Dubai: The one piece of common advice that Dr Rudi Webster gave all his celebrity patients was a reminder to ‘go back to the basics'. "My main job, surprisingly, had been to remind them of the basics and it worked in most cases," Dr Webster told Gulf News.
It had been an illustrious list of patients for Dr Webster over the years which ranged from Clive Lloyd, Viv Richards, Brian Lara, Greg Chappell, Virender Sehwag in cricket to Greg Norman in golf. "Whenever they have come to me, their confidence levels were at a low and my primary job was to remind them of how good they actually were. The idea is to remove the self doubt that creeps into the mind from time to time," he said.
Emphasising on the need for falling back on the basics, Dr Webster said: "During my long chat with Greg Chappell, I realised that he was not watching the ball. Once that issue was sorted out, he was back to his former self."
During his tenure with the Indian cricket team in 2006, an out-of-form Virender Sehwag sought him out for a three-hour long chat, following which Sehwag admitted that he had never chatted so "deeply with anyone." The transformation was immediate and Sehwag thanked Webster for clearing his mind. What did he exactly tell Sehwag? "We had a long conversation whereby I took out some trash from his mind," he said.
Referring to Greg Norman, Dr Webster recalled a phase in the career of ‘The Shark' where the Australian was concentrating too much on the outcome rather than pursuing his normal, attacking game.
In his book Greg Norman: My Story, Norman has referred to a marathon telephonic discussion between him and the doctor in the following manner: "He [Dr Webster] told me to dispel my doubts and fears and always think of golf not in terms of numbers, but in terms of hitting the ball. When I put the telephone down I sat for an hour and thought about what advice he had given me, and the more I thought about it the more it made common sense."
