second game in first grade. In fact, he had debuted for Penrith in 1976.
But the match was a significant first for the young Gould.
It was his first game as captain of the Penrith Panthers.
The previous Sunday, 30 April, club captain Mick Stephenson had played his final match. Mounting injuries had finally brought his career to an end, but he went out with a remarkable performance. Penrith had lost its first five matches of the 1978 season; against North Sydney, Stephenson scored two tries as the Panthers recorded their first win, 17–16.
The following week, the captaincy passed to Gould.
He was just 19.
Penrith’s opponents on Sunday, 7 May were Eastern Suburbs. Gould recalls Bob Fulton being captain-coach of Easts that year but it was Arthur Beetson However, for this game at the Sydney Sports Ground Beetson did not play and Fulton was the captain.
Gould remembers the young Panthers being given virtually no chance.
Roger decided to try something different.
Shoes Off, Lie on the Floor
Before the game, Gould recalls, the Penrith players walked from the Sports Ground to a nearby hotel. Pubs were closed on Sundays in those days, but Roger knew someone who allowed the team inside.
The players removed their shoes and lay on the floor.
Roger began what Gould describes as a relaxation and hypnotherapy session.
He asked the players to relax, control their breathing and then visualise the match ahead. Gould remembers Roger asking them to imagine themselves playing the perfect game — making tackles, kicking well, scoring tries and seeing everything they did producing a positive result.
Gould, reflecting on this in 43 yers later, could see parallels with techniques that had become commonplace in professional sport.
At the time, however, this was something very different.
As the players lay quietly imagining their perfect performances, one of Penrith’s front-rowers1 suddenly cried out:
“Oh No!”
Everyone sat up.
As Gould remembered it, that rather killed the mood.
Then they beat Easts.
Whatever contribution Roger’s experiment made, something went right that afternoon.
Penrith beat Eastern Suburbs 15–13.
Inevitably, Gould recalled, everyone credited the victory to Roger having hypnotised the team.
So they did it again.
Before the following match against St George at Kogarah on Saturday, 13 May, Roger arranged another session. This time, however, there was a practical problem.
At the Sports Ground the previous week, the hotel had been only a short walk away. Roger didn’t know the St George area nearly as well. The venue he found was down towards Blakehurst — much further from the ground than he had appreciated.
The players walked there, went through another session and then had to walk all the way back to Kogarah. They arrived late, rushed their preparation and St George beat them 26–9.
Gould’s conclusion was succinct:
That was the end of the hypnotherapy.
HEAR PHIL GOULD TELL THE STORY
In this 12-minute extract from Six Tackles with Gus (September 2012), Phil Gould recalls Roger Cowan’s experiments with hypnotherapy and visualisation at Penrith in 1978 — and explains the lasting influence the experience had on his own interest in sports psychology.
Excerpt from Six Tackles with Gus courtesy of Nine Network Australia
It would be easy to leave the story there — an entertaining glimpse of a very different era of rugby league.
But Gould didn’t.
Something Stayed With Gus.
Despite the scepticism of some of the players, and despite the somewhat chaotic end to Roger’s experiment, Gould says he personally got something from it.
More importantly, he says:
“It piqued my interest in sports psychology.”
That interest stayed with him.
When Gould eventually moved into coaching, he became, in his words, “a very strong believer” in the psychological side of preparation and incorporated it into his coaching programs. He sought out sports psychologists, learned from them, and developed ways of helping players understand their own thought processes, motivation, preparation and performance.
Gould’s approach was not about a few minutes of emotional motivation before a match. His 2021 explanation is much broader: self-appraisal, goal setting, preparation, communication, trust, relationships between players and understanding how an individual’s role affects those around him.
And he traced the beginning of his interest back to those early experiences at Penrith.
“That Sort of Stuff Was Unheard of Back Then”
There is an interesting echo to Gould’s recollection.
Many years later, Ivan Cleary encountered Gould as a young player at the Sydney Roosters.
In his book Not Everything Counts … But Everything Matters, Cleary recall being struck by the way Gould thought about football:
From the very start, I was blown away by the way Gus saw the game.
Cleary remembers Gould’s tactics and strategy, but specifically mentions “the mental side of the footy”.
On one occasion Gould brought a psychologist in to speak to the players.
Cleary’s recollection is telling:
That sort of stuff was unheard of back then.
Perhaps it was to Cleary.
But it wasn’t to Gould.
Nearly two decades earlier, a teenage Phil Gould had been lying on the floor of a closed Sydney hotel while Roger Cowan asked him to relax, control his breathing and visualise himself playing the perfect game.
More Than an Eccentric Experiment
In Part 43 of Panthers, Passion & Politics, Roger talks about his longstanding fascination with what he called “the power of the unconscious to affect performance”.
He explored meditation, hypnosis, NLP and other approaches to changing patterns of thought. At various times he worked directly with Panthers players who were struggling with confidence or performance.
Read in isolation, Roger’s recollections might sound like the unusual interests of an unconventional chief executive.
Gould’s story adds something important.
It independently confirms that Roger was actually experimenting with these ideas in the Panthers football environment as early as 1978.
Care needs to be taken about claiming any more than that. There may have been others in rugby league experimenting with psychological preparation at the time, and there is no need to claim that Roger Cowan invented or pioneered sports psychology in the game.
But it is interesting enough that Roger was exploring the mental dimensions of sporting performance at a time when such ideas were far from commonplace in rugby league.
Intersting enough because he had plenty on his plate with the entire Panthers enterprise. Interesting enough given the label “anti-rugby-league” tat had been applied by some.
The first experiment produced a memorable win.
The second produced a long walk and a 26–9 defeat.
And the hypnotherapy sessions stopped for then.
But for one 19-year-old player, something remained.
More than forty years later, Phil Gould could still trace his interest in sports psychology back to those unusual afternoons at Penrith — an interest he would eventually carry into his own highly successful coaching career.
Perhaps Roger’s experiment achieved something after all.
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Innovation · Culture · Football Club
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- Unfortunately Gould does not name the player. The front-rowers on the day were John Farragher and Ross Cale. In the second row were Paul Merlo and Tas Batieri. ↩︎
Panthers, Passion & Politics - The Roger Cowan Years 