Golf is Not a Game of Perfect

by Bob Rotella

  On the golf course, it means that a player can choose to think about his ball flying true to the pin, or veering into the woods. She can choose whether to think about making a putt or just getting it close.

  Every now and then a player says to me something like, “Doc, I just involuntarily started thinking about hitting the ball into the water. I couldn’t do anything about it.”

  My response is, “No. You can indeed do something about it. You can think about the ball going to the target.”

  A golfer can and must decide how he will think.

  IN NICK PRICE’S case, these ideas meant that Nick could choose to allow a few missed early putts to affect his thinking for an entire round. Or he could choose to think the way he did when those first few putts dropped and he was on his way to a 64. He could think only about what he wanted to achieve on the course, about the ball going to the targets he would select. He could think about scoring well insead of real or imagined flaws in his swing or his putting stroke.

  After listening to this for a while, Nick said, “If I had known this is what you were going to talk about, I would have come to see you a long time ago.”

  “Why didn’t you?” I asked.

  “Well,” he replied, “I was afraid you’d be into something weird. I didn’t realize it would be this logical and sensible.”

  I laughed. At that point, Nick and I were ready to go out to the practice tee and work on how he could control his thoughts and make his game more consistent.

  3.

  Train It and Trust It

  GOLFERS LIKE TOM Kite, Pat Bradley and Nick Price have come to me with exciting dreams and aspirations. But they have encountered obstacles, and they want help overcoming them. A lot of them tell me that they’ve never worked harder practicing their game, but they’re not getting better scores. Almost all of them want help learning to win and to play more consistently.

  The high handicappers whom I see in clinics tend to be people tying themselves in knots, physically and mentally. They’ve read all the books and all the golf magazines and they’ve been to six different pros, and they can’t understand why their games aren’t more consistent. Or they say that they hit the ball well on the range, but not on the course.

  But, pro or amateur, whatever their specific concerns are, they all know one thing. They’re better players than they’re showing on the golf course and in tournaments.

  This raises one of the essential issues in golf. Why is it that a golfer cannot simply command his body to repeat the motion that has brought success thousands of times on the practice range or the putting green?

  The answer has to do with connections between the brain and other parts of the nervous system that we still only vaguely understand.

  Having come to golf from other sports, I bring a broader perspective than that of professionals who have devoted their entire careers to the mechanics of the swing. To me, the act of striking a golf ball belongs in that category of sports events in which the player need not react to what another player does, as a batter must react to the pitcher. Major variables are constant and under the golfer’s control—the moment the action begins, the position of the ball, and his position in relation to it. Swinging at a golf ball is, in this sense, akin to pitching a baseball, shooting a free throw in basketball, or walking a balance beam in gymnastics.

  Consider the baseball pitcher. Greg Maddux of the Atlanta Braves tells me that he pitches best when he virtually forgets about the batter and thinks only of the place he intends his pitch to go, his target.

  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 two 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.

  Or consider the balance beam. If you lay a four-by-four-inch beam on the floor and ask people to walk from one end to the other, it’s easy. Most people will instinctively focus their vision and attention on the far end of the beam, their target. And they will walk confidently and casually until they reach it.

  Now mount the beam forty feet 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. How, exactly, does a person keep his balance? And how does he put one foot in front of the other? Toes in or toes out? Body sideways or facing straight ahead? Eyes on the end of the beam or on the feet? Arms limp or extended to the sides? 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. If you actually conducted the experiment, many people who successfully negotiated the beam when it was on the floor would fall off from forty feet.

  In much the same way, a golfer who fears failure—as most amateurs and many professionals do, at least some of the time—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. Inevitably, he will tend to lose whatever grace and rhythm nature has endowed him with, which leads to inconsistent shotmaking with every club, from the driver to the putter.

  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.

  When someone asks me why this is so, I cannot give a scientific reply. Psychologists and other specialists in human performance may one day figure it out. I simply know that the human organism performs a task like the golf swing much better if the athlete looks at a target and reacts rather than looks, thinks and reacts. I don’t want to impose religion on anyone, but the only explanation I can come up with for this is that someone created us this way. We are endowed with the most marvelous computer system imaginable, and it is wired to maximize physical performance and grace if a person simply looks at a target and reacts to it.

  There is, of course, a time and place for thinking about the mechanics of the golf swing. I am not one of those who try to sell the notion that golf is purely mental and that mechanics don’t matter. They do. It is much better to have a good swing than a bad swing. To be successful, a golfer must blend work on mechanics with work on the mental approach to the game. The professional golfers I work with all have swing teachers who help them with their mechanics.

  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. On the golf course, you have to be like the good free-throw shooter who eyes the basket and lets the ball go. You have to be like the person who walks across the balance beam without thinking about how to walk. 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.

  When I say this at clinics, someone usually stands up and says that trusting the swing might be all well and good for a Tom Kite or a Nick Price, who has endless hours to practice and who hits the ball almost perfectly almost all of the time. But how can a weekend player who sprays the ball all over the course trust his swing?

  I respond that I have seen lots of high hand
icappers with lots of kinks in their swings, but I almost never see one who improves his play by doubting himself, dwelling on mechanics or trying to correct a swing flaw in the middle of a round. The fact is, most amateurs don’t know exactly what breaks down when they swing badly. If they try to correct their swing, they usually wind up compounding the error. They would be far better off forgetting about their swing mechanics, thinking about appropriate targets and strategy, and making up their mind that they will shoot the best score possible with the swing they brought to the course that day.

  Yet, this notion of trusting the swing strikes many weekend players as difficult, if not impossible. But how often have they hit the ball well while thinking of mechanics? Why do they fear abandoning the effort to control and guide their swing?

  It’s just habit, habit that has become comfortable, however ineffective.

  The fact is that neither Tom Kite nor Nick Price nor anyone else I work with hits the ball perfectly or even close to perfectly all the time. In fact, over the past ten years I’ve been working regularly with players who have posted well over two hundred and fifty wins on the PGA Tour, LPGA Tour, and Senior Tour. I can’t remember more than a few times when a winning player has told me he or she hit the ball really well for more than two of the four days of a tournament.

  Winners learn to accept the swing they bring to the golf course on any given day and to score with it. They win tournaments, as often as not, because they manage to use their short game and their mind to avoid a high round on the day or days when their swing is not what they wanted. If they need to work on their mechanics, they do it after the round is over, or they take a week off and go to the practice tee.

  Even Jack Nicklaus had limits in his ability to repair a faulty swing on the course. Tom Kite told me about a round he and Nicklaus played during the PGA Championship. Nicklaus split the fairway with his driver on the first hole. On the second hole, a short par four, he used a 3-wood. The third was a par three. On the fourth hole, he pulled out his driver, but he pull-hooked the ball, almost out of bounds. Tom said it was the worst shot he’d ever seen Nicklaus hit. From that moment until the end of the round, the driver stayed in Jack’s bag, even though the championship was being played at Kemper Lakes, a brutally long, 7,200-yard course. Despite its length, Nicklaus played it with the clubs he could trust, his 3-wood and his 1-iron. He saved the driver for the practice tee after the round, where he drove balls until he was satisfied he had worked out the kink that had produced the pull-hook at the fourth hole.

  Most golfers, amateur or pro, lack Nicklaus’s patience and discipline. Most of them would react to a pull-hook like the one Nicklaus hit on the fourth tee that day by taking the driver out on the next tee and trying to fix their mechanics. They’d start thinking about how fast their hips opened, or when they turned their hands over, or their swing planes. And their score would suffer for it.

  Trusting is not instinctive or easy for most golfers. They experience it only sporadically. Maybe they have a club that gives them such a feeling of confidence that they can trust their swing when they use it. They get better results with this club because trust allows them to swing decisively and fluidly. This reinforces their confidence with that particular club. Or they feel trust in the midst of a hot streak.

  The challenge, of course, is to trust your swing with every club and score well when your shots are telling you that your swing is not in the slot. It’s not easy or instinctive for many people. But this is the way great golfers and all great athletes think.

  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 seventy yards left, then seventy yards right and then hit the third one screaming on line to the pin.

  At the Nabisco Championships a few years ago, Chip Beck, whom I was working with, shot 63 on Sunday. It was a big breakthrough for him. He had a chance to win if Watson faltered behind him.

  Watson could barely put the ball on the golf course down the stretch, but he kept getting up and down. On the last hole, he had a 6-iron approach to a tiny green surrounded by trees, with the pin cut tight to one side. But he knew what to do. Just as he always did, it was one waggle, two waggles, and let it go. And he knocked it stiff. That’s why he’s been a great player. He knows that no matter what happens, he has to keep trusting. He’s gotten away from that in recent years with his putter, but I always expect him to come back, because he knows how to think the way great athletes think.

  When great athletes stop trusting, they stop being great. The difference in a player’s attitude can be very subtle. A little doubt or a little indecision is sufficient to impair performance.

  When great players are playing well, trust becomes a habit. The golfer executes his shots without being aware that he’s trusting his swing. He simply picks out a target, envisions the kind of shot he wants to hit, and hits it. Brad Faxon will often hit a draw off the tee on one hole and a fade on the next, depending on the shape of the hole. But he tells me that he never thinks about the mechanics of a draw or fade. He trusts that his body will produce the swing needed for the shot he envisions.

  If you don’t trust right now, you will have to go through a period of conscious awareness until you learn the difference between the feeling of trust and the absence of trust. You will have to work at developing thoughts and habits that promote trust. You will have to learn to focus your mind on your target and your preshot routine rather than on swing mechanics.

  4.

  How Stuart Anderson Created His Own Reality

  FINE ATHLETES IN every sport know the importance of trusting their mechanical skills. And they do it regardless of the results they achieved on their last attempt.

  One of the best stories on the subject that I’ve ever heard came from Stuart Anderson, a University of Virginia football player who went on to play for several years with the Washington Redskins. Stuart took a seminar I gave on confidence in athletics. I asked him to share with the class what went through his mind when he was thinking confidently.

  Stuart replied with a story from his high-school basketball career.

  “I was a fifty percent shooter from the floor,” he said. “In the first round of the state playoffs during my senior year, I took my first shot and I missed.”

  Stuart kept missing. He had the worst shooting night of his life in that game. He missed twenty-odd shots in a row. His team teetered on the edge of elimination.

  One of the other students in the seminar asked, “Stuart, why didn’t you start passing the ball after you missed, say, ten in a row?”

  “Because I’m a shooter. But let me finish the story,” Stuart said.

  His team scrapped and stayed in the game. With a minute to go, trailing by a point, they stole the ball and called time out. The coach, reasoning that Stuart was irremediably cold that night, diagramed a play to run 55 seconds off the clock and set up a shot for another player, a junior.

  “Wait a minute, Coach!” Stuart objected. “I want the shot. Give me the ball!”

  The underclassman, it turned out, didn’t really want the shot at that stage. So the coach, against his better judgment, changed his plan and called a play to give Stuart the shot.

  He got the ball beside the free-throw line, one of his favorite spots. He turned and jumped, absolutely confident. His eyes zeroed in on the rim. He let the shot go.

  And in it went. Stuart was the hero. Fans carried him off the floor. The next day, the newspapers headlined his game-winning shot.

  After hearing this story, one of my students raised a hand and asked, “How did you stay confident after you missed all those shots?”

  “Well, you have to understand. I’ve always been a fifty percent shooter,” Stuart replied. “After I missed one, I figured the next one was likely to go in. After I missed two, I was overdue. By the time I’d missed five, I f
igured the next one absolutely had to drop. Every time I missed, I figured the odds were increasing in my favor.”

  “Okay,” the student said. “If that’s how you think when you miss your first shots, what do you think if you make your first six or seven in a row?”

  “That’s totally different,” Stuart said. “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,” the student said. “You can’t have it both ways.”

  “Of course you can,” Stuart said.

  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. In golf, it’s even more essential, because there is no one to come off the bench to replace a player who’s struggling.

  A golfer has to learn to do what Stuart Anderson did, to put aside all thought of past failures and to trust that his next swing will send his shot where he aims it. He has to develop the basketball shooter’s mentality.

  If he misses a few putts, he has to believe that this only enhances his chances to make the next one. If he hits a tee shot out of bounds, he has to believe that this only means he’s gotten the bad swing out of his system. The shot was an accident. It’s not the norm.

  This may seem, to an outsider, to be absolutely irrational. How can a kid who’s just missed twenty-odd shots in a row be confident he’s going to make the next one?

  The answer is that whether it’s irrational or not, it’s more effective than the alternative. Would Stuart Anderson have been more likely to make that shot if he had doubted himself? Would it have helped him to start trying to fix some real or imagined flaw in his shooting form?