Every golfer is of limited ability—some more so, others less. We can’t always help this, but I believe that I can make a few common sense suggestions, having nothing to do with technique, that will help to take strokes off any man’s game.
The first real big lesson I learned, and it was medal competition that taught me, was that every stroke in the round was of equal importance, and that each one was worthy of and demanded the same intensity of concentration. Before I had had much experience, I used invariably to allow myself to become careleess when confronted by a simple-looking shot. A wide fairway or a big green was always the hardest for me to hit. But no golf shot is easy unless it is played with a precise and definite purpose, and with perfect and complete concentration upon results. The easiest way to assure minute attention on every shot is to cultivate an attitude of mind that will be satisfied by nothing less than perfection. If it looks easy to play onto the green, then try to get close to the hole; if it looks easy to get within a ten-foot radius, try to lay it dead. Always strive to go as far toward the ultimate end of holing out as it is reasonably possible to go.
The surest way to collect 7’s and 8’s and to pile up a disgraceful score is to become angry and rattled. It won’t cost much in the way of strokes, when you slice a drive or pull an iron, if you throw your club away or curse your luck, because you still have time to get over it before the next shot. But if you look up in the bunker and leave your ball sitting where it was, you had best think twice before you hit it again.
No virtue in this world is so often rewarded as perseverance. Again, as Harry Vardon said, “Keep on hitting the ball.” Don’t give up just because you are bunkered in 3 and your opponent is on the green in 2. You might hole out and he might take three putts. It doesn’t happen often, but you can never tell.
I used to be a very rapid player. But at Merion in 1925, I discovered that I was missing many shots simply because I was hitting the ball too quickly after I had reached it, especially on the putting green. Having walked up to the green at a brisk pace, and elbowed my way through whatever gallery there might have been, I had been putting quickly while my breath was coming in short gasps and my ears ringing as I leaned over the ball.
Realizing that I was making a mistake, I resolved that no matter how much time I consumed, I was going to tranquilize my breathing before I made another putt. So I began to take great pains to study the line. I really did not study the line, for I have never been able to see more rolls and bumps in a minute than I could in five seconds, but I was giving my breathing a chance to quiet down. You have no idea what a steadying effect upon the nerves can be had by doing some little thing in a natural manner. Light a cigarette, pick up a twig, or anything to take up a little time.
And that applies equally to shots through the green. Don’t hit the ball until you are ready, until every other consideration has been excluded from the mind.
Another thing that often helps: When you have located the line to the hole and addressed the putt, often something gets blurred and you lose the line. Don’t go ahead and putt anyway, for you must surely miss. Step away and start over again. You don’t have a chance at first; you might make it the second time.
To those who play it and study it, the game of golf presents puzzling problems in many phases. One of the queerest angles on the mental side is seen when we begin to consider confidence—what is its effect, how much of it ought we to have; and in what should we have confidence—in our ability to beat a given opponent or in our ability to play the shots? Many of us have found that we can’t play well without confidence of one kind, and that we will be beaten if we have too much of another variety.
4 CONFIDENCE
Every golfer has a favorite club—a battered old spoon or a mashie with a crooked shaft—that he would not exchange for double its weight in gold. He has confidence in this club and in his ability to use it; and in actuality, he does play it better than any other. It isn’t all imagination—he doesn’t merely think he can play it better—he can really do so because he has confidence in it and swings it easily, freely, and rhythmically.
The better player has this same feeling of confidence, but instead of trusting one of his clubs, he trusts them all, except perhaps one. He has confidence in his swing. He is content to trust himself to take his time and hit the ball. Such an attitude is indispensable to first-class golf.
It doesn’t help a great deal to have the soundest swing in the world if that swing is not trusted. There are many men who play golf exceptionally well when the issues are small, but who collapse when anything of importance is at stake. The fact that they can play well at all shows that fundamentally their swings are good. But what causes the detonation is fear—lack of confidence in the swing—making them unwilling to trust it with anything that really matters. In the face of such an obstacle, tension takes the place of relaxation and strain upsets rhythm. The smoothest machine in the world cannot run in a bearing full of the gravel of uncertainty.
There is one kind of confidence that everyone must have in abundance; when he stands up to the ball ready to make a decisive stroke, he must know that he can make it. He must not be afraid to swing, afraid to pivot, afraid to hit; there must be a good swing with plenty of confidence to let it loose.
The other kind of confidence is a different thing, and a dangerous one. In a way, it has something to do with the player’s opinion of his ability to play the shots, but it works in an entirely different way. Of this kind of confidence, we must have only enough to make us feel as we step upon the tee with John Doe: “Well, John, you’re pretty good, but I think if I play hard and well, I can just about beat you.” It must be enough to overcome actual fear or to rout an inferiority complex, but it must not be sufficient to produce a careless, overconfident attitude.
Every successful competitive golfer has learned to adopt a certain humility toward an opponent or an Open Championship field. He knows that no matter how well he plays, there may be someone who may play even better. Therefore, although he may be supremely confident of his ability to drive well, play his irons accurately, and putt well, he still is a fool if he is confident of winning—that is to any greater extent than I have indicated. Confidence in the club, or the swing, or the shot, aids concentration because it banishes tension and strain; a too-great confidence in the result of a match or a tournament makes impossible the concentration and hard work required to win.
It is difficult to assign any definite degree of importance to the operation of the player’s imagination that enables him to visualize the shot to be played before he has even drawn a club from his bag. It is difficult, too, to say how complete the picture should be. A golfer of long experience, taking one look at the flag, instinctively knows with what club or clubs he can make the distance. A further consideration of wind, ground, and hazards will supply other details such as trajectory, high or low, and the kind of shot, whether straight, fade, or draw. The necessary preliminary to the playing of any stroke is the decision upon the club and the kind of shot to play. The player, in effect, merely applies an imaginary result to the problem in order to decide how it will fit.
But when the decision has been made and it comes time to step up to the ball, this picture of grass and flag and bunkers must fade into the distance—not entirely, to be sure, but far enough so that the attention can be focused mainly upon swinging the club. The strength of the blow—how hard to hit—is determined almost wholly by instinct. The picture in the back of the head is the guide for this, as well as for the nicety of club-face alignment needed to propel the ball exactly for the flag. But beyond this, complete concentration must be upon the swing.
Even the most expert player finds only very rarely that he can trust his swing entirely to habit and instinct. At all other times, there are certain things he must watch—body turn, hip shift, wrist-cock, or whatnot. For him, there is no magic in the loveliest picture of what ought to be the result of his stroke. He knows that in order to produce this pleasing res
ult, he must swing his club correctly, and that is the job to which his immediate attention should be directed.
5 STAYING ALERT
Lindbergh said that the hardest thing he had to do in crossing the Atlantic was to keep awake. When you stop to think about it, that seems reasonable enough. It is not so easy to understand why the hardest thing a golfer has to do is to keep awake-mentally.
I do not believe there is another sport that requires the uninterrupted, intense concentration of the mind demanded of a golfer in competition with others of anything like equal skill. In all other games, it is possible to take breathing spells without risking too much. But in golf the unexpected can, and usually does, happen with such startling suddenness that the unwary person may be caught before he knows it. One lapse of concentration, one bit of carelessness, is more disastrous than a number of mechanical mistakes, mainly because it is harder to bring the mind back to the business in hand than it is to correct or guard against a physical mistake recognized as soon as it appears.
The habit of correct swinging causes a great many of the movements of the swing to be instinctive. But there are always two or three things that have to be looked after actively all the time. When this is appreciated, it is possible to understand what it means, when playing a first-class championship round, to concentrate upon the execution of some seventy-two golf shots in a space of eighteen holes and over a stretch of upward of three hours’ time.
And by concentration, I mean the kind that not only excludes everything foreign to the game, but also takes account of all that the player knows should be provided for. We find numbers of players with fine form who hit the shots as well as anyone, yet fail to win because of imperfect concentration. It is so easy to walk up and hit the ball without thinking much about anything, and the player never realizes until the damage is done that he has not had his mind on the shot.
The men who are capable of complete concentration throughout an eighteen-hole round can be counted upon the fingers of one hand. The others go to sleep on any number of shots. Sometimes they never realize even afterward that they did take a nap, and often they mistake fear and anxiety for concentration. It is possible to worry a great deal over the result of a stroke without really thinking of the way to play it successfully.
This is one of the ways that mental staleness is manifested when a player is overgolfed. The lack of mental alertness that results renders it impossible for him to maintain complete concentration on the details necessary to be considered for the different shots he is called on to play. He is trying to the best of his ability, but the thing is just beyond him, and he pays for it in the form of extra strokes on his score, or holes lost that might have been saved or even won with the right kind of keen mental application.
It might be asked again just what is concentration. I think that is very simple. There are certain fundamentals that go with every stroke. The right sort of concentration must take these into account. For example, the golfer should know that he should let the weight go with the swing; he should know also that he should turn the left side well around on the backswing. These are two things he should think about in advance of the swing, especially if he is troubled with a fault of overlooking these two points. He cannot take them for granted, they must be thought out before he starts his swing, and he must think through his current pattern of swinging to see that it is carried out, or at least concentrate enough to see that it is started on the way.
As I have said many times, the thing that makes a successful tournament player is not so much the ability to put in gear a swing that is not just right as it is the faculty for working good scores out of a game that is not tuned to perfection. It is largely a matter of experience and club manipulation, of getting the ball up there somehow with a shot that you know you can play, while you avoid as much as possible those that are uncertain. Golf tournaments don’t just happen along when you and your swing are ready for them. You have to take them when and as they come and do the best you can.
For example, during the year 1926, I found myself utterly incapable of hitting a shot of any length in any way except with a fade, that is, from left to right. This was not my accustomed manner of playing. In fact during all the rest of my playing experience, I tended to favor the right to left, or drawing shot. Yet in this year 1926, simply by scrambling and maneuvering of the club and ball, I managed to win both the British and American Open Championships.
It is not easy for even the most experienced and golf-wise player to put his finger on a fault in his own swing and immediately apply a corrective. Often the period of struggling and searching runs into days and weeks. And then, as often as not, he finds that the trouble all came from some simple little thing that he knew perfectly well but had thought not worth checking up. Even granting that the rate of performance an expert has a right to expect is much higher than that to which the average golfer can aspire, certainly this is a cogent reason why the making of mechanical corrections should be postponed until after the round—that is, of course, if you are interested in the score you make.
Beyond forcing oneself to adopt this attitude, the only effort I should advise the average golfer to make when things begin to go wrong would be to think of rhythm, relaxation, and swinging. If he can avoid tightening up mentally and physically, if he can keep a cool head and refrain from hurrying his backswing, he can withstand almost any shock.
6 ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN
Illustrations of strange happenings in golf matches are not hard to find. Any of us can recall occasions when a trick of fortune either deprived us of a hole or an advantage seemingly secure or gave us a victory we in no way deserved. In such events, skill enters into the picture scarcely at all.
One such instance of startling effect occurred at Worcester in 1925 when Willie Macfarlane and I were playing off a tie in the National Open. In the first play-off, Willie had a lead of two strokes as we teed off on the fourteenth hole. Here he hit a beautiful tee shot, while I half-smothered mine. My ball failed to get out of the rough, and when I tried to use a spoon in an effort to reach the green, I sliced the shot badly into some more rough almost a hundred yards from the flag. When Willie pitched his second nicely on fifteen feet from the hole, my hopes appeared to be entirely gone. Already two down, I appeared certain of losing one, possibly two more strokes, which would have been the end, with only four holes left to play.
I was thinking about all this as I walked to my ball. I was ready to give up. But my niblick pitch hit the green and rolled straight into the cup for a three. Willie, shaken perhaps, went for his putt, now to protect his lead rather than increase it, slipped a yard past and missed that one. I had gained two strokes instead of losing two, as I might have, and this enabled me to come out even in the first play-off, although Willie beat me in the later one.
Skill has almost nothing to do with a thing like that. Given this shot to play and one stroke in which to hole out, a ten- or twenty-handicap player would be almost as likely to make it as any professional. The hole-in-one reports prove this. A hundred average golfers make holes-in-one to each expert.
The mental attitude is important. One must keep on trying and keep on hitting the ball so that he may have a chance to enjoy a lucky break like this. But on the other hand, he must always be on guard lest his opponent surprise him with one of his own. Whether up or down, whether it is you in the bunker or the other fellow, anything can happen.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
1 TAKING THE BREAKS IN STRIDE
2 PLAYING THE WIND
3 DIFFICULT CONDITIONS
4 EQUIPMENT
5 GOLF ARCHITECTURE
Putting
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
1 TAKING THE BREAKS IN STRIDE
Uphill and downhill lies, instances when the player must stand above or below the ball, close lies in swales and the like, when the ball must be gotten up quickly, these are the exacting situations of golf that offer opportunities for the skillful player to profit. At the same time, th
e certainty of frequent encounters with shots of this nature, in endless variety, accounts in large measure for the eternal fascination of the game.
It is for this reason, more than any other, that seaside terrain is regarded as the best for golfing purposes. There the undulating fairways furnish difficulties that bunkers do not provide, and, without punishing, call for the refinements of skill that an inland course rarely demands. Golfers who play these links learn to appreciate these difficulties and to enjoy trying to overcome them. Encountering lies of this kind so very often, they come to consider them desirable features of a proper course, instead of complaining of bad luck every time the ball is found in such a situation.
I think I first gained an understanding of this attitude upon my first visit to St. Andrews. Playing a practice round before the Open Championship with two American pros and a fellow member of the American amateur team of that year, we were accompanied by a small gallery of club members and townspeople, golfers all. I remember being puzzled when our shots from ordinary fairway lies were greeted with perfect silence, only occasionally broken by a discreet “well played” or “Veil done,” when the ball stopped a little closer to the hole than usual. This was so different from the attitude of spectators in our own country. But when one of us from a tricky lie brought up a shot with a spoon, or brassie, our gallery became quite enthusiastic. Finally I realized that our golfwise friends were refusing to become excited over what were merely good shots any first-class player would be expected to make with some regularity. I suppose they figured we would not have come so far to play in a championship if we could not play these; but they were most appreciative of the skillful execution of strokes of particular difficulty.
Bobby Jones on Golf Page 22
