Golf is Not a Game of Perfect

by Bob Rotella

  But if you bring a smothering perfectionism to the golf course, you will probably leave with a higher handicap and a lousy disposition, because your game will never meet your expectations.

  Some good players have developed idiosyncratic ways of diverting the anger that bubbles up within them after a bad shot.

  Sherry Steinhauer tells me that she thinks of her memory as a video machine. If she hits a bad shot during the course of a round, she thinks about erasing the tape of that shot. It’s a way of putting the mistake out of her mind. Others think of filing the memory of the mistake away somewhere, or changing the channel on the television.

  Jack Nicklaus had a few tricks of his own. Nicklaus nearly always selected his own club and generally wanted only silence and a dry towel from his regular caddie, Angelo Argea. But if he hit a bad shot, he might turn to the innocent Angelo and chew him out, saying, “Damn it, why did you let me pick that thing out of the bag?”

  Angelo was smart enough not to take it personally. He knew that Nicklaus would play much better if he directed his anger at his caddie rather than at himself.

  Arnold Palmer and Bernhard Langer tend to blame their clubs, frequently switching from one set to another and banishing the offending implements to a dark basement. Langer has been known to soak his clubs in a barrel of water overnight as punishment for their betrayal. He did that the week he won his first Masters.

  But if you don’t happen to have an understanding caddie in your employ, and you don’t have an endorsement contract with a manufacturer who is willing to supply an infinite number of clubs, how do you handle anger?

  The first thing to do is to throw away your expectations as soon as you step onto the golf course, and just play. It’s very difficult to do. But I have never worked with a golfer who could play anywhere close to his potential unless he shed his expectations before the first shot.

  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.

  This is not to say you should not think about hitting every ball to the target and believe that every shot will do just that. You should. But there is a fine difference between believing that the ball will go where you want it to go and expecting that it will and being upset if it doesn’t. You have to put expectations out of your mind by the time you get to the first tee.

  On the first tee, you should have two immediate goals. One is to have fun. The other involves the process of playing, not the results. This goal is to get your mind where it’s supposed to be on every shot. If you do that, you’ll shoot the best score you’re capable of shooting that day, whether it’s 67 or 107.

  Having fun shouldn’t be so difficult. You are, after all, out in the fresh air. You are playing in what amounts to an emerald park. Clipped grasslands, according to one theorist, have been the most soothing and emotionally satisfying habitat for man since the first humans dropped out of the trees. You are, presumably, in good company, the company of other golfers. You have a chance to strike a little ball and send it flying straight and true against the sky, an act that seems to resonate pleasantly somewhere deep within the human brain. These are the reasons you initially liked golf even though you couldn’t play it very well. Savor all of them as you play. Let the joy of the game come to you.

  Shooting the best score you’re capable of on a given day requires that, to paraphrase something that’s become trite, you become your own best friend—or in this case, a good caddie and pro to yourself. Can you imagine someone paying a caddie to berate him after a bad shot in this fashion: “You left that putt short! You’re a wimp! No guts!” Can you imagine someone paying a teaching pro to get apoplectic and tell him he’s an idiot for slicing the ball? Or to visit his hotel room after a bad round and remind him of all the mistakes he made that day?

  No one would do it. Yet, every time I play golf, I see people doing it to themselves.

  You have to be nonjudgmental. You have to forgive and forget and be compassionate toward yourself. But 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.

  When a shot is done, it’s done. The only constructive thing you can do about it is to hit the next shot as well as you can. That requires that you stay optimistic and enthusiastic.

  If you must have expectations about results, expect to make some mistakes. Walter Hagen once said that he expected to make seven mistakes per round. When he hit a bad shot, he wasn’t bothered. It was just one of the expected seven.

  Acceptance allows a golfer to be patient, and patience is one of the necessary virtues in golf. Sometimes, players tell me they are sick and tired of hearing me say that they must be patient and keep believing that if they do all the right things, the results they want will follow. That’s just one more thing they have to learn to be patient about.

  If you remember to have fun, it shouldn’t be too hard. When was the last time you were impatient when you were having fun?

  Remember, too, that golf is not a game of justice. A player can practice properly, think properly, and still hit a bad shot. Or he can hit a good shot and watch a bad hop or a gust of wind deposit the ball in a sand trap.

  A golfer can’t force results to happen. He can only do everything possible to give those results a chance to happen. As Tom Watson once put it, to become a really good golfer, you have to learn how to wait. But you have to learn to wait with confidence.

  ON THE TOUR, there are many factors conspiring to raise a player’s expectations, to encourage him to demand perfection 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.

  Scott Verplank won his first PGA tournament, the Western Open, while he was still an amateur. He expected that his golf could only get better once he finished school and could commit himself totally to golf, practicing as long as he wanted, playing all the time.

  It didn’t immediately work out that way for him. Performances that would have won or at least finished in the top ten in any amateur tournament didn’t make the cut on the Tour. He perceived them as failures. He responded as most good athletes have been taught to do, by working harder. He practiced all the time. He practiced when he shouldn’t have, when what he really needed and wanted to do was sit in his hotel room and read a book. And the hard work didn’t show up in better results. Eventually, he found himself returning periodically to Oklahoma State and asking the football coach to let him help out with the running backs. It was the only way he could take his mind off golf.

  Talking with him before the Buick Open one year, I emphasized the need for him to take it easy on himself. I told him it would be all r
ight to stay in his room and read a book for a few hours instead of going to the practice tee all day. And I asked him to promise me that he would try to have fun.

  I returned to Charlottesville to teach. On Thursday evening, I got a call from Scott.

  “Gosh, Doc,” he said, “I did it! I had fun all day long. And I’m leading! But what was really great was that I missed a five-footer on the first hole and I didn’t let it get to me! Made a thirty-five-footer on the second hole.”

  “I bet you were invited into the press tent afterward,” I said.

  “Yeah, I was,” he replied.

  “And I bet that they asked whether Scott Verplank could win his first tournament as a professional.”

  “Yeah, that’s all they talked about.”

  “Well, if you’re not careful, they’re going to have you thinking about the results you get instead of having fun. You might go out there fixed on shooting a certain number and keeping the lead and getting in position to win. You have to remember to throw away expectations, to just have fun and see what’s the lowest score you can shoot. You have to attend to the process, not concern yourself with the results.”

  Of course, I would not be telling this story if it didn’t have a happy ending. Scott won the tournament, and he called me up on Sunday evening. After telling me what happened, he said he was being interviewed by the golf writer for a newspaper in Dallas, and he was having trouble explaining to him why the idea of having fun had just helped him win a breakthrough golf tournament. Then he put the writer on.

  I talked for a while about the necessity to relax, enjoy the game and accept mistakes if a player wants to do his best. The writer still didn’t see it. He couldn’t understand why having fun could be difficult.

  “Try this,” I said. “Tomorrow in your paper, ask everyone in Dallas who plays golf to try a two-week experiment. During the first week, after every shot that’s less than perfect, they should get disgusted and angry with themselves. And they should stay mad even after they leave the course and go home. I guarantee you every one of your readers will be able to do it.

  “The second week, tell them that after every shot, no matter what happens to it, they are not going to be bothered. They are to have fun, stay decisive, and keep ripping the ball to the target. They are going to have a ball no matter what they shoot.

  “You can offer a big cash prize to anyone who can do what you ask during the second week, because I guarantee you there won’t be many people, if any, who will be honestly able to collect it.”

  RETIREES SOMETIMES HAVE a problem analogous to Scott Verplank’s. He expected his golf game to improve immediately once he finished school and could play all the time. 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 they also raise their expectations every time they step onto the course. They forget how to laugh off mistakes.

  Players plagued by perfectionism and unforgiving expectations would do well to remember the common sense their mothers taught them, or would have taught them if they’d paid attention.

  Here’s what Adela Saraceni told her son, Gene Sarazen, about perfectionism and expectations, just after he lost the 1927 U.S. Open by a single shot:

  “Son, everything that happens to you happens for the best. Don’t ever forget that. You can’t win all the time, son.”

  Gene Sarazen said this little bit of advice stuck with him and helped him to develop a certain fatalism about his golf that allowed him to accept whatever happened and make the best of it.

  If Mrs. Saraceni were around today, I might be out of business.

  12.

  Anyone Can Develop Confidence

  I WILL BE revealing no secrets by stating that good golf requires confidence.

  Coaches and athletes in all sports have long recognized that teams don’t win and athletes don’t perform well without confidence.

  All of the ideas and techniques I teach to golfers, from free will to the preshot routine, are intended to produce confidence. Without confidence, you can’t trust your physical ability. You can’t perform at your best.

  But a lot of golfers that I speak to about confidence have misconceptions that hold them back.

  They think that confidence is an attribute that they cannot choose to seek and acquire. They think it’s something that descends on an athlete, like a revelation from above, after he’s performed perfectly for a long time.

  Sometimes, a player struggling with this kind of misconception will ask me which comes first, confidence or success. They understand that a player cannot win tournaments without confidence. But they think that you have to win tournaments before you can get confidence.

  If that were true, no one would ever win a tournament for the first time.

  In fact, anyone can develop confidence if he or she goes about it properly. Confidence isn’t something you’re born with or something you’re given. You control it. Confidence is what you think about yourself and your golf game.

  Confidence at the level of any single shot is nothing more than thinking about your ball going to the target. If you’re thinking about the ball going to the target, you’re confident.

  A lot of golfers find this too simple. They have good educations. They’ve learned how to analyze and question. They want to apply what they know about probability and statistics.

  This kind of person might engage me in the following argument:

  “Doc, are you confident when you stand over a forty-foot putt that you’re going to make it?”

  “Yes,” I reply.

  “Well, then, would you bet me your house that you’ll make it?”

  “No.”

  “Then how can you say you’re confident?”

  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 percent is a good average on 40-foot putts. It means that when I’m standing over a 40-foot putt, no one is asking me to bet my house, and I’m not thinking about averages. I’m thinking about putting the ball in the hole. And that’s all I’m thinking about.

  Great athletes think this way. It would never occur to one of them to ask me whether I would bet my house on a 40-foot putt.

  People would understand this better, I think, if confidence guaranteed success. It doesn’t. 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? Obviously, you’re thinking about it going somewhere else—into a lake, maybe.

  And that kind of thinking definitely works, assuming you want to hit the ball in the lake. Negative thinking is almost 100 percent effective.

  IN A LARGER sense, your confidence is the sum of all the thoughts you have about yourself as a golfer. You’ve got to think about what you want your golf game to be. You’ve got to think about driving it well, wedging it well, being a great bunker player, being a superb putter.

  If you are a competitive player, you have to think about winning tournaments, about shooting low scores, about being able to stay cool if you get off to a rocky start and still come in with a good number.

  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.

  I tell players to try to feel that their confidence is increasing over the course of every round, every tournament and every season. I want them to feel that they are looser and more decisive on the eighteenth tee than they were on the first. I want them to feel more capable of going low on Sunday than they did on Thursday. I want them to feel more likely to win the last tournament of the season than they did in the first. As golfers grow in skills and experience, they must make certain that their confidence grows along with them.

  They can do this if they learn to be selective about their thoughts and their memories. They have to learn to monitor their thinking and ask themselves whether an idea that springs to mind is likely to help them or hurt them in the effort to grow more confident.

  If it won’t help them, they have to make a conscious choice to put that thought out of their mind and turn to one that will enhance their confidence. 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.

  This is what Nick Price has learned to do over the past few years. Nowadays, he tells me, the only thoughts that enter his mind on a golf course are thoughts about what he wants to do—where he wants to place his tee shot, where he wants his approach to land, and how he wants his putts to fall. 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.

  13.

  What Mark Twain and

  Fred Couples Have in Common

  MARK TWAIN WAS not, as far as I know, much of a golfer. But he had an insight that can help any golfer develop confidence and play better.