Sport psychology, as I teach it, is about learning to think in the most effective and efficient way possible every day. It’s the psychology of excellence. My job as a coach of mental skills is to help players go where they might not be able go on their own, given their old ways of thinking.
I am convinced that it is the power of will that separates great golfers from those who never reach their potential.
Though I teach psychology, I have never known for sure where the mind ends and where heart, soul, courage and the human spirit begin. But I do know that it is somewhere in this nexus of mind and spirit, which we call free will, that all great champions find the strength to dream their destinies and to honor their commitments to excellence. All great champions are strong on the inside.
They all learn that competitive golf either builds character or reveal character. They learn to be honest about their thoughts. The learn to relish the game’s mental and emotional challenges. They learn to appreciate the value of thinking in an athletic manner. Finally, they learn that golf is a game, and it has to be played.
Anyone who plays championship golf will tell you that at least half the battle occurs inside the golfer’s mind.
Generally, the better a player is, the higher the percentage he will attribute to the mental side. That’s reasonable. A beginner, who has very little control over his swing, can’t be expected to understand that the game is 80-90% mental. But on the PGA Tour, where all the players can hit quality shots, the mental side is at least 90% of the margin between winners and losers.
Many times I have had fans tell me how cool I looked on the course, when all I could remember was how scared or nervous I had been. Or, possibly, it’s because the top players, those who have found an effective way to think on the course, are very protective of any thoughts that might aid an opponent.
Freud believed dreams were a window into the subconscious mind. From them, he spun a web of theory that, too often, boils down to a belief that people are the victim of circumstances beyond their control — of childhood traumas, parental mistakes, and instinctive impulses.
A person with great dreams can achieve great things.
A person with small dreams, or a person without the confidence to pursue his or her dreams, has consigned himself to a life of frustration and mediocrity.
- Ben won the state championship twice. I won it once. Tom never won it. I thought I was way better than him. He seemed to be always shooting 3 over par. How did he get so good?
- The short answer is that Tom had a dream and he never stopped chasing it.
But while I certainly wouldn’t discourage someone with those physical characteristics, I’ve found that they have little to d with real golfing potential.
Golfing potential depends primarily on a player’s attitude, on how well he plays with the wedges and the putter, and on how well he thinks.
I asked how many times that year his golf coach had talked about winning the national championship.
“Not at all,” the boy replied. In fact, the team had felt it did very well just to qualify for the NCAA tournament, where it failed to make the cut. They had a party after the tournament was over.
“That’s the point. You have to look at what you’re aiming for, because that’s going to influence your level of commitment.”
That’s because the world is full of people happy to tell you that your dreams are unrealistic, that you don’t have the talent to realize them.
But he was capable of following a 64 with a 76 and shooting himself out of a tournament. Inconsistency plagued him.
As we talked, it became apparent that Nick had a problem shared by a lot of professionals. His thinking depended on how he played the first few holes. If they went well, he fell into a relaxed, confident and focused frame of mind. Not coincidentally, he shot an excellent round. But if the first few holes went poorly, his concentration was shattered. He might start trying to fix his swing in the middle of the round and become increasingly erratic.
If you’re going to be a victim of the first few holes, you don’t have a prayer. You’re like a puppet. You let the first few holes jerk your strings and tell you how you’re going to feel and how you’re going to think.
You’re going to have to learn to think consistently if you want to score consistently. You wouldn’t be foolish enough to try a different swing on every shot, would you?
It’s the same way with your mind. You’re going to have to decide before the round starts how you’re going to think, and do it on every shot. You have to choose to think well.
Not many people think that their state of mind is a matter of choice. But I believe it is.
Unfortunately, major branches of psychology and psychiatry during this century have helped promote the notion that we are all in some sense victims — victims of insensitive parents, victims of poverty, victims of abuse, victims of implacable genes. Our state of mind, therefore, is someone else’s responsibility. This kind of psychology is very appealing to many academics. It gives them endless opportunities to pretend they know what makes an individual miserable and unsuccessful. It appeals as well to a lot of unhappy people. It gives them an excuse for their misery. It permits them to evade the responsibility for their own lives.
He taught us that we had to be mentally disciplined every day in practice if we wanted to be disciplined on the game days and that attitude would always win out over ability.
The varsity athletes I played with had almost everything going right in their lives. They were good-looking, talented guys. But a lot of the focused on the little things that were wrong with their lives. They wanted to be taller, or they wished their families had more money.
In contrast, these retarded kids had almost everything going wrong in their lives. But they focused on the only thing that was going right — their chance to learn to play. And they learned, despite their limitations. It started to hit me that attitude, self-perception and motivation heavily influenced success in life. I realized that happiness had more to do with what you did than with what you had.
As a psychology student, I soon found myself skeptical of a lot of the theories and theorists I read. For one thing, a lot of the theorists were themselves unhappy individuals. I was attracted, on the other, to the ideas of people who seemed to have a knack for happiness and success.
People by and large became what they think about themselves.
The idea is so simple that it is easy to dismiss. People become what they think about themselves. It’s almost all a person needs to know about how to be happy.
If someone came to me and asked me how to be happy, I would reply that it’s simple. Just wake up every morning thinking about the wonderful things you are going to do that day. Go to sleep every night thinking about the wonderful events of the past day and the wonderful things you will do tomorrow. Anyone who does that will be happy.
Winners and losers, Wooden said, are self-determined. But only the winners are willing to admit it.
Free will means that a person can think any way he or she wants to think. He can choose to be a happy person or a miserable person. She can choose to think of herself as a great golfer or a born loser.
Free will is the greatest gift anyone could have given us. It means we can, in a real sense, control our own lives.
Consider the free throw. As with the tee shot in golf, nearly everything — the ball, the height of the basket, the distance — is constant, except the movement of the athlete. If you watch the best free-throw shooters, you will notice 2 things. First, they have routines that they follow on every shot. They may spin the ball in their hands. Then maybe they dribble the ball a precise number of times. They take their stance in the same way every time. They focus on a small piece of the rim. And they let the shot go, without giving much, if any, thought to such things as the angle formed by the right elbow at the point of release.
Now mount the beam 40ft in the air, with no net underneath. Physically, the task remains the same as it was when the beam was on the floor. Mentally, though, it has changed dramatically. Mounting the beam high in the air introduces a strong fear of failure.
Most people, in such circumstances, will respond by starting to think about mechanical things they didn’t worry about when the beam was on the floor.
Their goal will become not falling, rather than getting to the end of the beam. They will stop trusting the body’s ability to remain balanced as they negotiate the distance. Thinking that way causes the muscles to tighten and the movement of the body to grow spasmodic and jerky rather than rhythmic and graceful.
In much the same, a golfer who fears failure tends to think about how he takes the club back, how far he turns, how he cocks his wrists, how he starts the downswing, or other swing mechanics.
This suggests a most important principle:
You cannot hit a golf ball consistently well if you think about the mechanics of your swing as you play.
But the time to worry about swing mechanics must be limited, and the place to worry about them is the practice tee and only the practice tee. If you step onto the course with the intention of shooting your best possible score, you cannot think about mechanics. You have to believe that you’ve practiced the golf swing enough to have faith in it. To put it concisely:
A golfer must train his swing and then trust it.
Winners learn to accept the swing they bring to the golf course on any given day and to score with it.
This was the way Tom Watson played in his prime. The worse he hit it, the more he ripped it. He knew that if he reacted to a bad shot by getting more careful, it would not make his swing better. It would make it tentative — and worse. I’ve seen him hit it 70y left, then 70y right and then hit the 3rd one screaming on line to the pin.
- How did you stay confident after you missed all those shots?
- Well, you have to understand. I’ve always been a 50% shooter. After I missed one, I figured the next one was likely to go in. After I missed 2, I was overdue. By the time I’d missed 5, I figured the next one absolutely had to drop. Every time I missed, I figured the odds were increasing in my favor.
- Okay, if that’s how you think when you miss your first shots, what do you think if you make for first 6 or 7 in a row?
- That’s totally different. You decide that tonight’s your night, you’re on a hot streak, and you’re going to make everything you look at.
- That’s ridiculous. You can’t have it both ways.
- Of course you can.
Stuart had revealed something very basic about the way good athletes think. They create their own realities. They think however they have to think to maintain their confidence and get the job done. In basketball, this is called the shooter’s mentality. A golfer has to learn to put aside all thought of past failures and to trust that his next swing will send his shot where he aims it.
This may seem, to an outsider, to be absolutely irrational. How can a kid who’s just missed 20 shots in a row be confident he’s going to make the next one?
The answer is that whether it’s rational or not, it’s more effective than the alternative.
Many weekend golfers don’t even wait for a bad shot to stop trusting their swing. They step onto the 1st tee thinking of a dozen mechanical concepts they’ve heard from friends, read about in magazines, or seen on TV. Half the time, these dozen mechanical thoughts conflict with one another. They take the driver out and start their backswing thinking about stiff left arms, still heads, full turns, wrist cocks, or pronated hands. Without realizing it, they’re doing everything possible to undermine their own game.
Even the weekend players who start off trusting tend to stop doing it after a bad shot or two. They start trying to fix the mechanical problem that led to the bad shot. They would be far better off if they realized that, as human beings, they are highly unlikely to get through 18 holes without a few bad swings.
I’ve asked many golfers to recall and describe their state of mind during their hot streaks. I have yet to hear one respond that he was thinking of swing mechanics. Most would say that the hot streak enabled them to stop thinking about swing mechanics. That’s another way of saying they were able to trust their swings.
I had to tell him that most of what passes for discovery in sports psychology really isn’t new. There is just the same old wisdom, repeated over and over again, repackaged in new terminology.
Snead had a fine, intuitive sense of his own capabilities. And he soon learned that he knocked the rock farther and straighter when he cleared out his mind and just let his naturally fluid swing occur.
Snead allowed himself to be convinced that what had worked in the pasture back home wasn’t good enough for professional competition. He decided he had to learn to “concentrate,” which he took to mean trying very hard to swing absolutely correctly.
Practice ranges came long, and teachers found that they could make a living just standing on the lesson tee and talking about hand positions and body coils and swing planes. They stopped walking the course with their pupils. They stopped teaching rhythm and feel and scoring skills.
Gradually, teaching golf became a big business. Teachers competed for a share of the market by claiming that they, and they alone, had discovered the secret, the mechanical key to the perfect swing. Many in the golf business fought over the ownership of the “correct way” to teach the swing, even though, as it happens, almost none of the great golfers swung the club “correctly.”
Until 1946, Hogan never fully trusted his swing. He played every round in fear that he could fall out of the groove. He worried about dozens of mechanical details on every stroke.
Around 1946, Hogan realized that he had mastered the fundamentals of the swing and didn’t need to worry about them so much. He abandoned what he called “this ambitious overthoroughness” in relation to his swing. The results were dramatic.
I had a chance to visit Hogan several years a go, and what he said differed substantially from the Hogan image.
“I played by feel,” Hogan told me.
He also told me that he didn’t start to win major championships until he learned that on any tough course there would be always be a few holes that bothered him, where he couldn’t use his driver.
Hogan, in his prime, was as good as anybody at putts from 5-15ft. On the professional tour, those are the putts that separate the winners from the also-rans, because they are the putts that produce birdies.
When Hogan stopped being a confident putter and started muttering that putts should only count half a stroke, he stopped winning golf tournaments.
Nicklaus helped reemphasize the importance of the right mental approach to the game. He was a strategist and thinker on the golf course. He was among the first golfers to talk about visualizing the shot he desired before he swung the club. He insisted on waiting until his mind was relaxed and focused before hitting a shot.
A player has to pass through 3 stages: unconsciously incompetent, consciously competent, and unconsciously competent.
The brain and nervous system respond best when the eyes focus on the smallest possible target. The smaller the target, the sharper the athlete’s focus, the better his concentration, and the better the results.
But it has another benefit. A golfer needs to have something on his mind if he does not want thoughts about swing mechanics to intrude on his consciousness just as he is preparing to play his shot. The target helps to fill that void. It helps prevent distractions.
And experience, that false friend, tells you that you can’t hit a driver precisely enough to bother with a specific target. So golfers are tempted to be sloppy about targets. If they fall prey to the temptation, they tend to hit, not surprisingly, sloppy shots.
Locking your mind onto a small target will help you deal with looming hazards. The brain tries to be an accommodating mechanism. It will try to send the ball in the direction of the last thing you look at or think about. If that happens to be a pond, you can find yourself in severe trouble.
Most tour players have long since learned not to let things like water hazards bother them. More often, their brains get distracted by something like the flag.
The brain, at some level, cannot seem to understand the word “don’t.”
If your last thought before striking the ball is “don’t hit it in the pond,” the brain is likely to react by telling your muscles to hit it in the pond.
A sound preshot routine is the rod and staff of the golfer under pressure, a comfort in times of affliction and challenge. It ensures that he gets set up properly, physically and mentally. It blocks out distractions. It helps him to produce his best golf under pressure.
High handicappers often tell me that what the most want to solve are problems of inconsistency. They can’t figure out why what feels like the same swing produces a long, straight shot one time and a ball that fades to a splash the next.
I usually respond by asking them to describe their preshot routines. Many of them can’t, because they don’t have a preshot routines. And yet, the pros I work with, who know the golf swing better than anyone, tell me that 80% of any golf shot happens before the player takes the club back: when he aims, take his grip, addresses the ball, and, most important, focuses his mind.
The foundation of consistency is a sound preshot routine.
To develop a reliable routine, a golfer has to decide to follow it and practice it time after time after time until it becomes an ingrained habit that will show up no matter how much pressure he is under. You can be sure that under pressure, you will find out what your dominant habit is.
Good players feel that when their routines start, they are stepping into a bubble, a small, private world in which nothing can distract them. Tom Watson once said it feels like going into a room where everything is dim and quiet.
The important thing about club selection is decisiveness. If you step up to the ball still uncertain whether you have the right club, your routine is not sound. You have to start over, rethinking the shot until you are convinced you have the right club for it.
But you don’t have to visualize. A lot of great players don’t, because their minds don’t work that way. They look at their targets, decide they are going to hit those targets, and how they will work the ball — draw or fade. That suffices. Some players simply focus on the target and know the ball is going there. That gets the job done.
She later said she failed to follow her routine. To a spectator, this would not have been apparent. Physically, she went through all the motions. But she did not follow the mental side of the routine, which required her to dispel any doubt or anger from her mind before she hit the ball.
This is often the hardest part of the routine to execute. It’s not enough to go through the motions that set up the body properly. You have to set up the mind as well.
Even the best players, the ones who have learned this principle, understand it, and have practiced it, have to work constantly at it. The game is always tempting them, as it tempted Val Skinner, to hit a shot before their minds are set. Everyone succumbs to the temptation once in a while and strays from the proper routine.
The practice swing, improperly used, can inject trouble into your routine. Some people, for instance, feel it’s important to take precisely the same number of practice swings before each shot. But if the last swing doesn’t feel right, and they step up to the ball anyway, they can’t help but have doubts about their ability to execute the shot. They would be better off being flexible about the number of practice swings they take, making certain that the last one feels right and inspires trust in the swing.
He knows that the purpose of the routine is not to take a certain number of practice swings, but to set him up properly, mentally and physically, for the shot.
The practice swing can be the back door through which thoughts about swing mechanics invade your routine. Many players, as they take their practice swings, remind themselves of all sorts of mechanical concepts. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, for them to then step up to the ball and banish those thoughts from their minds.
I know that many golfers cannot easily bring themselves to do that. They go through a phase where they simply must think about mechanics on the practice swing. If you fall into that category, my advice is to take at least 2 practice swings. Let the 1st one be the one on which you think about mechanics. Once your mechanics feel right, take a final practice swing in which you concentrate only on target and feel.
In the ideal routine, the player takes his grip and his stance unconsciously and correctly. I like to see my players take their grip while they are standing behind the ball, rather than during their address. I don’t want to see them fiddling with the grip over the ball.
The correct grip and stance are so important that if you plan on taking only one lesson for the rest of your life, I would recommend that it deal only with grip, stance, alignment, ball position, and developing a routine that enables you to mentally and physically set up properly every time.
Until you reach the stage where you can unconsciously take care of grip, stance, and alignment, you need to be consciously meticulous about your setup. As soon as you’ve completed setting up, shift gears mentally, stop thinking about mechanics, and focus on the target.
Then the most important part of an exemplary routine begins. It’s deceptively simple:
Look at the target, look at the ball, and swing.
The best swing thought is no swing thought. If a player tells me he absolutely must have a swing thought, I let him have one. But he can have only one per round, and only for shots of 120y and longer.
A person with a sound, deliberate routine should be a faster player, because he will spend less time in the woods looking for lost balls.
She told me that, in her mind, missing a green didn’t matter. She was just as intent on, and confident about, holing chips and pitches as she was on long putts. That’s how solid her short game was.
There’s no small amount of machismo involved in this. The long drives connotes strength, power, virility. The short game has connotations of delicacy and femininity. Part of my job as a sports psychologist is to help players get past this.
All I can say is that if you want to score well, attach your ego to how well you think, how well you manage your game, how well you hit your wedges, how well you putt.
If you’re not spending 70% of your practice time on shots from 120y in, you’re not trying to become the best golfer you can be.
Have no swing thoughts whatever from 120y and in. Think only of the target.
There may be occasions when you can’t see the hole on a short shot. You might, for instance, be at the bottom of a slope, pitching up to an elevated green. In that situation, think about dropping the ball straight onto the flagstick.
He didn’t want to dwell on the putts that he missed, because that would only make it harder to be certain that the next one was going in. And that was one thing Locke insisted on. Putting was about confidence. “Hitting a putt in doubt is fatal in most cases.” Locke has to be certain that the putt was going in.
The style of the stroke is unimportant. There have been great wrist putters and great shoulder putters. There are good putters who putt cross-handed.
Yet, you can still find teachers who will dissect the “proper” stroke and grip at great length and insist that their pupils master these mechanics.
The great players usually start out as confident putters, even bold putters. But over the years, even the great ones have trouble maintaining this attitude. Maybe playing for years with major championship on the line inevitably produces memories of missed putts in crucial situations. After a while, those memories become so burdensome that the golfer can’t keep them out of his mind as he stands on the green. Then he loses the instinct to look at the hole, look at the ball, let the putt go, and know that it’s going in.
The important thing is that you commit yourself completely to the read you make.
He goes entirely by instinct, an instinct honed, of course, by a lot of practice and playing experience.
You have to begin by committing yourself to liking them. You will not be one of the guys who sit in the locker room complaining about what great scores they’d be shooting if they weren’t blowing short putts. You will, instead, be a player who loves holing short putts. You will roll them just as freely as you roll 40ft putts. You won’t try to steer them or over-control them.
The difference is that when you guys get in tournaments, the likelihood is that you’ll lose your concentration on 4 or 5 shots every round. Over a 4-day tournament, even if every lapse costs you just 1 stroke, that’s 16-20 shots a week, and that’s the difference between the leading money winner and losing your card. If one of these lapses costs you 2 or 3 strokes, or you get upset and lose concentration on a 2nd shot, you can be talking about 25-30 strokes a week, and you won’t even make the college golf team. Over a career, losing concentration once in a while can mean lots of strokes.
One of the things Tom, or any successful pro, does best is to accept his bad shots, shrug them off, and concentrate completely on the next one. He has accepted the fact that, as he puts it, “Golf is not a game of perfect.”
Not matter what happens with any shot you hit, accept it. Acceptance is the last step in a sound routine.
Good golfers, I think, have to get over the notion that they only want to win by hitting perfect shots. They have to learn to enjoy winning ugly. And that entails acceptance of all the shots they hit, not just the good ones.
But the question is, does it do any good to get angry?
Getting angry is one of your options. But if you choose to get angry, you are likely to get tighter. That’s going to hurt your rhythm and your flow. It will upset you and distract you. It will switch on your analytical mind and your tendency to criticize and analyze anything you do that falls short of perfection. It will start you thinking about the mechanical flaws in your swing and trying to correct them.
You will very likely play worse.
Chip Beck has one of the best attitudes toward bad shots. When he hits it into the woods, he walks toward the ball and all he say is, “You gotta love it. This is what golf is all about.”
And he’s right. Golf is indeed all about recovering from bad shots. It’s about getting up and down from sand traps. It’s about knowing when it’s smart to pitch sideways out of the rough and do your best to save par or bogey with your wedge and putter. It’s about the exhilaration that comes from spotting a narrow path through the trees and threading your ball through it to the green. Viewed this way, any round you play will be enjoyable.
Expectations are great if you confine them to long-range considerations. It’s fine, for example, to expect that if you work at your game intelligently for an extended period of time, you will improve. But expectations can hurt you if they are narrowly focused on the results of a particular stroke, hole or round.
Golfers in American society, though, tend to be people who are used to getting what they want. Many were born into families of wealth and achievement. Many of those who were not are people who rose to positions of wealth and status because of ambition and hard work. They expect to master golf just as they’ve mastered everything else in life. If they are competing, they expect to win. If they swing at a golf ball, they expect to hit it well, every time. When their golf fails to meet their expectations, what happens? They begin to judge how well they are doing against how well they expected to do. They get angry at themselves. They tie themselves up in knots.
In our culture, people, particularly high achievers, are taught to judge themselves harshly. They’re taught that being compassionate toward oneself is weak and indulgent. There is a kernel of truth in this. There is a time and place for tough self-evaluation, and you will not improve as a golfer unless you honestly examine your game and work on its weaknesses.
But don’t do it on the golf course.
On the tour, there are many factors conspiring to raise a player’s expectations, to encourage him to demand perfect of himself. When this happens, the work ethic that brought a lot of players to the Tour can become a double-edged sword, driving an individual to grind himself down in a dogged, joyless attempt to meet those expectations. A successful player has to develop the ability to evaluate himself objectively, to work harder when he needs more practice, but to ease up when he’s tempted to push too hard.
Retirees often expect to get good after they stop working and don’t have to confine their play to weekends.
When it doesn’t happen that way, it’s often because they forget that golf remains a game. They practice more, but when they also raise their expectations every time they step onto the course. They forget how to laugh off mistakes.
Son, everything that happens to you happens for the best. Don’t ever forget that. You can’t win all the time, son.
The answer is that while I wouldn’t bet my house, that doesn’t mean I’m not confident.
Being confident doesn’t mean that I don’t know that 2% is a good average on 40ft putts. It means that when I’m standing over a 40ft putt, no one is asking me to bet my house, and I’m not thinking about average. I’m thinking about putting the ball in the hole. And that’s all I’m thinking about.
Standing on the tee and thinking about your drive going to the target doesn’t guarantee that it will go there. It only enhances the chances. If it guaranteed success, people would more readily get the idea. But they try thinking confidently, and as soon as a shot doesn’t succeed, they think, “Well, that doesn’t work.”
But look at it another way. If you’re not thinking about your drive going to the target, what are you thinking about?
Negative thinking is almost 100% effective.
I frequently tell touring players that when they’re off the course, if they can’t think about playing great golf, they shouldn’t think about golf at all.
By its nature, golf will try to sap your confidence. On every round, even the best golfer will mishit some shots. Over the course of a year, even the best golfer will lose more tournaments than he wins. So, maintaining confidence in golf is like swimming against a current. You have to work hard to stay where you are.
They have to focus on what they want to happen, be it a particular shot or an entire career. Everyone thinks this way some of the time. Doing it consistently is a habit that requires disciplined effort.
Nowadays, he tells me, the only thoughts that enter his mind on a golf course are thoughts about what he wants to do. The prospect of hitting a drive into the woods or running a putt way past the hole simply does not occur to him.
It can sound a little bit like self-deception. But it isn’t. It is simply the way that great athletes, or successful people in any field, have trained themselves to think.
The question is, as you stand over a ball and prepare to hit it, which shots do you choose to remember?
A lot of players tell me they don’t choose — that the memories of bad shots jump, unbidden, into their mind. Others say they have realistic memories, that they recall both the bad and the good.
But a golfer can indeed choose. Free will enables him to develop the kind of memory that promotes good shotmaking: a short-term memory for failure and a long-term memory for success. A golfer can learn to forget the bad shots and remember the good ones.
One way is to permit yourself to enjoy your good shots.
“Well, you know, when I come up to a shot, I just pull up my sleeves and shrug my shoulders to try to get them relax,” Fred said. “And then I try to remember the best shot I ever hit in my life with whatever club I have in my hands. Is that okay?”
It’s important to differentiate between fear and nervousness. Nervousness is a physical state. It’s sweat on the palms, adrenaline in the bloodstream. There’s nothing wrong with it — it can even help a golfer.
Fear is a mental state. It’s being afraid of making a mistake when you swing the club. Fear causes golfers to try to guide or steer the ball, rather than swing freely.
He learned what all successful athletes sooner or later learn. Courage is fear turned inside out. It is impossible to be courageous if at first you weren’t afraid.
“Once,” Steve went on, glumly, “I was the future of golf. All I ever did for years is what I think you teach. I just saw myself in my mind winning golf tournaments. I saw myself making the shots. I saw myself winning. The year I won the Masters by 7 or 8 shots, I knew I would win it before the plane landed in America. The only problem was that I walked up the 18th fairway without any joy, because I had known I would win before the tournament started.”
In his 1st year as a professional, Seve said, he’d had a feeling of immense control. He felt sometimes as if he controlled not only himself and his ball, but the galleries and his opponents as well. “When I first came to America, if I hit the ball in the rough, I didn’t care. When I saw an American player hit the ball in the rough and then chip out into the fairway, I laugh. I thought, ‘How can they beat me if they do that?’”
It used to be that I would come to the 18th hole and be sad because there was no more golf left to play. Now I come to the 9th hole and I’m sad because I still have 9 to go. I hate golf like this. I don’t want to keep playing if it feels like this.
That 1960 Open was one of the first to demonstrate an unfortunate truth: listening to TV golf commentators can be hazardous to your game.
TV producers want the broadcast to be exciting. They want the drama of gold, reckless shots and swashbuckling players. So when they see a player gamble the way Palmer did, they glorify him. People listen to the broadcasts, and they get the idea that bold, reckless shots pay off.
Hit the shot you know you can hit, not the shot Arnold Palmer would hit, nor even the shot you think you ought to be able to hit.
I teach a conservative strategy and a cocky swing. You want to play each hole in such a way that you’re confident you can exec each shot you attempt. That gives you a cocky swing, which is another way of saying that you swing aggressively, that you swing with trust. It produces your best results.
The opposite approach would be a bold strategy and a tentative swing.
No football or basketball coach whom I’ve ever heard of would send his team into competition without a game plan. Coaches in those sports recognize that an intelligent game plan can take advantage of a team’s strengths and camouflage its weaknesses. More important, a good game plan makes the mental side of the game easier. Players don’t have to make as many impromptu, possible emotional decisions. They can instead execute decisions made in advance, calmly, outside the heat of competition.
The best way to prepare a plan is to walk or mentally review each hole backward. Standing on the green and looking back toward the tee usually reveals much more about a hole than standing on the tee and looking at the green. It shows more of the tricks and deceptions that the architect may have built into the hole. And it forces you to think strategically about where you want your ball to land on the green, what club would be best for landing it there, and what kind of tee shot will set this up.
Every game plan, of course, must be tailored to the Individual’s strengths and preferences. It must be based on an honest appraisal of a player’s skills, and it can change from one year to the next, or one round to the next, depending on changes in those skills.
The obvious call, if he wants a conservative strategy and a cocky swing, is to leave the driver in the bag and play something he knows will get the ball into the fairway, 200y or so out.
I tell my professional players that going for the flat depends on the distance. With a wedge in their hands, they should always go for it. Indeed, they should go for the hole. No one makes it to the Tour without being at least that good with the wedge. Between 120-170y is a gray area for most professionals. They must consider the wind, the speed of the greens, how they feel, and the potential penalty for a slightly missed shot before they decide whether to aim for the pin.
This is not negative thinking. It’s honest thinking. If you honestly assess your game and determine that you will hit the 7i successfully 9 out of 10 times and hit the driver to the green 1 time in 10, the risk-reward calculation is obvious. It would only be negative thinking if you then let yourself lose confidence in your ability to hit the 7i.
I hate bumping into a player after a round and hearing him say, “God, if I had just not double-bogeyed that par 5, I’d be leading.” Players who carefully balance risk against reward rarely have to say that. For a professional, a birdie is or should be almost as likely from a comfortable lay-up position as it is from a spot on the edge of the green, 40ft from the hole.
When they step up to this level, they often find that they perceive the game very differently. The grass is still green and the ball is still white. But fairways that once looked wide and inviting turn tight and menacing. Putts that once seemed short and straight start to writhe like snakes.
At their first exposure to competitive pressure, not to put too fine a point on it, a lot of players choke. They don’t produce anything resembling the kind of golf they play when they’re completely relaxed.
A golfer chokes when he lets anger, doubt, fear or some other extraneous factor distract him before a shot.
Distracted, the golfer then fails to do one or more of the things he normally does. He fails to follow his routine, particularly his mental routine. He forgets his game plan. He fails to accept his shots. Quite often under pressure, a distracting doubt or fear turns on the conscious mind. The golfer stops trusting his swing. He starts going through a checklist of errors to avoid. He gets tight and careful. When he’s tight and careful, his body must work against gravity, rhythm and flow. His muscles get spastic, his feel get stiff, and he loses his natural grace and tempo. He hits a bad shot, relative to his ability.
In a young golfer, or an older golfer who hasn’t learned how to handle it, this gush of adrenaline can be devastating. He stands over a shot or a putt and feels the trembling hands and the furiously beating heart. He doesn’t understand that this is simply a natural reaction to the situation. It’s the way the body is wired. He begins to think, “What the heck is wrong with me?”
And that thought introduces doubt and fear, which, as we have seen, are the termites that destroy the foundation of the successful stroke. He may try to still the heart and hands, which makes the body stiff. He forgets to trust. He blames the ensuring bad shot or putt on shaking hands, not on being distracted by shaking hands.
The successful golfer either has learned, or instinctively understands, that the pounding heart and the trembling hands are nothing to worry about. They are, at worst, another factor to be accounted for, like a following wind. They may cause an iron shot to carry 10-20y longer than it normally would. But they will not, of themselves, destroy the swing.
The successful golfer knows that rather than concern himself with stilling the hands and quieting the heart, he must focus the mind, blocking out distractions and attending to routine and strategy just as meticulously as if this were a practice round, on his home course at twilight, with no one else around. The body can and probably will stay excited. The mind must not.
Successful golfers, like Nicklaus, welcome the onset of nervous symptoms. That’s why they got into competition in the first place — because winning was important to them and overcoming the emotional challenges of competitive golf game them a feeling of accomplishment. They play tournament golf precisely because it makes them nervous.
I sometime tell young players that being nervous on the golf course is a little bit like being nervous the first time you make love with someone you really care about. Nearly everyone is nervous in that situation, but nerves are part of what makes the experience so exhilarating. If it didn’t make you nervous, it wouldn’t be so gratifying. In fact, it might be a little boring. Ask any prostitute.
Palmer had already committed, in retrospect, 2 of the common mental mistakes a golfer makes under pressure. He had let his thoughts drift into the future. He had started to dwell on the score he was shooting and the Open record. Then, he compounded the error by introducing a new, mechanical thought, about swing tempo.
First, stay in the present and keep your mind sharply focused on the shot immediately in front of you.
I recommend getting your mind off of golf between shots. It’s easier for most people to concentrate for a minute or so at a time, as they execute their shotmaking routines. Trying to stay that focused between shots can be too taxing.
Finally, the play of your opponents can be a nervous distraction. Many a player has been cruising along in a match until his opponent suddenly and unexpectedly sinks a long chip or comes out of the woods to make par. Surprised, he loses his focus, starts to feel pressured, and fouls up his own game.
A golfer should always assume that his opponent will hit the best possible shot.
One of the most common mental errors committed by golfers under pressure is letting the score distract them from what they ought to be thinking about.
The minute you start thinking, “If I shoot bogey for the last 3 holes I’ll break 90,” or “if I shoot par for the next 2 holes I’ll win the Open,” you get ahead of yourself. Your thoughts leave the present. You start worrying too much about fouling things up. You get careful. You get tight. You start steering the ball instead of getting looser and cockier. You play the golfing equivalent of pro football’s prevent defense.
High-handicappers as a rule pay much closer attention to their scores than pros do. They can’t wait to write down the number after every hole.
The first opponent is the game itself. The course, the club and the ball are all idiosyncratic and unpredictable foes, and they will humble the best golfer more than occasionally.
The second opponent is the golfer himself. Can he discipline his mind to produce the best score his body is capable of?
Only after those 2 foes have been confronted do the other people on the course come into the picture.
The best athletes realize that if they win the battle with themselves, they have done all they can do. The golfer who can look back on a tournament that he lost and say, “I played as well as I could. I had my mind where it was supposed to be on every shot,” will be satisfied and happy.
In the training mentality, a golfer evaluates his shots critically and analytically. In the trusting mentality, the golfer simply accepts them.
In the training mentality, the golfer tries to make things happen. In the trusting mentality, the golfer lets things happen.
The training mentality is very thoughtful. The trusting mentality feels like reckless abandon.
The trusting mentality is essential for getting ready to play competitively. If you want to be able to trust your swing on the golf course, you have to spend time doing it on the practice tee.
I’d begin by going to a practice green and start on the fringe. I recommend that good players practice chips every day until they sink two. This does 2 things. First, it forces them to think about holing chips rather than just getting them on the green in the direction of the hole. And it boosts their confidence. It’s amazing how sinking a couple of chips every day can persuade a player that he has a great short game.
The short shots around the green save pars. The longer wedge shots, from 40-120y, make birdies. Players can’t practice them too much.
If a golfer tells me he wants to win the US Open, I tell him to try to imagine that experience as vividly as he can. He needs to create, in his brain, all the sensory messages that would bombard him as he actually played the last holes of the Open, in contention to win. He needs to smell the grass and hear the murmur of the crowd. He needs to feel the tackiness of his grips, the way the sweat trickles down his forehead and the churning of his gut.
People develop pride and find satisfaction, not from doing things that are easy, but from trying things that are difficult, that most people don’t even dare to aspire to.
But if you want to become a low-handicap golfer, it’s not going to be enough simply to read this book, or any other book. You have to make a long-term improvement plan and a commitment more like the Paul Runyan made. Your plan should include how many times a week you will practice, what you will work on, and for how long. It should include lots of time for short-game practice. Then you must execute that plan.
The loss of focus on 4 or 5 shots a round makes the difference between great golf and mediocre golf.
Golfers must learn to love the challenge when they hit a ball into the rough, trees, or sand. The alternatives — anger, fear, whining, and cheating — do no good.