by Tom Cox
What if I took the rhythmical confidence that had sent my drive so beautifully up that impossibly tight fifteenth fairway and applied it to every shot? It couldn’t be that hard, could it? Everything I had learned said yes, it could. Everything I felt in my fingers when I waggled my eight-iron in the living room disagreed.
I had, at least, now confessed to myself that I was playing the worst golf of my life. I’d probably known this before The Open, but I had still believed that, given eighteen holes in a genuinely big tournament, everything would click into place. But now there was no getting away from it: my year so far had been crushingly, comically bad – a farcical movie script of low-rent golfing humiliation. I’d played better than this when I was seventeen and losing heart. I’d played better than this two years ago, when I’d been playing golf once a month.
‘It’s a bit like a golfing nervous breakdown, in a way,’ I’d told Simon and Scott.
I’d imagined that putting a name to the horror might help, but quite the contrary. In the two weeks after Hollinwell, even my moments of practice-round hope began to vanish. My disease began to spread, too. My playing partners at Hollinwell might have been hardened and focused enough to block it out, but more inquisitive, receptive golfing beings like Scott and Simon soon got swallowed up in its dark path. The Melanoma Cup may have been a tussle, but it was an unsightly, scabby one2. Ever since I’d talked frankly about my woes on the second hole at the Melanoma’s host venue, Richmond Golf Club, I’d seen my friends beginning to unravel. A few days later, Simon had gone to Florida on a golfing holiday with his dad, and I’d quickly started to receive portentous text messages from him describing tearful ‘What is it all for?’ moments beside crocodile-infested lakes in Ponte Vedra.
Pro golfing history is full of mysterious falls from grace. Among these are some total head-scratchers featuring players with infinitely more talent than me: terrifying King Midas in Reverse tales of golfers who’ve gone from superhuman brilliance to sideways-hitting desolation. Having won The Open at Lytham in 2001, become one of the few men to have shot 59 in a professional tournament, and once occupied the number-one spot in the world rankings, David Duval slipped to 211th on the PGA Tour money list in 2003. Even more disturbing was the story of my man Ian Baker-Finch. That poetic victory of his in the 1991 Open at Birkdale had been the kiss of death for his career. He’d never been anywhere near as good again, and in the 1995 and 1996 seasons he’d either missed the cut, or withdrawn, or been disqualified from all twenty-nine tournaments that he’d entered. In 1997 he’d scored a catastrophic 92 in the first round of The Open – only three shots better than me in the 2006 Qualifying. He’d subsequently retired and become a golf commentator for the CBS network in America.3
I thought about Baker-Finch a lot as I waded through my black sporting cloud, looking for a way out. If, as Owen from Urban Golf had said, I swung like Baker-Finch, did that mean I was also predisposed to collapse like him as well? By rewatching his final round at Birkdale in 1991 so many times, had I absorbed some of his spirit, as well as his physical rhythm? These were ridiculous thoughts, but no less ridiculous than others that cluttered my mind, like ‘Have I made myself into a terrible golfer merely by the act of becoming a pro?’ and ‘What if I read the Sun like Lee Westwood, would that help?’ In that way, feeling depressed as a golfer is a bit like feeling depressed as a person: it makes you myopic and irrational. And, as at most low periods in life, you sometimes sense that the best way to deal with it is just to wait it out: get to that point when there’s nothing left to lose, then start all over again.
When the miasma lifted slightly, I decided that there were two main causes for my devastating play. One was the Panicked Squid. The other was the Evil Brain Worm. I refrained from explaining this theory to those closest to me, for fear of prompting them to sneak out of the room to make some discreet enquiries with mental-health charities. Instead, I examined the evidence, and tried to decide which of these two foes I needed to conquer first.
The Evil Brain Worm – formerly known as the Maggot, before it grew to unmanageable size – represented the psychological side of my game. Like all golfers, I had always had it. It lived in that fertile part of my brain that responds to the command ‘Don’t think of a hippopotamus!’ by thinking of a hippopotamus. It had popped up every now and then in the past, when I had been compiling a good score and trying not to hit the ball into a lake, and done its duty by reminding me that there was a lake in the vicinity. On the whole, I had been able to ignore it and control it. More recently, though, I’d got interested in it, and if there was one thing the Evil Brain Worm thrived on, it was attention. ‘What,’ the Evil Brain Worm would ask, ‘if you lined up this simple short putt perfectly, attempted to make an absolutely perfect stroke, but then I shouted “Miss It!” just as you took the putter back? Would you miss it? And, if you did, wouldn’t it be weird, that I had all that power?’
But the Evil Brain Worm was not always so loquacious. Sometimes it would just have to make a noise – ‘Boo!’ perhaps, or ‘Flunt!’, or ‘Unkulspagger!’ – at the exact moment when I was starting my backswing, in order to do its damage. It didn’t have to form proper sentences to make its intentions lucid. It really was a wriggly, insidious bastard. I suppose, though, if it hadn’t been, it wouldn’t have been a very effective Evil Brain Worm.
The Panicked Squid, which represented the physical side of my golfing make-up, might have been uncharitably viewed as a bigger, more hideous and tentacled version of the Evil Brain Worm. But I knew it wasn’t anywhere near as malevolent. It meant well, and it wasn’t its fault if it got confused. It was simply what happened when an instruction like ‘Keep your swing nice and loose’ transformed, in the heat of tournament play, into ‘Make your swing a mad flailing mélée of appendages.’ In truth, it was probably controlled by the Evil Brain Worm, and served as its writhing, outward manifestation.
Bearing in mind that Darth Vader was nowhere near as much of a nasty piece of work as the Emperor in the Star Wars trilogy, there seemed to be only one way to go here, and that was straight to the source, cutting out the middleman. Or, in this case, the middle-squid.
I had been intending to do some work with a sports psychologist all year and around the time of my game at Stoke-by-Nayland had even had a couple of exploratory conversations with two members of the mind-coaching industry, Karl Morris and Peter Crone. That I had been slow to follow these encounters up may have had something to do with my confusing the role of a psychologist with that of a psychiatrist, just like Baker-Finch had. The idea of taking my sporting troubles to one of these men had seemed premature back in March: I couldn’t shake the mental picture of myself lying on a couch and talking about my childhood, nor the conviction that I needed to have built up a sizeable history of angst before submitting to such therapy. Additionally, Crone had unnerved me slightly, and I felt that more unnerving – whether it was the constructive kind or not – was the last thing I needed.
‘Don’t take this the wrong way,’ he’d told me over the phone, ‘but from what you’ve been saying so far I gather you’re a very sensitive person.’ This seemed a remarkably astute observation, given that we had only been speaking for three minutes at that point: just about enough time for me to introduce myself and give him a (very) edited summary of my golfing life to date.
He didn’t like to call himself a golf psychologist, preferring the terms ‘spiritual excavator’ or ‘happiness guru’. Every time I made a self-deprecating comment, he interjected with the phrase ‘Boring story!’ He explained that this was one his catchphrases, intended to discourage negative thought processes. He talked metaphorically about peeling back the layers of the onion, and opening Christmas presents that were already there. ‘My method is not to talk directly about golf,’ he said. ‘We’re talking about your life here. The golf stuff will come automatically.’ He was undoubtedly an invigorating force, and seemed like an intriguing character – more so when I looked at his promotional website,
which featured pictures of him hugging alsatians and towelling his naked torso in the manner of an eighties Athena model – but he lived in America and didn’t get over to Britain all that often. Somehow I couldn’t quite convince myself that getting spiritually excavated by a man who numbered Liz Hurley among his clients was precisely what my game needed.
The former pro Karl Morris, who worked with Darren Clarke and the snooker player Jimmy White, was a similarly persuasive personality, but one in whose presence I immediately felt comfortable. When I’d met him at Urban Golf earlier in the year, he’d given me some useful hints. These included a lesson about how the fact that golf is a ‘dead ball sport’ makes the need for a player to train his brain more pressing – how a hypnotic trigger was needed to perform the same function that, say, a starter’s pistol might perform in athletics. Karl lived not far away from Mollington, so a couple of days prior to teeing off in the GMS Classic, I drove over to his house.
Karl’s office was a sparsely furnished room, containing three or four golf clubs, a couple of seats, a Tour-sized golf bag signed by Darren Clarke (‘To Karl. We WILL get there. Thanks for everything, Darren’) and a table on which were a couple of books: an ancient hardback called Gravity Golf, by Dave Lee, and Blink, Malcolm Gladwell’s wonderful treatise on the untapped power of split-second decision-making. As I made myself comfortable in a leather chair – I took it that this was where all Karl’s patients sat – he listened to my troubles in a way that suggested not one of them was something he hadn’t heard before a million times. He said the question ‘Why do I play so well in practice and so badly in competition?’ was the one he was asked most frequently. ‘And I’m talking,’ he added, ‘right from Darren Clarke downwards.’
I told Karl that when I was standing over the ball I wanted to get into that state of concentration that the five-time Open champion Tom Watson once compared to ‘a room where everything is dim and quiet’, but that as soon as I was in a competitive situation I just couldn’t silence my internal dialogue. It was that old puzzler again: How could I learn to stop thinking without falling asleep?
‘What you’ve got to realise,’ he said, ‘is that a golfer can’t think of nothing. It’s impossible, and when you try, it will make your mind wander. You need somewhere to park your attention. But it’s got to be consistent.’
I told Karl about what I’d read in Bob Rotella’s book on the mind game, Golf is Not a Game of Perfect, about how being focused on my target would concentrate my mind. Was this the kind of thing he was thinking about?
‘The target works for some people,’ he said, ‘but it’s a matter of personal preference. Some people find that by parking their attention on the target it’s harder to stay in the present. I tell people to choose one of four things to focus their attention on: either the target, the ball, a part of the club, or a part of themselves.’
He handed me a putter, and asked me to choose one of the four focus points. I chose a point halfway up the shaft of the club. He then placed a cup on the floor five feet away, its rim facing me. I addressed the ball, and he twisted the clubhead so it was aiming some seventy degrees right of the target. He then asked me to putt four balls, not trying to hole them, and thinking about nothing but my awareness of the shaft.
Amazingly, three out of the four balls found their target.
‘It’s self-correcting, you see,’ he said.
I’d heard and read plenty about the crucial golfing art of ‘getting out of your own way’, but nobody had yet demonstrated it in such persuasive terms. What Karl was explaining to me so eloquently was something I’d already suspected: that much of my golfing thought was carried out by an utterly superfluous part of my brain. All I had to do was find a way to shut it down. As a miracle cure, it was not just surprisingly simple. It seemed almost … boring.
‘I wish I could tell you that what I’m teaching is something new,’ said Karl, ‘but there’s nothing in it that wasn’t said by Buddhists a thousand years ago. And then there’s this …’
He took the copy of Dave Lee’s Gravity Golf off the table beside us, opened it roughly halfway through, and pointed to a passage a third of the way down the page: a quote attributed to Gregory A. Mihaioff.
‘In learning to make a typical multi-joint movement,’ I read, ‘two neurologically relevant points seem reasonably clear. First, the movement must be practised and, to be most effective, every repetition should be as true to the desired form as possible. Second, the conscious cerebral cortex control circuitry needs to be eliminated from the performance of the movements as soon as possible.’
‘That says it all right there,’ Karl said. ‘And that’s not from a golf coach. It’s from a professor of neurobiology.’
For a member of the notoriously pushy and embroidered self-help profession, Karl was both refreshingly modest and refreshingly straight-talking. It had long ago become apparent to me that it was in the spiritual contract of every psychological guru to undermine the physical side of golf coaching, and vice versa. Karl was an exception, and seemed to have found the ideal middle ground between the two occupations: he had an immense understanding of the sporting brain, but – perhaps aided by his background as a playing pro – he kept the issue of hitting the ball central to all his teaching. He also gave me some good advice about practice. What was I aiming at? ‘A sort of random area about ten yards wide, or maybe a tree,’ I said. Was it smaller or bigger than what I would be aiming at on the course? ‘Bigger, I suppose,’ I said. If I was practising for a basketball game, Karl asked, would I want to make the hoop I practised with smaller or bigger than the one on the court?
‘Look at it this way,’ he continued. ‘Is there any other sport apart from golf where the way it’s practised bears no resemblance to the way it’s played?4
I said I could not think of one.
‘Exactly! You’ve got to make the hoop smaller.’
An hour later, I went to a driving range just off the M52, made the hoop smaller, and hit the most perfect two hundred shots of my life. When the last ball zipped off into the distance and I looked at the empty basket in front of me, I felt as if I had woken up from a brief, dreamless sleep, which was odd, given that I’d been unusually alert during my hitting. The blister on my thumb that had opened up and leaked blood on my shirt seemed a small price to pay.
I immediately noticed a sweaty man in a Ping baseball cap in the adjacent bay grinning a tooth-deficient grin in my direction.
‘You must be playing in the tournament – the big one – hitting it like that,’ he said.
I wasn’t sure if by ‘the big one’ he meant The Open, in which Tiger Woods had strolled to victory the previous day, or the GMS Classic. ‘Er, yeah,’ I said, slightly disorientated, and not wishing to split hairs. It was 33 degrees, and I was starting to smell something ripe. I hoped it wasn’t me.
‘Well, don’t you take it for granted, mate. It’s not a lot of people who can hit a ball like that.’
He limped off towards the car park.
It was a gratifying moment, as near as I’d felt to having ‘arrived’ all year.
Looking back, I’m glad I took a few seconds to savour it, because, little did I know, I’d already made two crucial mistakes.
The first – and possibly most telling – mistake had come before I’d even left Karl Morris’s house.
As we shook hands at the front door, he’d reminded me of the importance of sticking with the brain-training rituals he’d given me, even if they didn’t work at first. I promised that I would do so, then added, for good measure, ‘Even if I shoot 86 on Wednesday.’
I should have kept my mouth shut.
The nineteenth-century psychologist William James once said that his most telling finding in fifty years of research into the workings of the mind was that ‘People by and large become what they think about themselves’. In some ways, I have to doubt this. I mean, my friend Graham thinks he’s Knight Rider, and has done for many years, but he’s still a greying mark
eting consultant for a computer-software firm in the east Midlands who just happens to have a black car. But if you transpose William
James’s theory to the world of golf, it’s surprisingly foolproof. A good example of this would probably be my performance on the fourth tee of the first round of the GMS Classic.
I’d started well at the dust-baked Mollington course. I’d hit each of the first three greens in the regulation number of shots, leaving myself two putts for par. Even though I’d missed a four-footer on the third to slip to one over, I was feeling, perhaps for the first time in my short career as a golf pro, a lasting sense of belonging. On the tee of the short par-four fourth, however, there was a delay of ten minutes while my playing partners, Tim Stevens and James5 (son of the boxing legend John) Conteh and I waited for the green to clear. During this delay I began a conversation with James about his home club, Moor Park in Hertfordshire.
‘I expect you probably played in the Carris there when you were a junior,’ said James. He was talking about the Carris Trophy, one of the biggest under-eighteen amateur events in Britain, and one which I’d always hoped, as a kid, to get my handicap down low enough to enter.