In October 1993, a meditation teacher named George Mumford walked into the Chicago Bulls' training camp in Deerfield, Illinois. Phil Jackson had hired him to teach the team what was billed as stress reduction. By 1997, Jackson had noticed a pattern: "The funny thing is, invariably we go on a five-game winning streak whenever we see George." (Quoted in Katy Butler, Tricycle, Summer 2003.)

Mumford went on to work with Jackson for more than 20 years, from the Bulls to the Lakers of Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant. The idea he taught is simple enough to use on a Tuesday night at the pool hall: you play your best when you stop fighting your own mind. Here is what he taught, what the science says about it, and a ten-minute practice you can start this week.

Who was George Mumford?

George Mumford is a meditation teacher and sports psychology consultant who worked with Phil Jackson's teams for more than two decades. He taught Vipassana, an insight meditation practice, along with stress reduction. He came to meditation through his own recovery from addiction, and he wrote The Mindful Athlete about applying it to sport.

Mumford has been open about why the practice mattered to him. "My life depended on meditation practice," he told Tricycle. That honesty is part of why players listened. He was not selling calm as a performance trick; he had needed it to survive.

What did he teach the Bulls and Lakers?

He taught players to notice what was happening in their minds and bodies without being ruled by it. His sessions mixed meditation, conversation and team building. The point was not to empty the mind. It was to stay present, steady and connected to teammates while the game swirled around them.

In a 2016 profile for Mindful, Hugh Delehanty, who co-wrote Jackson's book Eleven Rings, summarized Mumford's lessons in three ideas: be still so you can act without overthinking; forget yourself and focus on your values and your teammates; and remember that mindfulness alone is not enough without steady effort and good judgment. Mumford once told Kobe Bryant that the best way to score was not to try to score. Bryant scored 16 points in the first quarter. "Because he wasn't trying to score," Mumford said, "he was letting the game come to him."

Michael Jordan put the result in his own words: "George talked me off the ledge of anger and frustration." That line matters for pool players. Anger after a miss rarely costs one shot. It costs the next three.

Does mindfulness improve performance?

The research says yes, and pool players have a particular reason to pay attention. Two reviews point the same way. One found the clearest performance gains in precision sports like shooting and darts. Another found that mindfulness training lowered competitive anxiety, with larger effects from programs longer than seven weeks.

The first review, led by Laura Bühlmayer and published in Sports Medicine in 2017, pooled nine trials with 290 athletes. Mindfulness practice improved performance in shooting and dart throwing. The second, by Xin Wang and colleagues in Current Psychology in 2024, pooled 20 studies, 14 of them randomized controlled trials. Mindfulness reduced both the worried thoughts and the physical jitters of competitive anxiety, and it raised self-confidence.

Why precision sports? They share the demands of a pool shot: stillness, fine motor control and a single moment of execution after time to think. That window is exactly where a wandering, anxious mind does damage. Nine trials is not a mountain of evidence, and the authors call for more high-quality trials. Still, for a sport built like ours, the direction is clear.

What does "let the game come to you" mean at the table?

It means you stop forcing outcomes and respond to the table in front of you. You play the shot that is there, not the shot you wish were there. You let a bad roll go instead of carrying it into the next rack.

In practice, this is the difference between a player who misses, mutters and then rushes the next shot, and a player who misses, breathes and walks around the table to see what is left. The second player is not calmer by nature. That player has practiced noticing the frustration and letting it pass before it reaches the stroke. That is a trainable skill, and it is the one Mumford taught.

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