Golf is Not a Game of Perfect

by Bob Rotella

  I suspect Tom will attain his new dreams as he did the old ones, because he has always been willing to do what was entailed in the long answer to the question posed by his boyhood rival.

  The long answer would have recounted how hard Tom worked, on both the physical and mental aspects of his game, how often he endured failures, how often he bounced back, as he pursued those dreams.

  The man I was speaking with had made a common mistake in assessing Tom. He confused golfing potential with certain physical characteristics. Most people carry in their mind an image of a golfer with potential. He is young, tall and lean. He moves with the grace of the natural athlete and probably has excelled at every sport he’s ever tried. He can hit the ball over the fence at the end of the practice range.

  But while I certainly wouldn’t discourage someone with those physical characteristics, I’ve found that they have little to do 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.

  It’s nice when Tom gives me a little of the credit for his achievements, but the truth is that he had a great attitude before I ever met him. He had a backyard green and sand trap as a boy, where he developed his short game. He refused to believe he couldn’t achieve his goals. Those qualities of mind were and are true talent and true potential. I believe that with his mind and attitude, if Tom had decided as a five-year-old that he wanted to be a great basketball player instead of a great golfer, he would have been an All-American in basketball. That’s because talent and potential have much more to do with what’s inside an athlete’s head than with his physical characteristics.

  I’m sometimes asked if there is a distinct champion’s personality. I see no evidence that there is, because the champions I’ve worked with cover a broad spectrum of personality types. They come from cities and small towns, poverty and wealth, athletic parents and nonathletic parents. Some are shy and some are gregarious. Tom Kite and Nick Price, if they were in law and accounting instead of in golf, might well find they had few common interests.

  But they and other champions all have a few common characteristics. They are all strong-willed, they all have dreams, and they all make a long-term commitment to pursue those dreams.

  In fact, I think it’s often more difficult for a person branded with what most people perceive as potential to become great than it was for, say, Pat Bradley.

  When everyone around you is telling you you have great potential, and they expect you to win all the time, you can quickly start to hate and despise the potential you have, to perceive it as a burden. Val Skinner, one of the players I work with on the LPGA Tour, has struggled with that problem. She came to the tour as the Collegiate Player of the Year, and she hits it a long way. When she didn’t win immediately, she got frustrated and critical of herself. She’s had to work hard to realize that her physical talent is only one factor in her golfing ability—and not the most important factor.

  Most people use only a small percentage of their innate physical ability, anyway. The golfer whose attitude enables him to tap a higher percentage of a relatively modest store of God-given talent can and will beat the one who doesn’t know how to maximize what he has.

  ON THE OTHER hand, a player with no dreams has little real potential. Not too long ago, a young man from another university came to Charlottesville to see me, looking for help with his golf game. I asked him what his dreams were.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m a pretty talented golfer, a pretty talented student. I do pretty well at both. My dad’s got a pretty good company, and I guess after college I can go to work for him and make a pretty good living, so I’m not worried about the future.”

  The conversation floundered for a while. Finally I asked if there was anything he really loved doing, anything that truly excited him. He perked up immediately.

  “Oh, yeah! I love going to see our school play basketball. The team is so awesome, so good, so into it. They’re like on a mission, Doc. I’d stay up all night in a tent to get tickets to the games. I go on the road with them.”

  His school indeed had a successful basketball program. The team had been to the Final Four several times.

  I stopped him and told him, “I don’t want to break your heart, but you must realize that if your school’s golf program was as good as its basketball program, you couldn’t play.”

  He asked why.

  “You have talent, but your school recruits basketball players with both talent and attitude,” I said. “Your basketball coach dreams of winning national championships. He recruits only players who are totally committed to winning national championships. If you’re not, he doesn’t want you. Because if you’re not, you’re not going to work on free throws every day until you become an excellent free-throw shooter. If you’re not, you’re not going to play defense every night.”

  Free throws and defense, I said, are like the short game in golf. They require not so much talent as determination and commitment. And they are usually what separates teams that win national championships from aggregations of slam-dunk artists.

  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,” I said. “You have to look at what you’re aiming for, because that’s going to influence your level of commitment. I guarantee you that guys on your golf team practice when they want to practice. I guarantee that they spend all of their time on the range working on their swings and that no one’s ever over at the practice green working on the short game. And I bet most of you spend a lot of time justifying being so-so golfers because you’re at a very demanding school, academically, and you spend too much time studying.”

  He nodded.

  I told him it would be harder for him to achieve great things in golf than it would be for his school’s basketball players to achieve great things in their sport, because he would have to do it himself. He would have to set his own goals higher than his team’s, and commit himself to achvieving them. It would be an individual quest, and sometimes a lonely one.

  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.

  I never do that. Whenever someone introduces me or identifies me as a shrink, I am tempted to correct him. I’m not a shrink. I’m an enlarger. I am not in the business of telling people that they don’t have talent, that their dreams are foolish and unnattainable. I want to support people’s talent. I believe in human abilities.

  If someone came to me and said, “I’m forty-five years old, my handicap is 25, and my dream is to make a living on the Senior Tour,” I would say, “Fantastic! You’re just the kind of person who excites the living daylights out of me. Just the fact that you’re shooting 95 and you’re talking about being able to shoot 70 every day means you have the kind of mind that has a chance. I live to work with people like you.”

  I would not guarantee this fictitious duffer more than a chance. The next question would be whether he could keep that dream in front of him for eight or fifteen years. The right thinking can quickly and substantially lower the score of any golfer who has been thinking poorly. But there is no rapid, miraculous way to go from a 25 handicap to scratch, no matter how well a golfer starts to think. Improvement takes patience, persistence and practice.

  If a golfer chooses to go after greatness, whether he defines greatness as winning the U.S. Open or winning the championship at his club, he must understand that he will encounter frustration and disappointment along the way. Tom Kite played in and lost more than a dozen U.S. Opens before he finally won one. Big improvements require working and chipping away for years. A golfer has to learn to enjoy
the process of striving to improve.

  That process, not the end result, enriches life. I want the people I work with to wake up every morning excited, because every day is another opportunity to chase their dreams. I want them to come to the end of their days with smiles on their faces, knowing that they did all they could with what they had.

  That’s one reason golf is a great game. It gives people that opportunity.

  2.

  What Nick Price Learned from William James

  SEVERAL YEARS AGO, Nick Price came to see me for the first time. I met him at the airport and we drove to my home.

  Nick was then in his early thirties. He was a good professional, but not a great one. He had not won a tournament in six years and had never won a major.

  He had dreams. He dreamed of winning all the major championships. And his talent was apparent in the very low numbers he sometimes posted—rounds in the mid-sixties and lower.

  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.

  The worst thing that could happen to him, he said, was to hit his approach shot close to the pin on the first hole. If he then missed the putt, he became discouraged and timid. He putted worse. This was the state of mind that accounted for the all-too-frequent 76.

  Nick let events control the way he thought, rather than taking control of his thoughts and using them to influence events.

  “If you’re going to be a victim of the first few holes,” I said, “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,” I went on. “You wouldn’t be foolish enough to try a different swing on every shot, would you?”

  No, he said.

  “It’s the same way with your mind,” I said. “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.

  But I didn’t get into psychology through the normal academic route. I got in via the back door, from the gym. I grew up in Rutland, Vermont, where my father owned a barber shop. As a boy, I wanted nothing more than to play. I played football, basketball and baseball at Mt. St. Joseph Academy in Rutland. I played basketball and lacrosse at Castleton State College, and did well enough that the school recently inducted me into its Hall of Fame.

  Golf, then, was only a minor interest. In the summer I carried clubs at the Rutland Country Club, where a neighborhood friend of mine, Joe Gauthier, was caddy master. I played a few rounds a year, on Mondays, just because my friends were doing it.

  By the time I became a teenager, coaching fascinated me. I liked to hang around coaches and listen to what they had to say. I was blessed by contact with some excellent mentors. My cousin, Sal Soma, was one of the greatest high-school football coaches in New York state history. He was a good friend of Vince Lombardi, and I hung on every word he said about training and motivating athletes. My next-door neighbor, Bob Gilliam, coached basketball at Kimball Union Academy in New Hampshire. He impressed me with how much fun he had developing a team and getting the players to believe in themselves. My elementary-school basketball coach, Joe Bizzarro, taught me that the team that wins is usually the one that believes in itself. My entire high school experience at Mt. St. Joseph was filled with invaluable lessons. Jim Browne, my high-school basketball coach, was an extremely talented player and coach from Ridge-field Park, New Jersey, who had survived the Korean War. He taught mental and physical toughness; one of his drills cost me a front tooth. But I remember not caring because I loved his approach to the game. Tony Zingali, an assistant football coach who was the backbone of a legendary high-school program, taught us that we had to be mentally disciplined every day in practice if we wanted to be disciplined on game days and that attitude would always win out over ability. My quarterback coach, Funzie Cioffi, who had played for Lombardi at Fordham, passed along the necessity of having and executing a game plan. Bill Merrill, the head baseball coach at Castleton State, lived in my dormitory. We talked for hours about coaching. He taught me that if an athlete or a team wanted to be successful, a way could be found. He proved it with his baseball team. Roy Hill, one of my basketball coaches at Castleton, taught me that an athlete had to stay focused at all times and that the size of your heart was far more important than the size of your body.

  I started to coach informally when I was in college. At Christmas break one year, the basketball squad was told that every Friday afternoon it would be working with a busload of retarded children from a nearby institution called the Brandon Training School. I thought, at first, that the basketball team could hardly afford to waste practice time working with retarded kids. But after a while, I started to enjoy doing it. Those youngsters would happily try anything we wanted to teach them—dribbling, shooting, an obstacle course, or tumbling. They always had good attitudes. They were always in good moods.

  The varsity athletes I played with had almost everything going right in their lives. They were good-looking, talented guys. But a lot of them 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 with what you had than with what you had.

  After college, I continued teaching the retarded; and Frank Bizzarro, the brother of my elementary-school basketball coach, gave me a job as an assistant coach at my old high school in Rutland. The more I coached, the more convinced I became that the Xs and Os that obsessed many coaches were rather less important than the attitudes and confidence they instilled in their players. Without confidence, concentration, and composure, teams lose. With confidence, almost any plays would work. So when the chance came to go to graduate school at the University of Connecticut, coach lacrosse at the university and basketball at the university high school, and pursue a degree in sports psychology, I took it. Eventually, I got my doctorate and became director of sports psychology at the University of Virginia. Since 1976, I’ve had the enormous pleasure of working with the University’s athletes in all sports.

  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 hand, to the ideas of people who seemed to have a knack for happiness and success. In particular, I liked the ideas of William James, the most prominent American psychologist of th
e nineteenth century. Once, at a meeting of the American Psychological Association, James was asked to identify the most important finding of the first half-century of university research into the workings of the mind. His reply became part of my philosophy:

  People by and large become 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.

  John Wooden, who won nine national basketball championships at UCLA, expressed the same idea; maybe he’d also read William James. Winners and losers, Wooden said, are self-determined. But only the winners are willing to admit it.

  That strikes a lot of people as fatuous. But it’s quite realistic if you accept another old concept that has unfortunately gone out of style: free will.

  I harp on free will with the players I work with. 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.