Early Years
A former United States Table Tennis Junior Champion, as well a National Sports Festival gold medalist, Dr. Lardon credits his own sports experience as setting the stage for his interest in athletic peak performance and the study of human consciousness.
As an undergraduate at Stanford University, Lardon’s senior research paper for Professor Albert Bandura (Social learning theory) was on mental visualization in the context of human peak performance. He also was a teaching assistant for Dr. Philip Zimbardo (Principal investigator of the Stanford Prison Study), Dr. Robert Ornstein (Author of the “Psychology of Consciousness”) and for Dr. Stephen LaBerge, a leader in the scientific study of lucid dreaming. In 1984 Lardon received his Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Stanford University.
In 1991 Lardon completed his internship in internal medicine at St. Mary’s Hospital in Long Beach, CA (a UCLA affiliate hospital) after graduating medical school in 1989 from the University of Texas medical branch at Galveston. In 1993 he won the UCSD Department of Psychiatry Judd (Louis Judd, Past Chairman, National Institute of Mental Health) research award for his work on the neuroelectric assessment of athletic peak performance. In August 1994 this research was awarded grant funding by the United States Tennis Association by the administrator of sports science, E. Paul Roetert, Ph.D.
During his psychiatry residency training at UCSD he caddied for his brother Brad Lardon in the finals of the PGA Tour Qualifying School in La Quinta, CA. His experience was first chronicled in John Feinstein’s best selling book, “A Good Walk Spoiled” and later in the January 1995 issue of Golf Magazine where he read his brother’s final putt to determine if Brad Lardon would earn fully exempt status on the PGA Tour. Lardon under-read the putt but his brother hit it too hard, taking the break out of it and the ball hit the back of the cup, bounced straight up and fell back in giving Brad Lardon his second fully exempt year on the PGA Tour.
Read more about this topic: Michael Lardon
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or years:
“He had long before indulged most unfavourable sentiments of our fellow-subjects in America. For, as early as 1769,... he had said of them, “Sir, they are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for any thing we allow them short of hanging.””
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
“We watched her jug a hare, once, on television, years ago.... The hare had been half rotted, then cremated, then consumed. If there is a god and she is of the rabbit family, then Saskia will be in deep doo- doo on Judgment Day.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)