Golf is Not a Game of Perfect

by Bob Rotella

  No. 16 at Olympic is a long par five, playing 604 yards that day. Obviously, at that length, it was unreachable in two shots. The conservative strategy would have been to play a couple of 1-irons down the fairway, then hit a wedge to the green. But Palmer hated playing conservatively. He had used his driver in each of the three previous rounds from the 16th tee.

  As he stood there, waiting for Casper to hit, Palmer mulled over his strategy. He thought about a 1-iron. But then he decided that he couldn’t do that, that Arnold Palmer would look silly playing safe with a 1-iron, trying to protect a three-stroke lead with three holes to play. So he took out his driver and duck-hooked the ball into the trees and rough.

  His ball was buried in thick, wiry grass. But Palmer was still intent on boldness.

  “Can I get a 3-iron on the ball?” he asked Reasor.

  Reasor thought the lie was too difficult for a 3-iron, that it called for a much more lofted club. But he was afraid to tell Palmer that.

  “Only with a perfect swing,” Reasor said.

  Palmer decided that if a perfect swing was required, he would simply have to produce a perfect swing. He tried the 3-iron. But he barely got the club on the ball, moving it only 40 or 50 yards, still in the rough. He hit a 9-iron into the fairway, then a 3-wood to a greenside bunker. He managed to get up and down for a bogey. Casper, meanwhile, played three safe shots to the green and sank a putt for a birdie. The lead was down to one stroke.

  It evaporated completely on the 17th, when Palmer missed the green, played a good recovery, but missed a five-footer for par.

  Would the Open have ended differently if Palmer had played conservatively? It’s impossible to tell. Mike Reasor points out that the swing Palmer made on the disastrous tee shot at No. 16 would have produced a disastrous shot with a 1-iron as well. But we will never know if he would have made that swing with a 1-iron. There are no hard and fast rules for strategy and tactics.

  But it’s instructive to compare what Palmer did with what Jack Nicklaus did in a roughly similar Open situation a year later, at Baltusrol.

  Palmer and Nicklaus made up the final twosome of the tournament, and as they came to the 18th hole, Nicklaus was four strokes ahead. Not only that, but a birdie would break Hogan’s record of 276.

  The 18th at Baltusrol is a 542-yard par five, dogleg left, lined with trees, reachable with two good shots. A creek cuts across the fairway about 400 yards from the tee. Nicklaus, of course, wanted the record. But he wanted even more to make sure that he won the tournament.

  Nicklaus pulled out his 1-iron.

  As it happened, he made a bad swing, much as Palmer had done on the 16th tee at Olympic the year before. He sliced the ball into the rough. He could have tried the heroic shot there. But he played an 8-iron, expecting to lay up short of the creek. He mishit it and moved the ball only about 100 yards, but into the fairway. Palmer, meanwhile, played his second shot just off the green.

  At that point, Nicklaus hit one of the great shots of his career, a 235-yard 1-iron to the green. He sank the putt and got the record anyway.

  The difference between what Nicklaus did in 1967 and what Palmer did in 1966 is subtle but instructive. Both made some bad shots under pressure. But Nicklaus was playing more conservatively, more within himself. He accepted the fact that once he put the ball into the Open rough from the tee, he would have to play a lofted club. His bad swings, as a result, got him into a little less trouble. And when the time came to make a truly difficult shot, he was in a much stronger, calmer mental state. His success reflected it.

  A WEEKEND PLAYER can only imagine what it must be like to stand in Palmer’s shoes, trying to hang on to a dwindling lead in the U.S. Open. But the lessons of Palmer’s collapse are just as applicable to coping with the pressures of a two-dollar Nassau or the final holes of a club tournament.

  First, stay in the present and keep your mind sharply focused on the shot immediately in front of you.

  Don’t, as Palmer did when he started thinking of the Open scoring record, let extraneous thoughts distract you. If you’re ahead, don’t start calculating whom you’ll play in the next round, or what kind of beer you’ll order with the two dollars. If you’re behind, don’t start thinking about losing the match or about how well your opponent played the last few holes.

  Second, avoid mechanical thoughts, such as the tempo thought Palmer allowed into his mind. Instead, strive to become looser, freer and more confident. You should want to feel that you trust your swing more on the 18th tee than you did on the 1st.

  Third, stick to your routine and to your game plan.

  You set them up to give you a chance to post your lowest possible number by having a conservative stragety and a cocky, aggressive swing. If you make some mistakes and fall behind early, there’s no reason to try to make up the deficit with bold, risky strategy, like Palmer’s 3-iron out of the rough on No. 16. Don’t start firing at tight pins where you’d planned to aim for the middle of the green. Don’t hit a driver from a tee where you planned to hit an iron. You’re far more likely to come back by playing steadily and well and giving your opponent a chance to make some mistakes of his own.

  NERVE-WRACKING DISTRACTIONS are not, of course, peculiar to the U.S. Open. They can occur on any course at any time, even in a casual round.

  Some golfers get upset when play slows down in front of them. It’s often hard not to. But if you dwell on it, you can convince yourself that the delays are going to throw off your rhythm and ruin your round. You may even come up against a player who will deliberately agree with you that the slow play is aggravating and damaging and take quiet delight in destroying your composure.

  The only effective response to bottlenecks on the course is a decision that they will not bother you. You can even try to enjoy the languor of it. If you have to wait, keep walking around to make sure that the body stays active and warm. If you must sit, be certain that a few minutes before your turn to hit finally comes around, you stand up, stretch a little, walk around, and get the body limber again. Then go through your routine once or twice in your mind. Get yourself focused back on golf.

  Even if there are no undue delays, much of the time in a round of golf will be consumed by things other than shotmaking—walking to your ball and watching your partners play theirs. I recommend getting your mind off of golf between shots. It’s easier for most people to concentrate totally for a minute or so at a time, as they execute their shotmaking routines. Trying to stay that focused between shots can be too taxing. Some players, like Lee Trevino and Fuzzy Zoeller, chat constantly between shots as a way of staying loose. Brad Faxon will sometimes step behind the gallery ropes to chat with friends who are following him around.

  If you or your partners don’t want to talk, try something else. Look at the birds or trees or weeds. Jack Nicklaus used to scan the gallery for pretty girls and joke about setting up his caddie, Angelo Argea, on dates with them.

  Of course, Zoeller, Trevino, Faxon and Nicklaus all switch their attention completely to the task at hand once it’s time to play a shot.

  If there’s a rain delay, it’s even more essential to unwind and distance yourself from golf. Read a book. Change clothes. When the rain stops, make up your mind that the delay is going to help you. Warm back up by going through your routine on a few practice swings, simulating a real shot as closely as possible.

  Finally, the play of your opponents can be a nervous distraction. Many a player has been cruising along in a match until his opponent suddenly and unexpectedly sinks a long chip or comes out of the woods to make par. Surprised, he loses his focus, starts to feel pressured, and fouls up his own game.

  A golfer should always assume that his opponent will hit the best possible shot. Then, if it happens, he’ll be prepared to cope with it. I saw a great example of this some years back at the Tournament Players’ Championship. Tom Kite and Chip Beck were leading the tournament going into the final round, and they formed the final twosome.

  Chip star
ted out horribly, making four bogeys on the front side and shooting 40. Tom seemed to have a comfortable lead. But Tom did not assume that Chip would keep playing that badly, or even that he would play the back nine in par figures. Instead, he assumed that Chip would get as hot on the back side as he had been cold on the front. And Chip did, shooting 31. Tom, however, was ready for that kind of charge. He stuck to his game plan, and he held Chip off until the final hole. There, Tom teed off with a two-stroke lead.

  They both reached the green in regulation figures. Tom was 50 feet and two tiers of green away. Chip had a tricky, downhill putt of 25 feet.

  Immediately, Tom told me later, he assumed Chip would make that putt, difficult though it was. He rolled his first putt to about five feet.

  Then, sure enough, Chip made his birdie putt.

  If Chip’s putt had surprised or unnerved Tom, his next putt would have suddenly become much harder. But because Tom had prepared himself mentally, his emotional state did not change when Chip’s ball disappeared into the hole. Things were still going as he had planned. He was still in control.

  And he holed his par putt and won the tournament.

  19.

  When the Scoreboard Looks at You

  ONE OF THE most common mental errors committed by golfers under pressure is letting the score distract them from what they ought to be thinking about.

  No one paid more dearly for this mistake than Sam Snead in the U.S. Open of 1939 at Spring Mill, outside Philadelphia. Snead set the Open pace that year with rounds of 68, 71 and 73. As he stood on the 17th tee in the final round, he added up his own total. He knew that par on the final two holes would give him a 69 for 281, tying the Open record Ralph Guldahl had set two years earlier.

  In those days, tournament courses had no leaderboards. Nor were the leaders always paired in the final rounds. News of other players’ scores flitted around the course by word of mouth, and the news was not always accurate. Byron Nelson, Snead’s closest pursuer, had come in at 284. Snead erroneously thought, however, that Nelson had finished a stroke or two better than that.

  Not knowing he had a 3-shot lead, he decided to go all out on 17 and hit a 300-yard drive. But his second shot was in the rough, and his chip was short. He bogeyed the hole.

  Walking to the par-five 18th, thinking that he had probably fallen into a tie with Nelson, Snead completely lost his natural serenity. He had nervous physical symptoms; his teeth, he recalled later, were chattering. The gallery distracted him. The rush of people coming over to 18 from 17 forced him to wait. He started thinking about the money he stood to blow. He thought about the annoying gallery. He thought about avoiding humiliation. He thought he needed a birdie to win. He thought, in short, about everything but the right way to play No. 18.

  Half a century later, Snead still was angry with the gallery, still wondered why no one told him that the score to beat was 284, not 282 or 283. He needed only a bogey to win the Open. But the fact of the matter is that he himself let extraneous thoughts dominate his mind. He let the score distract him. He let the gallery distract him. He did not focus intently on a game plan for No. 18, take each shot as it came and stick with his routine.

  Trying to hit another huge drive, he hooked the ball into the deep Open rough. Still thinking he needed a birdie, he tried to hit a 2-wood out of the rough, rather than taking a midiron. He hit, in other words, the shot he thought he should hit rather than the shot he knew he could hit. He topped it.

  The ball came to rest in a fairway trap, a hundred yards from the green, half-buried. Snead was desperate to reach the green. He took an 8-iron, rather than a sand wedge. The ball hit the lip. His fourth shot found a greenside trap. He blasted out and, thoroughly discombobulated, three-putted, for a total of eight strokes. He had given the Open away, and after that he never would win one.

  Would he have won if he had known the correct score? Perhaps. If thinking about the score accurately can be a dangerous distraction, thinking about a false score is even worse.

  But he almost certainly would have won if he had not paid attention to the score. Once he started thinking about it, he introduced a host of distracting thoughts. He let the score, rather than common sense, dictate club selection and strategy. Sitting in the rough after his tee shot at No. 18, Snead was 260 yards from the green. He could have hit a 7-iron and a wedge, leaving himself a putt for the birdie he thought he needed. Instead, he tried for the shot that was too bold, too difficult, and in the end disastrous.

  Pressure frequently doesn’t do nearly as much damage to a golfer’s swing as it does to his course management.

  IN FOCUSING SO much of his thinking on his own score and those of the other players, Snead did something I advise golfers to avoid, whether they’re in the final round of the Open or just a friendly round.

  The minute you start thinking, “If I shoot bogey for the last three holes I’ll break 90,” or “if I shoot par for the next two holes I’ll win the Open,” you get ahead of yourself. Your thoughts leave the present. You start worrying too much about fouling things up. You get careful. You get tight. You start steering the ball instead of getting looser and cockier. You play the golfing equivalent of pro football’s prevent defense. And disaster often strikes, whether your goal is to break 90 or win the Open.

  High-handicappers as a rule pay much closer attention to their scores than pros do. They can’t wait to write down the number after every hole. They’re always adding up their strokes and using the number as a way of evaluating how they’re doing. If they start to approach a goal, like breaking 90, they’re instantly aware of what they have to do on the remaining holes to reach it. It’s one of the reasons they’re high-handicappers. They make it much harder on themselves.

  Professionals, when they’re playing at home, rarely use a scorecard. When the round is over, they recollect each hole, add up the strokes and determine their score. That’s what the average player should do.

  I know it’s not easy. Golfers have ingrained the habit of writing down the score after every hole, adding it up after 9, and projecting the total over 18. Playing partners often will do this for them if they don’t. If there are bets on the match, that adds to the tendency to keep constant track of the score.

  I can only say that you’ll shoot a lower score, on average, if you keep your mind in the present and take it one shot at a time.

  For modern professionals, the task is harder because there are leaderboards everywhere on the courses they play, and they have to make a conscious decision not to let them distract them.

  Jack Nicklaus was excellent at this. Angelo Argea, his longtime caddie, wrote that as a rule, Nicklaus did not want to know how the field was faring and rarely looked at a leaderboard. Once, Argea said, Nicklaus started a final round leading a tournament by several strokes. He ordered Argea not to tell him what the leaderboards said. The caddie stayed mum. But on the 16th tee, Nicklaus suddenly turned to Argea and demanded to know where he stood.

  “You’re nine strokes ahead,” Argea told him.

  Nicklaus double-bogeyed the hole.

  There are players, of course, who do keep an eye on the leaderboard and want to know where they stand, particularly in the final holes of a tournament. Nick Price is one of them. They like the challenge of knowing the entire situation and dealing with it. If they are successful players, though, you can be sure that they take the score information in and then refocus their attention entirely on the next shot. For most players, it’s easier, in my opinion, to pay no attention to the score.

  VAL SKINNER TELLS me she has won several tournaments without knowing, until she holed her last putt, that she had won. She’s won tournaments knowing, from the way the crowd applauded her, that she had the lead, but not knowing by how many strokes. She makes a deliberate effort to avoid looking at leaderboards. She counts on her caddie to tell her, on the final few holes, if there’s anything critical she needs to know about the standings. This means, for instance, that if she’s a stroke out of the le
ad on a par-five final hole, she wants to know. It could affect her decision on whether to lay up or try to reach the green in two. Otherwise, she understands that there is nothing she can do to affect her opponents’ scores. She maximizes her chances to win by refusing to think about anything but her own routine and her own game plan.

  At the Atlanta Women’s Championship in 1994, at Eagle’s Landing, Val started the final round two strokes behind Liselotte Neumann. Neumann tripled-bogeyed the first hole, and Val, in the final threesome with her, knew she was close to the lead, if not leading. She decided to pretend, however, that someone in the group in front of them had the lead. She refused to look at a leaderboard. She stuck to her game plan. She played a round that verged on brilliance. Neumann, however, steadied herself and kept pace with Val.

  On the 17th, a dogleg par four, Val hit her drive a little left of her target, into a bunker. She tried to hit too much club out of the bunker, and barely got on the green in three. She had a 20-foot putt for par. Neumann had a 3-foot putt for par.

  An enormous leaderboard stood behind the green. Val tried to keep her eyes from focusing it, but suddenly, she could not. The numbers and letters, as if of their own volition, pulled into sharp clarity.

  The board said she was leading Neumann by one stroke.

  The information did not help her concentration as she stood over the 20-footer. It was a slippery, downhill putt with perhaps an 8-foot break. Once she knew that missing it could cost her the tournament, it started to look even slipperier, as if she were trying to bank the ball off a green, marble cliff.

  She left her putt 8 feet short.

  Fortunately, at that point, all the work Val had been doing to learn to control her thoughts and discipline her mind paid off. She confronted the challenge to set aside all of the distractions. She forgot the standings. And she made her 8-footer.