Golf is Not a Game of Perfect

by Bob Rotella

  Of course not. If Stuart had reacted to his missed shots by deciding that there was a kink in his shooting form and trying to fix it in the middle of the game, he would have destroyed his natural grace and rhythm. He would most likely have started shooting airballs.

  Many weekend golfers don’t even wait for a bad shot to stop trusting their swing. They step onto the first tee thinking of a dozen mechanical concepts they’ve heard from friends, read about in magazines, or seen on television. Half the time, these dozen mechanical thoughts conflict with one another. They take the driver out and start their backswing thinking about stiff left arms, still heads, full turns, wrist cocks, or pronated hands. Without realizing it, they’re doing everything possible to undermine their own game.

  Even the weekend players who start off trusting tend to stop doing it after a bad shot or two. They start trying to fix the mechanical problem that led to the bad shot. They would be far better off if they realized that, as human beings, they are highly unlikely to get through eighteen holes without a few bad swings. They are much more likely to play their best if they trust their swings, flawed though they sometimes are. This can be done. A golfer has free will. He can choose how he will think.

  If more golfers chose to continue trusting their swings, they might be surprised at how often the brain and body respond by doing things right when it matters most—just as it happened for Stuart Anderson.

  5.

  The Hot Streak: Staying Out of Your Own Way

  MOST GOLFERS, EVEN mid to high handicappers, if they play often, have experienced a string of holes where everything fell into place, and for a while at least, they played the golf they had always sensed they were capable of. For one golden hour, perhaps two, the golf ball went where they wanted it to go and they strung together pars. Then something happened to break the spell—an errant tee shot, a stubbed chip, a three-putt green. They went back to making bogeys. Perhaps they thought that during the hot streak they played over their head.

  They did not. The hot streak represents the golfer’s true capability. It results, essentially, from trust. The golfer trusts his abilities. He steps up to the ball knowing that he can pick a target and hit it there. He does things unconsciously. The swing repeats itself. It feels effortless.

  You can learn a lot from a hot streak.

  I’ve asked many golfers to recall and describe their state of mind during their hot streaks. I have yet to hear one respond that he was thinking of swing mechanics. Most would say that the hot streak enabled them to stop thinking about swing mechanics. That’s another way of saying they were able to trust their swings.

  Players I work with have had some very low rounds and very hot tournaments. David Frost has scored 61 or 62. Nick Price shot 11 under par in a South African tournament. Davis Love III shot a 60 in Hawaii recently. Andrew Magee set the record for a 90-hole tournament in Las Vegas in 1991 with a 329, 31 under par. Tom Kite broke it two years later at Bob Hope’s tournament, shooting 325.

  The lowest single-round score any of my players ever recorded in an official tournament was Chip Beck’s 59 a couple of years ago in Las Vegas.

  Chip called me after the round, and naturally, I wanted to know as much as possible about his state of mind that day.

  Of course, he had sunk a lot of birdie putts. He had hit lots of fairways and greens. Mentally, he told me, he had a serene feeling of confidence as the round progressed.

  “Doc, I stayed out of my way the whole day,” he said.

  By “staying out of my way,” Chip meant that he had not allowed doubts of any kind—particularly doubts about his mechanics—to interfere with his game. He had a plan for each hole, each shot, and he executed that plan. He trusted completely that his mechanics would enable him to do so. He let nothing from his mind interfere with his physical capabilities.

  Trusting won’t, by itself, turn on a hot streak. But it will make a hot streak much more likely.

  If you wish to play your best golf, you can’t wait until a few putts fall and a couple of birdies go on the scorecard before you start trusting. You have to start replicating the state of mind you have on a hot streak as soon as you step onto the first tee. No matter what happens during your round, you have to strive to maintain that state of mind.

  You have to stay out of your own way.

  6.

  Rediscovering Old Scottish Wisdom

  SHORTLY AFTER I met Tom Kite, he suggested that I start regularly visting him and other players on the PGA Tour. They wanted, Tom said, to keep abreast of all the new discoveries being made in sports psychology.

  I had to tell him that most of what passes for discovery in sports psychology really isn’t new. There is just the same old wisdom, repeated over and over again, repackaged in new terminology.

  The Scots who invented golf knew a lot of what I teach to pros today, and they passed it along to early American golfers. Bobby Jones, for instance, learned the game from a Scottish pro named Stewart Maiden at the East Lake course of the Atlanta Athletic Club, just after the turn of the century. Jones’s family lived in a house near the 13th hole of this club, but as a boy, Jones did not take lessons in swing mechanics, as so many children do today. He learned the game playing around the 13th green and by tagging along behind Maiden and imitating his movements.

  Jones also learned the psychology of the game from Maiden. In the midst of his great career Jones disclosed what he had been taught in his autobiography, Down the Fairway. Jones wrote at length about his swing mechanics in the instructional section of the book. But at the end of this section, he appended:

  “One bit of earnest admonition. Stewart Maiden maintains that he cannot think of any of these details, or of any other details, during the execution of a shot—that is, if the shot is to come off. He adds that he does not believe anybody else can think of these or other details and perform a successful shot. I find this to be the case with my own play.”

  Other great players from American golf’s early years figured this out in their own way. Walter Hagen, like Jones, learned the golf swing by imitating, though he did it as a caddie, rather than a member’s son. He discovered the essential psychology of the game as a young pro, in 1914. He was working at the Country Club of Rochester, N.Y., and his game impressed the members enough that they passed the hat and paid for his train fare to Chicago, where the U.S. Open was being contested at Midlothian. Hagen, even then, had luxurious appetites. The night before the tournament began, he treated himself to a lobster dinner. But Hagen’s purse was not yet commensurate with his tastes and he couldn’t afford a place that served truly fresh lobster. The lobster he got was old and bad.

  He awoke the next morning with a fierce case of food poisoning. He was almost doubled over with pain. Had he not been afraid of what the members back in Rochester would say if he withdrew, he would not have played. But play he did.

  Because of his pain, Hagen could think only of finishing his round. He stopped worrying about the way he was swinging and thought only of putting the ball into play off the tee, getting it onto the green, and getting it in the hole.

  He shot 69 and went on to win his first Open.

  Sam Snead grew up poor in the hills of Virginia, and started caddying at a nearby resort. Golf fascinated him, but he had no money for clubs or lessons. He whittled sticks into the shape of clubs, found rocks for balls, and practiced in a pasture, seeing how many fence posts he could knock the rock past. Snead had a fine, intuitive sense of his own capabilities. And he soon learned that he knocked the rock farther and straighter when he cleared out his mind and just let his naturally fluid swing occur.

  “I found that the best way was just to draw that stick back nice and lazy, not thinking too much about how I was doing what,” Snead wrote many years later.

  He had to relearn the lesson when he started playing golf professionally in the early 1930s. Snead allowed himself to be convinced that what had worked in the pasture back home wasn’t good enough for professional competition
. He decided he had to learn to “concentrate,” which he took to mean trying very hard to swing absolutely correctly. His first tournament was in Hershey, Pa., near the chocolate factory. On the first tee of his first round, he concentrated fiercely, concentrated so hard that he thought the ball might catch fire. He sliced it into the factory grounds. He concentrated harder. Another slice, deeper into the factory grounds. He was lying four, still on the tee.

  Snead’s professional career might have aborted right there if he had not had the instinctive wisdom to stop trying to concentrate. He relaxed and let his body swing the club. He drove the green, 345 yards away, made the putt, and went on from there.

  SOMETIME IN THE 1940s, though, American golfers began to overemphasize and complicate swing mechanics. They began to forget the wisdom that Stewart Maiden passed along to Bobby Jones and that Walter Hagen and Sam Snead discovered for themselves. This was not, of course, true everywhere. Golf is a sport of individuals and everyone had his own approach to the game. Teachers like Harvey Penick never stopped imparting sound principles about the mental side of golf. But they became a minority.

  There were many reasons for this. One, I think, was technology. As motion pictures and stop-action still photography developed, it became possible to record and study the swings of good players in minute detail. You could actually determine whether Byron Nelson pronated or supinated at the top of his backswing. Televised golf and the plethora of magazines and books reinforced the emphasis on mechanics.

  Practice ranges came along, and teachers found that they could make a living just standing on the lesson tee and talking about hand positions and body coils and swing planes. They stopped walking the course with their pupils. They stopped teaching rhythm and feel and scoring skills.

  Gradually, teaching golf became a big business. Teachers competed for a share of the market by claiming that they, and they alone, had discovered the secret, the mechanical key to the perfect swing. Many in the golf business fought over ownership of the “correct way” to teach the swing, even though, as it happens, almost none of the great golfers swung the club “correctly.” Bobby Jones regripped the club at the top of his backswing. Walter Hagen had a forward move that resembled a lunge. Not only that, but the best players, from Jones down through Palmer, Player, Nicklaus and Trevino, have always taken pride in the fact that their swings were a bit idiosyncratic and highly personal. The best players have always had the courage to swing in their own way and ignore teachers who insisted that only a classic swing could win.

  Unfortunately, as far as the mental side of the game was concerned, in the 1940s and 1950s a distorted image of Ben Hogan became the model for American golfers. Hogan was badly misperceived. The press and public saw him as a robotic exemplar of swing mechanics. In fact, as Hogan himself wrote, he played his best golf after he stopped being obsessive about swing mechanics. Until 1946, Hogan never fully trusted his swing. He played every round in fear that he could fall out of the groove. He worried about dozens of mechanical details on every stroke.

  Around 1946, though, Hogan realized that he had mastered the fundamentals of the swing and didn’t need to worry about them so much. He abandoned what he called “this ambitious overthoroughness” in relation to his swing. The results were dramatic. “At about the same time I began to feel that I had the stuff to play creditable golf even when I was not at my best, my shotmaking started to take on a new and more stable consistency,” he wrote.

  In other words, when he started to trust what he had trained, he played better.

  But this was not the Hogan image. The press and the golf publishing houses presented him as a man who became great by obsessive attention to the mechanical details of the golf swing. Everyone heard how Hogan hit bucket after bucket on the practice green. Everyone heard how Hogan developed a “secret move” that cured his hook.

  I had a chance to visit Hogan several years ago, and what he said differed substantially from the Hogan image.

  “I played by feel,” Hogan told me.

  He also told me that he didn’t start to win major championships until he learned that on any tough course there would always be a few holes that bothered him, where he couldn’t use his driver. Once he started using 1-irons in those situations, he started to win. So strategy and course management, not perfect ball-striking, had a lot to do with his success.

  A final point about Hogan makes clear the depth of the public misperception. It was brought to my attention by David Frost. Frosty is a native South African, and a couple of years ago he passed along to me an autobiography by the great South African golfer of Hogan’s era, Bobby Locke. At the end of the book, Locke presented an all-star team, listing the best player he’d seen with each club in the bag. Hogan didn’t make the team for ball-striking. He made it for putting.

  That was so at odds with Hogan’s image that I asked the great player and teaching pro Paul Runyan about it the next time Paul and I worked together at an instructional clinic. Paul confirmed that Hogan, in his prime, was as good as anybody at putts from five to fifteen feet. On the professional tour, those are the putts that separate the winners from the also-rans, because they are the putts that produce birdies.

  When Hogan stopped being a confident putter and started muttering that putts should only count half a stroke, he stopped winning golf tournaments.

  I wonder how American golf might have developed if someone had asked Hogan to write a book on golf psychology. Such a book might have caused people to focus, not on his mechanics, but on the nerve he showed in developing a swing that was completely different from those of his peers. It would have highlighted how he steeled his mind and refused to be distracted on the course, and how he developed the inner strength to pursue his dreams through many years of failure.

  But no one ever did. And Hogan’s perceived obsession with swing mechanics influenced a generation of golfers.

  After Hogan, the mantle of superiority in American golf passed briefly to Arnold Palmer and then to Jack Nicklaus. Nicklaus helped reemphasize the importance of the right mental approach to the game. He was a great strategist and thinker on the golf course. He was among the first golfers to talk about visualizing the shot he desired before he swung the club. He insisted on waiting until his mind was relaxed and focused before hitting a shot.

  In the past decade, thinking about golf psychology has continued to progress backward toward the wisdom of the old Scots. Jim Flick, one of the best of today’s golf teachers, says that a player has to pass through three stages: unconsciously incompetent, consciously competent, and unconsciously competent.

  Today’s best players strive to stay on that third level. Nick Price wants to think only of his target as he swings. He tells me that he’s constantly struck by how much better he swings the more sharply he focuses his mind on his target. Fred Couples says he tries to have no swing thoughts at all. They are the new avatars.

  The new breed of golf winners has to have a tougher approach to the game than their predecessors did. In Hogan’s day, and even in Nicklaus’s, it was often sufficient to play cautiously for the first three-and-a-half days of a tournament, then cut loose on the back nine of the final round, trying to hole everything. Nowadays, winning scores are lower and players have to be free and cocky from the first hole Thursday morning. With that exception, though, not much that today’s winning players say about their mental processes would surprise Stewart Maiden.

  7.

  What the Third Eye Sees

  IF THINKING ABOUT swing mechanics can spoil a golf swing, what should a golfer think about as he stands over the ball?

  A Ben Hogan story told by members of the Los Angeles Country Club suggests part of the answer. It concerns an exhibition round Hogan once played on their North Course.

  Hogan came to the 5th hole, a 476-yard par five on which the green, because of the slope of the land, is not visible from the tee. A cluster of four tall palm trees, planted only a few feet apart, stands immediately behind the green and tow
ers above the horizon.

  When Hogan arrived at the tee, he asked his caddie for a target.

  “Aim for the palm trees, Mr. Hogan,” the caddie replied.

  To which Hogan answered, “Which palm tree?”

  The story is cited sometimes as an example of Hogan’s perfectionism. But what it really suggests is Hogan’s knowledge of one of the fundamental psychological principles in golf:

  Before taking any shot, a golfer must pick out the smallest possible target.

  This may seem obvious to some people. But I’m continually amazed by the number of golfers who don’t do it. When I’m at a clinic or pro-am with someone who’s just sprayed his ball into the next county, I sometimes ask what he was aiming at when he hit the errant shot.

  Usually, the reply is something like, “I was aiming down the left side.” Or “down the middle.” Or people might say, “I don’t know what I was aiming at. I just knew I didn’t want to miss left.”

  That’s not good enough. Aiming down the middle is the equivalent of trying to go to Los Angeles by flying to an airport somewhere in California.

  The brain and nervous system respond best when the eyes focus on the smallest possible target. Why this is so is not important. It just happens to be the way the human system works. Perhaps it has to do with the evolutionary advantage enjoyed by those cavemen who focused on the hearts of attacking tigers, as opposed to those cavemen who merely looked in the tiger’s general direction and hurled their spears.

  It is true in virtually every sport. We teach basketball players to look, not at the backboard, nor even the rim, but at the net loop in back of the rim. We teach quarterbacks to aim, not at the receiver, nor even his number, but at his hands.

  The smaller the target, the sharper the athlete’s focus, the better his concentration, and the better the results. When an athlete locks his eyes and mind onto a small target, the ball naturally tends to follow.