Golf is Not a Game of Perfect

by Bob Rotella

  The inability to forget, Twain said, is infinitely more devastating than the inability to remember.

  Golfers, after they’ve played for a while, have a vast store of memories that can affect the way they play.

  They’ve hit long, straight drives that rose majestically against an azure sky and dropped to earth in the middle of a clipped, green fairway. They’ve struck irons that covered the flagstick all the way and settled softly on the green. They’ve chipped in from the fringe. They’ve hit 40-foot putts and watched them snake across an undulating green and die in the cup.

  They’ve also topped drives that barely made it off the tee. They’ve shanked 7-irons out of bounds. They’ve left sand shots in a trap. And they’ve watched, horrified, as putts rolled on past a hole forever.

  The question is, as you stand over a ball and prepare to hit it, which shots do you choose to remember?

  A lot of players tell me they don’t choose—that the memories of bad shots jump, unbidden, into their mind. Others say they have realistic memories, that they recall both the bad and the good.

  But a golfer can indeed choose. Free will enables him to develop the kind of memory that promotes good shotmaking: a short-term memory for failure and a long-term memory for success. A golfer can learn to forget the bad shots and remember the good ones.

  One way is to permit yourself to enjoy your good shots.

  People tend to remember best those events in their lives that are associated with strong emotions, like the birth of a child or the death of a parent.

  The problem is that many golfers allow themselves to get very angry at bad shots. That helps plant the memory of the bad shot strongly in their minds.

  These same players tend to get very little joy or satisfaction from their good shots. They take them as routine events that cause no particular excitement.

  If they thought about it, though, they would realize that a great golf shot is a thing of beauty. They would savor it and celebrate it.

  I encourage players to do that. It will help make the game more enjoyable. It will help make the memory of good shots stronger.

  Second, golfers often have a problem of perception. If a player, facing a tee shot, starts to remember shots she’s hit out of bounds, is she being realistic? Or is she being unduly harsh on herself?

  If she thought about it, she’d probably remember that she’s hit far more tee shots in bounds than out of bounds during the course of her golfing career. Remembering one of the good shots, therefore, would be far more realistic than remembering a shot that sliced out of bounds.

  But golfers, particularly high-handicappers, often perceive themselves too negatively. They allow the bad shots to dominate their memories.

  Good golfers, I’ve found, frequently have a selective memory that helps them.

  The night before the final round of the Masters in 1992, I had dinner with a group of players and teachers that included Fred Couples, who went on to win the tournament.

  Fred is not a player I’ve worked with, but he asked me that night what I thought about his mental game.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It looks pretty solid to me. What do you try to do?”

  “Well, you know, when I come up to a shot, I just pull up my sleeves and shrug my shoulders to try to get them relaxed,” Fred said. “And then I try to remember the best shot I ever hit in my life with whatever club I have in my hand. Is that okay?”

  “I think that will do just fine, Freddy,” I said. “Just fine.”

  14.

  Fighting Through Fear

  SEVERAL YEARS AGO, Brad Faxon began talking to me about a difficult challenge. Brad had begun to fear his driver.

  Brad is one of the most successful young players on the PGA Tour. He’s not overwhelmingly long, but he can hit a drive 280 yards. He’s very accurate with his irons. He’s a fearless wedge player who will make a long, loose swing to flop the ball onto the green in a tight situation and give it a chance to go into the hole. He’s one of the best putters I’ve seen. And he has an ideal temperament for golf. He’s intelligent and easygoing. He loves the game and he likes the people associated with it.

  After he graduated from Furman in 1983, Brad quickly established himself as a professional, and by 1985 he was an exempt player on the Tour. Despite this success, he started to have vivid, disquieting thoughts about drivers, or, more precisely, what might happen to the ball after he hit it with a driver. These thoughts occurred not only on the tee. They might come to him at night in his sleep. They might come to him as he sat at the dinner table with his wife. Usually, he could see the golf ball flying 50 yards off course to the right, into trouble or out of bounds, even though his natural shot is a draw.

  These thoughts became so persistent that he could no longer stand on a tee with a driver in his hands and even come close to believing that the ball would go to his target. In that mental state, his game off the tee inevitably suffered. In stressful situations, on narrow driving holes, he tightened up and lost his rhythm. If he mishit a driver, it was as if someone had punched him in the solar plexus. All the air, all the energy left his body.

  It’s important to differentiate between fear and nervousness. Nervousness is a physical state. It’s sweat on the palms, adrenaline in the bloodstream. There’s nothing wrong with it—it can even help a golfer.

  Fear is a mental state. It’s being afraid of making a mistake when you swing the club. Fear causes golfers to try to guide or steer the ball, rather than swing freely. That doesn’t work. Swinging freely makes the ball go straight. Swinging carefully causes disasters. To play his best, a golfer has to feel that once he’s aligned himself and picked his target, it’s as if he doesn’t care where the ball goes. He is going to trust his swing and let it go.

  If fear could plague a golfer as talented and successful as Brad Faxon, it could certainly debilitate the average golfer. And it does.

  I’ve talked to players who can’t look at a downhill putt without thinking that they could roll it 10 feet past. They make ugly jabs at the ball. I’ve talked to players who can’t look at a pitch shot over a bunker without thinking about dumping it into the sand. They chunk a lot of wedges. And there are many, like Brad Faxon, who get fearful when they put a driver in their hands.

  On the professional circuit, there have been prominent players whose careers were totally derailed by fear. One year they were contending in major championships. The next year they were staying at home, unwilling even to risk exposing their fear in a tournament.

  Sometimes I wish there were a quick, simple answer for them, a psychological parlor trick that would banish their fears and allow them to hit their best shots. There isn’t, at least not in most cases. Fighting through fear can take a lot of patient effort. But a golfer who learns to do it has given himself an invaluable lesson.

  In Brad’s case, we began by trying to decide whether his problem was mental or mechanical. He decided that it was some of both.

  There were a few subtle mechanical changes he decided to make in his swing with the driver, changes having largely to do with his posture and his release. He went to work with a teaching pro to make the necessary adjustments.

  With a lot of players, this would have been as far as they went. They would have proceeded to try to beat the problem to death on the practice range, hitting bucket after bucket of balls in an effort to fix their mechanics.

  But the fact was that even before he made those mechanical changes, Brad could always hit the driver fairly well on the practice range. That suggested that his problem lay mainly in his mind.

  We didn’t waste time trying to figure out why he was getting these fearful flashes. Anyone who has played golf for a while has inevitably hit some monstrous slices or hooks off the tee. Images of those shots remain buried in the memory, capable of springing into a golfer’s consciousness at the worst possible moments. The fact was, they were springing into Brad’s mind. Why they were was hardly relevant.

  We reviewed some
fundamental ideas. First and foremost, we talked about how free will controls thought. Any golfer can decide what he wants to think about as he contemplates a shot.

  So we worked hard on getting Brad to think of what he wanted to happen with the driver rather than what he didn’t want to happen. We talked about picking a target and visualizing the ball going to that target. We talked about making this the centerpiece of a mental routine that Brad would repeat on every shot, particularly tee shots.

  But it wasn’t that easy. Brad still could not make himself feel certain that the ball would go to the target when he hit it with a driver. He needed something to fall back on while he worked on vanquishing his fear.

  So for a long time, Brad hit lots of 3-woods off the tee. I told him that whenever he felt doubt or fear about hitting a driver, he should leave it in the bag and hit a 3-wood or a 1-iron instead.

  Fortunately, Brad hits an excellent 3-wood. Moreover, the rest of his game—his irons, his chipping and wedging, and his putting—helped him compensate for the loss of distance off the tee. For several years, he was able to stay high on the money list while rarely using a driver.

  This didn’t really surprise me. Most amateurs, watching the professionals play golf on television, notice their length off the tee first of all. It’s glamorous. It’s masculine. The weekend players get the idea that this length with the driver is the key to shooting low scores. But the driver is the toughest club to hit consistently. It mercilessly exposes swing flaws and thinking flaws. A lot of weekend players ruin their games with it. They think they have to hit it, and hit it a long way. When they don’t, or don’t hit it straight, they get tense and mechanical. Their tee shots get worse, and the rest of their game frequently comes apart as well.

  In truth, while length off the tee is desirable, it’s not nearly as important as keeping the ball in play and chipping and putting well, as Brad demonstrated. Weekend players who have trouble driving would do well to emulate him, hitting a 3-wood or a long iron off the tee and developing a short game they can score with. This would enable them to feel, from the beginning of every hole, that they were following their mental routines and feeling certain about every shot before they swung the club.

  Of course, Brad did not want to spot the competition 40 yards off the tee indefinitely. He continued to work hard on thinking about hitting the ball where he wanted it to go. Using a 3-wood helped him maintain this habit. Gradually, he began to be able to do it more often with the driver.

  He worked at this all day, not just at the golf course. I told him that he should either think about driving the ball well or not think about it at all, and he made it a habit to think about hitting long, beautiful drives. We made some audio tapes that he could play in the car in which I reminded him of great drives he had hit in critical situations. He tried to develop a long-term memory for his good drives and a short-term memory for the bad ones.

  It helped as well that Brad retained a sense of humor about the whole thing. His caddie, Cubby Burke, is an imaginative and irreverent kidder who could have matched insults with the regulars at the Algonquin Round Table, provided, that is, that the Round Table permitted certain epithets common to the golf course. Brad had the good sense not to restrain Cubby, but to let himself be teased. Laughing at the problem helped put it in perspective.

  By the time Brad first qualified for the Masters he had, over the course of several years, made a lot of progress. But his Masters debut made him all the more anxious to be done with his driver anxiety once and for all. Augusta National, with its absence of rough, its reachable par fives, and its long par fours, favors the long hitter. Brad was eager to do well his first time out.

  The night before the tournament began, we had dinner in the house he had rented for himself and his family. After dinner, we took a walk down the dark, narrow, tree-lined street. I told him to imagine teeing a ball in the street, hitting it with a driver, blasting it straight between the trees and then drawing it into the house at the end of the block.

  “Hopefully,” I added, “no one will be watching through the windows.”

  Brad laughed and took a swing in the shadows. Yes, he said, he could see that shot.

  He did it a few more times. He laughed some more. Each imaginary shot was perfect. I told him that the only difference on the golf course the next day would be the presence of a ball and a club. His body and mind could work just as well then as they did on that darkened street, unless he let the ball intimidate him.

  With that thought in mind, he played well in his first Masters. He felt that he had turned a corner, and in 1992, he won two tournaments.

  He learned what all successful athletes sooner or later learn. Courage is fear turned inside out. It is impossible to be courageous if at first you weren’t afraid.

  Finally, Brad did something that I can take no credit for. He moved from Florida back to his native Rhode Island. He started practicing and playing, between tournaments, at the courses he grew up on, Rhode Island Country Club and Metacomet. He played with friends from high-school days. This change of scenery helped him recapture the attitude toward driving the ball he had had when he was fourteen or fifteen years old, when he couldn’t wait to walk onto the tee and bust one. As a kid, he had driven the ball fearlessly. Back home, he completed the process of learning to think that way again.

  Nowadays, Brad’s biggest problem is the opposite of the old one. He loves hitting the driver again, and he steps onto every tee looking for a reason to pull it out of the bag. Sometimes he uses it when the situation calls for a 3-wood or an iron.

  That, however, doesn’t strike him as such a bad problem to have.

  15.

  What I Learned from Seve Ballesteros

  A COUPLE OF summers ago, Seve Ballesteros walked up to me at the Westchester Classic and introduced himself. Seve had not been playing well for a year or so.

  “Nickie Price says I need to talk to you,” Seve began abruptly. “He said you’ll teach me how to win again. He said what you teach is the future of golf.”

  I was flattered, but not so much that I was not startled by Seve Ballesteros admitting that he had lost the knowledge of how to win.

  “Once,” Seve went on, glumly, “I was the future of golf. All I ever did for years is what I think you teach. I just saw myself in my mind winning golf tournaments. I saw myself making the shots. I saw myself winning. The year I won the Masters by seven or eight shots, I knew I would win it before the plane landed in America. The only problem was that I walked up the eighteenth fairway without any joy, because I had known I would win before the tournament started.”

  I winked at him. “Well, I could certainly teach you how to get happy and party.”

  But Seve was not in a mood to banter. He wanted to explain himself.

  It turned out that, in Seve, personality and environment had combined to produce a golfing artist. He grew up poor in Spain, and like Hagen, Nelson, Sarazen and Hogan, he got into the game as a caddie. He started playing with a few mismatched clubs, and he competed ferociously from the outset.

  From the beginning, Seve had focused his energy not on his swing, which he picked up instinctively. He was always concerned with the ball, with making the ball move in such a way that it went into the hole. He was the kind of kid who might walk into a sand trap with a cast-off 7-iron and experiment until he found ways to get the ball up to the hole with it.

  He had a natural instinct for thinking right. When he went to sleep at night, he saw himself making great shots and winning tournaments.

  When he practiced, he told me, he would almost immediately have all of his clubs strewn on the ground beside him. He was not the type to hit one club over and over, seeking to groove a swing. He played imaginary holes on the range, inventing different shots to fit the circumstances his mind conjured up. He might imagine a par five, and hit a driver and a 2-iron. If the 2-iron drifted a little left, he’d pull out his wedge and practice a flop shot.

  In his first years as
a professional, Seve said, he’d had a feeling of immense control. He felt sometimes as if he controlled not only himself and his ball, but the galleries and his opponents as well.

  “You know,” he said, “when I first came to America, if I hit the ball in the rough, I didn’t care.”

  He crouched down like a golfer peering under the low branches of a tree at a distant green.

  “I just looked for a way, an opening. I didn’t care that there was a tree there. I just found the opening, hit the ball over the tree, or around it, or under it, and got the ball in the hole. When I saw an American player hit the ball in the rough and then chip out into the fairway, I laughed. I thought, ‘How can they beat me if they do that?’

  “Then, around the green, I saw that a lot of them hit a putter from the fringe. They said that if they missed with the putter, they left the ball closer than if they missed with a wedge. I thought that was silly. I used a wedge. I never thought I would miss.”

  Now, he went on sadly, he had started to resemble those golfers he used to scorn. He pitched sideways out of the rough. He used a putter from the fringe. His whole attitude toward the game had changed and all the joy was gone.

  “It used to be that I would come to the eighteenth hole and be sad because there was no more golf left to play,” he said. “Now I come to the ninth hole and I’m sad because I still have nine to go. I hate golf like this. I don’t want to keep playing if it feels like this.”

  As we talked, it became apparent that Seve’s game had gone sour when he tried to change from the intuitive, imaginative and ball-oriented attitude of his youth to a mechanical, swing-oriented approach. A sincere desire to improve had prompted him to do it, but he had found that it was not easy—and perhaps impossible—to go from being an artist to being a scientist.

  “I wanted very much to win the U.S. Open,” he said. “People would tell me that I would have to get a much better, more consistent swing if I wanted to win on a U.S. Open course.”