Hogan loved to practice more than he loved playing the game itself.
Until Ben Hogan came along, the goal of professional golfers was to make it all look as easy as possible. Many were hustlers, con men, gamblers, who made the bulk of their living at country clubs, where they coaxed with rich amateur golfers into believing that they never practiced.
They played golf for money and practiced as little as possible. It was Nelson in particular, with his glorious and unvarying swing, who baffled Hogan. He was a great player, but Hogan believed that with effort he could be better. “He’s too lazy to practice,” Hogan said.
One of the big differences between amateur and pro golfers is how we practice. I see amateurs out on the driving range just hitting golf balls one after another without thinking. All they’re doing is ingraining bad habits. It drives me crazy to see that. Every shot you hit should matter. Every shot you hit should have a purpose. Ask yourself: “Why am I here?”
Tom Watson believes this: The point of playing golf is playing golf well. He does not accept any counterargument.
“What do you want to be?” he repeated.
At this point, I stammered something.
“Do you want to be great?” He asked, piercing my pauses. “Do you want to be thought of the way the greatest sportswriters are thought of? Do you want to be loved like they are loved? I think it’s a question you need to ask yourself. Why do you do what you do? What’s it all about? Do you want to be great? Not enough people ask themselves that question. It’s the most important question. It’s the only question. So, do you want to be great?”
“Yeah.”
“Then stop writing those damned list columns.”
Golfers make mistakes — people make mistakes — when a moment grows tense. They make mistakes in judgment, mistakes in tempo, mistakes in strategy. But pressure did not seem to have power over Jack Nicklaus. Pressure clarify his thoughts. Trouble steeled his nerves. Watson watched Nicklaus and thought, “He already knows he’s going to win this. He doesn’t think he’s going to win. He knows it.” “You can’t compare Jack with anyone else. It was almost as if he felt it was his birthright to win major championships.”
But Nicklaus still felt sure he would win at Turnberry. He felt sure because he had a symbiotic relationship with pressure: the bigger the moment, the better he played, and the better he played, the bigger the next moment. And Watson? The sportswriters called him a choker. His swing could get erratic at inopportune moments. He had folded under pressure on numerous occasions. He simply did not know the things Nicklaus had learned about winning, about finishing off a tournament, about how to deal with the turbulent feelings a golfer feels when close to victory.
Watson believes bad grips are the biggest problem for recreational golfers. The vast majority of golfers do not grip properly. It is perhaps the simplest thing in the game. But then, it is usually the simplest things that trip people up.
The first thing a golfer should do is develop a good grip. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of effort to break old habits. It takes hours of practice and days of frustration.
The secret is to consider and reconsider the basic details, again and again, even as your mind pushes you to more complicated thoughts.
You cannot hide from yourself on a golf course. You are your true self.
“I’m lucky,” Jack says now. “My dad was my best friend.” This is the picture he would keep fresh in his mind, even after he became the greatest golfer ever lived, the picture of playing golf with his best friend.
Ray’s message was more to the point: You play life to win. No shot Tom ever hit was good enough. No achievement ever satisfied.
He chalked it up to nerves and waited for his father to concede the short putt so they could go on to the next hole. Conceding short putts is one of the hallmarks of match play in golf.
But there was silence. “Make it yourself. You play life to win.”
Tom stepped over the ball and missed the putt. Then he shook his father’s hand in defeat. He had learned just how much winning meant.
Watson says that the secrets Nicklaus and Hogan and Nelson know are not magical things only professionals can do. They are mundane, common things they always do, time after time, swing after swing, without fail. The first and most basic of those is to consider how the golf ball lies.
Many amateur golfers settle on what shot they will hit before they even get to their golf ball. If the ball is in the fairway, they calculate the distance to the green and choose their club accordingly. If the ball is in the rough, they choose a club that should get the ball out and closer to the green. Most of us see golf as a 2-dimensional sport, the ball being at Point A, the flag at Point B.
Palmer’s verse, his competitive fury and magical putting stroke simply could not overtake Nicklaus’s overwhelming shots, mathematical mind, and breathtaking confidence. No golfer had ever hit drives so far and straight; no golfer had ever hit iron shots so high; and no golfer had ever seemed so sure that everyone else was playing for second place.
Watson found this treatment distasteful — golf was supposed to be a gentleman’s game.
He took a psychology class, where the teacher handed out envelopes containing personality report the school had put together based on each student’s records and class work. The students were told to write a paper agreeing or disagreeing with their report’s findings. Almost everyone in the class agreed with his or her personality report, only to find out that the reports were not personalized at all. They were all the same. Watson liked that experiment, so he became a psychology major.
I said, “What’s the one thing I should do? What’s the one thing that will make me a better player?” Each one of them said the same damn thing. They said, “Go play and watch the best players out there.”
But there was nothing magical about it. Watson understood that seeing Nelson swing the club — elegantly, proficiently — altered his own swing. He rarely could put words to those alterations. It was like his body understood. Watching a master at work can have a powerful effect. That is one of the reasons why so many golfers watch weekend golf on TV.
What Watson noticed most was how often Nicklaus would hit conservative shots. This was exactly the thing that turned him off as a youngster, when he preferred the risk-taking brilliance of Palmer. But once he reached the PGA Tour, he saw golf — and Nicklaus — in a whole different way.
Nicklaus told him, “More golfers lose tournaments than win them.”
Nicklaus was not thinking about great shots most of the time; he was thinking about avoiding big mistakes.
No golfer hit the right shot more often than Jack Nicklaus.
He changed his golfing schedule so that he would be well rested and peaking when the major tournaments came around. He played even more conservatively based on his belief that more golf tournaments are lost than won. And perhaps more than anything, he created an aura that intimidated every golfer in the world. Jack Nicklaus, everyone knew, played his best golf in the biggest moments.
Very few guys love to be in contention. Yes, you hear all the time people say, “You’ve got to like the pressure. You’re got to like being in that position.” But I think most of them were fibbing. There have been only a few guys who really liked that moment of intense pressure; for the rest of us, it was just something we had to get through.
Jack though… Jack really enjoyed it. I never saw anyone else who was quite like that.
Here’s a question Watson has asked himself repeatedly: What is pressure? The answer seems obvious: pressure is a stressful urgency caused by the weight of a moment or the difficulty of a task. But because handling pressure is such a part of Watson’s profession, he has spent a lot of time breaking down what pressure means.
“Pressure,” he says with some finality, “happens when you are attempting to achieve something you are not sure you can achieve.”
Every step away from the familiar takes you a step away from comfort. Each step adds pressure as you become less and less certain you can achieve the objective because you’ve never done it before.
Perhaps more than any other sport, golf focuses pressure on the player. There are no time constraints, as there are in other sports. Your competitors are not allowed to hinder you. The pressure originates in yourself; it builds from doubts.
“If you don’t feel pressure, you won’t feel the pressure” is Watson’s way of saying that the best way to handle and overcome pressure is to not let it build in the first place. One way is to think positively. Harvey Penick used to demand that his students speak positively at all times. He put it like this: “Never say never and don’t say don’t.”
Another way is to “never hit a shot under pressure that you are not capable of executing.” In other words, you will feel doubts; you will feel uncertain. The best way to deal with this is to go back to the things you know. Follow the same routine you always follow. Return to the familiar. Do what you know how to do.
The first option was the safer shot. But in the moment, under golf’s most intense pressure, he decided to go for the riskier shot, the one he was not sure he could execute. “That,” he would say angrily more than 3 decades later, “created pressure.” He hit a poor shot and left the ball in a nearly impossible spot.
“That was the wrong time to play the shot that I wasn’t qualified to play.”
His humor was like that: tinged with his own painful memories. “I don’t play golf for fun. It’s my business. When the mailman starts delivering mail on his day off, that’s when I’ll start playing golf for the hell of it.”
He had promised his family and sponsors that he would work harder than anyone on the PGA Tour. He had told his girlfriend that he was giving himself just 5 years to make it as a professional golfer. He practiced with such intensity that at first this was the only thing the other golfers noticed about him. To them he was simply that odd guy who seemed to practice every hour of every day.
In the 5th round, Watson shot a 62 to take a commanding 6-shot lead. For many years, Edwards would talk about that extraordinary round as the one that told Watson’s destiny. “He was just firing at the flags all the way. A lot of guys, they get 5-, 6-under for the day, they start protecting. All they want to do is make pars and get in without messing up. Tom just wasn’t built that way. He felt good, and he just kept on firing.”
When the USGA president was asked why the association would set up a golf course that seemed designed to humiliate the world’s best players, he offered this famous reply: “We’re not trying to embarrass the best players in the world. We’re trying to identify them.”
Sportswriters like a clear narrative, and now they had one: Tom Watson versus His Demons.
There’s a famous golf saying: Major championships don’t being until the back 9 on Sunday.
The 2nd step he sums up in 3 words: Overestimate the wind. “It never ceases to amaze me that even good players, when hitting into the wind, will come up well short. This is even when they hit a good shot. It’s because they don’t overestimate the force of the win in their face.”
“I will play a 2-, 3-, 4-club wind sometimes.”
The Golden Bear had not played well all week, but one of the things Nicklaus had come to understand was that he did not need to play well in order to win major championships. He needed only to play smarter than everyone else. With 3 holes to go, he found himself near the lead, and he knew precisely what was left for him to do.
“Par, par, par wins this tournament.”
Watson had watched Nicklaus enough to know that the way to win major championships was not to go chasing low scores but to wait for pressure to take its toll on everyone else.
There are only 5 tournaments in my life where going in I thought I was going to win. I won a lot more when I wasn’t playing well than when I was.
I have won 18 majors and I can promise you that I didn’t play well in at least a dozen of them.
“Eddie,” Nelson said, “I believe that was as poorly as I can remember playing.”
“On the contrary, Byron,” Lowery said. “This was the finest round of golf you have ever played. Because you played that badly and you still shot a 72.”
For Watson, that story offers the secret of competitive golf. He hears from weekend golfers all the time who talk about how they didn’t drive the ball well, didn’t hit their irons well, didn’t put well, and so on. They see this as the reason they shot high scores. Only Watson doesn’t see it that way. “That’s a normal state of the game, even for the best players. That’s golf.”
Watson says the day when he or Nicklaus or Tiger Woods play really well — when they feel in control of every aspect of their game — are rare. Playing well is not something even professional golfers can count on. “Winning golf does not come down to playing better than everyone else. It comes down to thinking better than everyone else.”
Funning thing is, Nicklaus says exactly the same thing: “I have always felt that the mettle of a player is not how well he plays when he’s playing well, but how well he scores and plays when he’s playing poorly.”
Forget about bad shots, don’t try for the hero shot, aim for the spots with the least trouble, take one shot of medicine here to save 2 or 3 strokes later. Think a shot a head. Think about what you are doing well and try to play to your strength that day.
That’s how quickly a sports narrative changes. Months earlier he was widely viewed as a choker who might never win anything of consequence. Then he won the Open Championship and instantly became a brilliant young golfer who could challenge Nicklaus.
But when it came down to winning and losing, Irwin’s swing held up under the strain. Watson’s did not.
I made an adjustment on the takeaway that kept the club face looking at the ball a bit longer. I kept the face looking down the line a bit more rather than rotating, and I hit a very solid shot for basically the first time that day.
Watson is among many who believe that visualizing a shot is one of the most important parts of playing good golf. But for most of us, it’s a hard thing to do. For one thing, we don’t have Watson’s imagination. For another, the shot we hit often bears no resemblance at all to the shot we saw in our minds. After visualizing a high cut that dances around the cup and then hitting a low screamer that plugs into a bunker, how can you help but wonder, What’s the point?
The point, Watson says, is that positive energy fuels the golf swing. No golfer needs to be told that many more bad things than good things can happen when you hit a golf ball. Golf’s a hard game. At the same time, thinking about how hard a game golf is has never helped anyone play the game better, just as thinking about the intimidating length of a marathon will not help anyone get to the finish line.
One of the things Watson takes great pride in is that, with rare exceptions, he did not think negative thoughts when hitting the ball. He walked fast and he played fast, and that was because he had no interest in lingering on the challenges or the potential calamities.
I see golfers hit a poor shot, and I’ll say to them, “What were you thinking before you hit the shot?” More often than not, they weren’t thinking anything. They just hit and hope. It’s hard to hit good shots that way.
Nicklaus was aware of the effect. He often said that he did not try to intimidate other golfers, but that is semantics; he did intimidate other golfers, and he knew it. Nicklaus’s imperviousness to pressure propelled golfers into going for birdies. And by going for birdies, they made mistakes.
If Nicklaus had been clear-minded, as he usually was under pressure, he would have hit precisely the same shot he had intended. But instead he decided to aim for the flag and try to match Watson’s birdie. It was exactly the sort of rash and cloudy thinking Nicklaus had inspired in everyone else.
It boils down to one thought — a swing key, as Sam Snead would say. If you think about 2 things, that’s too complicated.
One of his favorite things to do during major championship weeks was open up the newspaper and see which of his competitors was complaining about the weather or the course conditions or anything else. He would then smile and mentally cross that player off the list of contenders. Those golfers who complained about stuff they couldn’t control had already lost.
I guess it comes down to this: When Greg hits a bad shot, he takes it very hard. He will say, “Why didn’t I get a kick left?” or “Oh, that’s the worst place I could have hit it,” or “Ok, there goes the tournament.” He’s very hard on himself. And when Tom hits a bad shot, he will look at me, wink, and say: “Just watch how I get out of this one.”
Back when I started, I made an important rule for myself: Never follow a bad shot with another bad shot. Meaning if you had the option to play another risky shot after a bad shot, you better back off a little and take your lumps.
Most golfers want to fix their bad shots. That’s the natural reaction. But, as Watson often says, the natural reaction is often the wrong reaction. In golf, trying harder often leads to bad things.
When he was a young player, he hit many wild shots, and he understood that such wildness would not allow him to last long on the PGA Tour. He simply had to reduce and then, as best he could, eliminate double bogeys.
He realized that the way to avoid double bogeys was to be sure he didn’t hit 2 bad shots in a row. More to the point, he had to make sure not to hit 2 stupid shots in a row. Some nutritionists suggest that dieters give themselves one meal to splurge on anything they want: pasta, ice cream, chocolate, whatever. The key, they say, is that it must be one meal. There’s only so much weight gain with one meal.
Watson applies this theory to golf. One bad shot can hurt you only so much if you surround it with smart ones. Watson’s point is that scores are destroyed when golfers turn bad situations into worse ones. W/hen I point out that it’s more fun to try the risky shot than fix a mistake, he offers a sharp correction: “No. It’s more fun to get a lower score.”
Nicklaus was not a particularly gifted putter, but he never seemed to miss an important putt. Something steadied him in the biggest moments. Nicklaus’s caddy once said that Nicklaus could enter worlds of focus that other golfers simply did not know existed.
Nicklaus’s genius was his precision, his competence, his skill at choosing precisely the right shot for precisely that moment. He played exceedingly slowly, not because he moved slowly but because he took more time than anyone else to consider and align his shots. He never hit a shot before he was ready.
Watson, in contrast, was the turbulent artist. He was the fastest walker on tour; he almost ran to his ball. And when he got to the ball, he considered only a handful of variables and then hit. Fast and loose. He saw golf as a game in motion.
If you think yourself unlucky, you’ll have bad luck. There’s no scientific explanation for it, but it’s a cold, hard truth in golf. That’s one reason why bad bounces never bothered me as much as they did some people. The second you start thinking of yourself as a victim, you’ve had it.
He just believes that unlucky golfers, those who see themselves that way, are inevitably poor golfers. They rage at the bad breaks. They lose focus when things go wrong. They feel sorry for themselves when a well-struck shot does not yield the right result. They play negatively.
“I do tend to think too much,” Watson admits. “The funny thing is that when I’m playing well, I would say I play 90% by feel. You have to feel the shot. When I’m not playing well, it’s usually because I’m not playing by feel.”
Tom understood — and I think I understood this too — that the worse the conditions, the more golfers you could cross off the list as contenders. I think Tom loved playing in the rain and wind because he knew he would handle it better than anyone.
You don’t put yourself in a position to lose. If you do that, you have a good shot of winning. That has been my philosophy through the years.
Nicklaus agrees: “If I had known how to win, I would have won. But you don’t know how to win when you start. You have to learn how to lose before you learn how to win.”
He explains: There are intense emotions that people go through when they are under pressure. There is nervousness. There is fear. There is something like giddiness. There is also adrenaline. The mind races and jumps to memories and images that may or, more likely, may not be helpful. Making sense of these emotions take experience.
But the biggest lesson Nicklaus picked up from Cherry Hills was not how to control his emotions but instead to remember that everyone else was feeling the same pressure.
“You don’t win golf tournaments by hitting miraculous shots that you are not capable of hitting,” Nicklaus says. “You lose golf tournaments that way.”
“Remember, most golfers self-destruct.”
In Tom, I saw someone who was focused entirely on winning. He was a lot like I was when I was younger. He reminded me a lot of myself in those early years. I was not the kind of person who worried about anyone else on the golf course. But I think it was good for me to be around Tom, to be around someone who cared that much.
Nicklaus was a pioneer in what teachers call the upright swing. Hogan had a flat swing: he would bring the club back on a very low trajectory, so his hands on the backswing never rose above his right shoulder; he then swung on a shallow plane, almost like a baseball swing. Snead had what many still believe to be the most beautiful golf swing, and he too had a flat swing. Palmer had a flat swing.
Nicklaus, though, had been taught to swing upright; his hands went high above his right shoulder on the backswing. He and his teacher believed that an upright swing held the key to power because it allowed him to better use the strength in his arms and legs. The young Nicklaus hit golf balls farther than any great golfer had; the upright swing seemed the reason.
Awareness of death, mortality, the afterlife makes us fearful, tainting our natural resolve.
Watson talks a lot about fear in golf. He thinks it deadens the nerves. It makes a golfer lose feeling in his hands and weakens his sense of moderation. That is when pressure is at its highest and your adrenaline is pumping, you should take a little bit less club and swing fully.
When the pressure is hottest, touch is the first thing to go.
He was 2 shots ahead of Nicklaus, so the championship seemed secure, but he knew that he shouldn’t think that way. Instead he heard his father’s voice. “I got a little nervous on the putt. All I needed to do was 3-putt from 30ft, but I had to stop thinking like that. Try to make it. That’s what Dad always said. So I went back to the old school and tried to make it.”
Watson insists you should emulate the way Nicklaus practices. Yes, Nicklaus too worked long hours, especially as a young man building his game. But for most of his career, he did not put in the hours that Watson did. Nicklaus says plainly, “I really didn’t work all that hard at the game in some of my best years.”
“What Jack did was concentrate on each shot. He might only be out there for 15 minutes, but he had a purpose for every one of those 15 minutes. He was working on something. I see golfers go out to the range and just hit balls carelessly. That’s not helpful. In fact, it’s probably hurting you because it is ingraining some bad habits.”
Nicklaus still felt sure that he was going to win. How? He’d find a way. It was almost as if he felt it was his birthright to win majors. Nicklaus had a Trojan’s sense of destiny.
This, though, is where Watson’s greatest attribute shone through. If Nicklaus won tournaments by embracing a grand destiny, Watson won by refusing to accept a doomed fate. No golfer before or since moved on from a bad shot quite like Tom Watson.
Nicklaus had more success at Pebble Beach than anyone. Here was his theory of how to win there: “Beat up the first 7 holes then hang on for dear life.”
Edwards had watched Watson rebound from bad shots again and again through the years. How many times had Edwards felt discouraged only to see Watson make some supernatural shot from an impossible place?
Even the best golfers in the world hit bad shots. Golf is a hard game. I think people sometimes forget that.
When a high-handicap golfer hits a wonderful shot exactly as planned, the feeling tends not to be ”Wow, it’s strange that a golfer of my meager ability would hit such a good shot.” It leans instead toward “Yes, that’s my game. That is who I am.” The next 20 terrible shots are mere illusions until, finally, another good shot reminds the golfer of his true self.
Before hitting every shot, Watson insists that you should imagine a good shot, even a perfect shot. There should be no negativity. When Watson said to Edwards at Pebble Beach, “Get it close, hell. I’m going to make it,” he was only putting into words the image he visualized.
You want to limit your bad shots, of course. But you will hit some bad ones. You have to expect that. If you expect bad shots, you can let go of them and get on with business.
Golf can be a cruel game. Watson’s swing began to betray him the year he turned 35. This can happen to even the greatest golfers. There are so many elements in a golf swing, and when one goes even slightly wrong — one degree too steep, one millimeter too far left or right, one notch too low or high — the whole swing can fall apart.
Then the golfer must try to find the flaw by going through a checklist roughly the length of the one used for Apollo 13: recheck the grip, the alignment, the angle of the takeaway, head placement, head movement, the arc of the swing, the depth of the swing, the placement of hands at impact, the fullness of the follow-through, and so on. There’s no guarantee that you will ever find the problem.
- It hurt every single part of my life. I hated the game. I really hated it.
- Did you ever think of quitting golf?
- I hated it. Don’t you understand? There’s nothing else that needs to be said.
- Did you ever think of quitting?
- No.
Age does prey on a golfer’s putting. At the end Ben Hogan would sometimes freeze when standing over a putt, as if he was afraid of making a stroke. “Putting is not golf,” Hogan would grumble, and it was a sentiment many great golfers felt as they grew older.
“God only gives you so many nerve endings to burn up through pressure,” Watson said of putting, “And when you burn through them, you can’t get them back.”
I always tell people that you want to hold the club firmly, but you don’t want to squeeze it. That’s the proper pressure — hold it firmly but don’t squeeze.
How can you hold the club firmly without squeezing it?
“That’s what a golfer has to figure out,” Watson says. “And it’s a constant struggle. For me, it comes from hitting a million golf balls. You achieve an understanding of what works and what doesn’t work in certain situations. And if you have a good enough memory, you can bank on those experiences with those memories to help you out when you’re struggling with a particular shot or a particular swing.”
Edwards could barely stand to see Watson like this. The man who used to wink after bad shots and say, “Watch what I do with this,” now seemed resigned to bad shots. The man who used to slam putts at the hole with confidence now stood tentatively over easy short putts. The man who stood on the practice range for so many hours had mostly stopped practicing.
Privately, though, they stewed about how other golfers capitulated to Woods’s will. They seemed content to cash the enormous 2nd- and 3rd-place checks that Woods’s popularity generated.
The group was asked if they would like to be younger so they could face Woods.
“You bet your ass I would,” Palmer said.
“The golfers today give up,” was Player’s response.
Watson said, “I would love to try and beat that kid when I was a kid.”
“Tiger has them all buffaloed,” Nicklaus said, shaking his head. “If you don’t believe you can win, you won’t win. We believed.”
- Tom, how do you win 5 British Opens?
- I love bad bounces. It was really clear to me when I looked around at other golfers that, you know, you can’t handle bad bounces. But I can
There’s a classic Twilight Zone episode in which, after a degenerate gambler dies, he finds himself in the afterlife checked into a beautiful hotel. His closet overflows with perfectly fitted suits. Women find him irresistible. And he cannot lose any game he plays. Every time he spins the slot machine, it comes up sevens. When he play roulette, his number hits. He can’t stop getting blackjack. After some weeks of this, he’s utterly bored, and he screams at the man he presumes is his guardian angel that he doesn’t belong in heaven.
“Whatever gave you the idea this is heaven?” the man replies. “This is the other place.”
He was always good at handling difficult conditions. He had a toughness that other golfers lacked. Watson — and Nicklaus and Tiger Woods and pretty much every great golfer through the years — wants to face difficult conditions because he believes in his ability to overcome them.
The best part of playing golf is hitting great shots. And what gives you the opportunity to hit your greatest shots? Getting in some trouble.
Garcia had wondrous talent; when he first came on tour his touch around the greens and ability to hit brilliant shots when in trouble reminded observers of the young Tom Watson. But he felt jinxed. Every missed putt was a sign of doom. Every bad bounce convinced him that the golfing gods were against him. “This doesn’t happen to other golfers,” he moaned in those moments when things went bad. Watson, who liked Garcia, wished he could convince the young man that he was talented and blessed.
The leaderboard was turning and twisting but it did not matter. All of the other golfers would have to face a kind of turbulence that they had never felt before; there is nothing quite like being in contention for the 1st time at a major championship.
The worst thing that can happen to any golfer is to lose hope. One lousy round follows another, shots hook into the woods or slice into the water time after time, putts from 3ft away skid short of the hole or roll 5ft by. At some point the golfer starts to think that it will never get better. The promise of a new golf club or the next lesson fades. This is the time many golfers quit.
When it ended, Watson was inconsolable. He asked the question Ben Hogan had often asked in his later years: What use was it to hit the ball so well if he could not make any putts?