Golf is Not a Game of Perfect

by Bob Rotella

  Once he has practiced those shots, he should move to the practice tee and start working at shots from 40 to 120 yards. Hit lots of different shots: pitch-and-runs, knockdowns, different trajectories. Always have a small target. This will develop feel and touch.

  The short shots around the green save pars. The longer wedge shots, from 120 yards to about 40 yards, make birdies. Players can’t practice them too much.

  I like to see players competing at short-game drills. Bet a nickel, a beer or a soda. Drop balls at varying distances, into varying lies. Award five points for holing a shot and three for hitting it within tap-in distance. It introduces competitive pressure, it sharpens the instinct to hit the target, and it makes practice fun.

  A player ought to spend, as a general rule, no more than 30 percent of his practice time on the full swing. And of this time, the bulk should be spent with the club—anything from a driver to a 3-iron—that he uses when he absolutely has to put the ball into the fairway. How much time should be reserved for the long irons and midirons? Almost none, especially if practice time is limited.

  I also don’t believe a golfer should spend hours practicing putts. Good putting is primarily a function of attitude and routine. Once a player masters those two, he really doesn’t need to hit a lot of practice putts. Bobby Locke didn’t. Ben Crenshaw doesn’t.

  But there are several practice drills I find quite useful in putting.

  I encourage players I work with to use a chalk line. This is a device that uses a reel of chalked string to lay down a line on a flat section of green, from the hole to the ball. A lot of players find that this helps them make putt after putt. The image tends to become so vivid that they can then go out on the golf course and see the line much more easily.

  Often I ask a player to go to the practice green with a ball and place it 8 to 12 feet from the hole. I ask him to take nine putts and to try a little bit less with each putt, until he finds just the right amount of intensity. When he’s found it, I ask him to try to maintain that level for five putts.

  I also ask players to go to the practice green and putt to the fringe from all possible distances, merely looking at the fringe and reacting to it with each stroke. The idea is get to the edge of the green without going into the fringe. This helps players develop a feel for pace, which is the key to long putts. This drill avoids the pitfall of putting at a hole from long distances, which is that a golfer is bound to miss most of these attempts, eroding his confidence.

  If a player wants to practice his putting mechanics, I suggest that he do it without a ball, indoors. Tie a piece of string, about six inches off the floor, to a couple of chairs. Step up until your eyes are over the string and the alignment line on your putter is underneath and parallel to the string. Then practice your putting stroke, trying to make the line on the putter blade stay parallel to the string. Think about the mechanical ideas you want to work on. But don’t think about mechanics when you’re actually putting a golf ball. Then you want to think only of the target.

  Regardless of what putting drills a golfer uses, he should be certain, if he uses a ball and a cup, that he practices making putts. Practicing misses does no good. Yet I see lots of players standing 15 feet from the cup, missing nine out of ten practice putts. They may tell me that they don’t get bothered by practice misses, that they’re only putting for mechanics and pace, but their eyes see the misses and their minds record them.

  So, work hard on putts from two to four feet. Make putt after putt. I sometimes ask players to make twenty-five in a row from that distance.

  This is particularly important in the preround practice period. Putt to the fringe from every distance and angle until you are confident you can judge the pace of any putt you will encounter on the course. Then sink a few from short range, using your full putting routine.

  Then go on to your long shots. If you find, as you warm up with longer shots, that you’re hitting the ball well, you must believe that this is the way you will hit the ball once the round begins. If, on the other hand, you can’t find your clubface as you warm up, you must believe that you’re saving your good shots for the golf course.

  Years ago, when I broached this idea to a group of touring players, Roger Maltbie raised his hand and said, “Wait a minute, Doc. You can’t have it both ways. Either you play like you warm up or you don’t.”

  I answered by asking what the goal was. The goal was to play well. That being the case, you have to have it both ways.

  This is what Tom Kite did recently when he set the scoring record in the Bob Hope tournament out in Palm Springs. As he warmed up for the final round, he couldn’t hit the ball very well at all, at least not by his standards. He reacted by making up his mind that his play on the course would be just the opposite of his play on the practice tee.

  He had to do this. Otherwise, as I said to Roger Maltbie, his best option would have been to drop out of the tournament and go home.

  YOU WILL CERTAINLY spend more time in the training mentality if you’re taking lessons and trying to make changes in the way you swing. No one knows how long it takes an individual to learn a new physical technique—say, a new backswing plane—well enough so that it becomes a habit that repeats itself when he swings without thinking of mechanics. It depends in part on how ingrained the old habit was. It depends in part on how well the individual practices. Does he make the new move correctly each time he practices it? Certainly, if he hits every practice ball with a teacher present, giving him accurate feedback, he will incorporate the improvement that much faster.

  Ideally, if you were trying to make a change in your swing, you would stop playing golf for a few weeks while you worked on the practice tee in the training mentality. You would know you had mastered the change when you could switch to the trusting mentality and count on the new swing to repeat itself reasonably well. Then you’d be ready to go back out on the course and play.

  I know that this may be more than a lot of amateurs are prepared to do. They want to improve their swings, but they also want to play their regular Sunday morning matches with their friends. Their habit is to take sporadic lessons. Since they are sporadic, their pro may figure he’s only got one hour to convey everything these pupils need to know. He overloads them with fixes for all the flaws in their swings.

  The golfers then try to incorporate all those changes as they play. Almost inevitably, their scores initially go up, because they are out on the course thinking about their mechanics, particularly about the changes the pro has suggested. After a week or two of frustration, they often react by consciously or unconsciously forgetting about the new techniques and going back to what they have always done. Their scores drop back to their normal range, because they begin to trust their swings again. But they wind up roughly where they started. They make no progress.

  A good golfer seeks help differently. David Frost, who never took a lesson until he was a scratch golfer, tells me that he mentally filters what he hears from any teacher he consults. “When I take a lesson,” he says, “my teacher can say eight or ten things to me, and I’ll be saying to myself, ‘Nope. Nope. That’s not it. Nope.’ But one of those eight or ten things will appeal to me. I’ll know it will help, and I’ll incorporate it and play better.”

  Players without Frosty’s knowledge of his own swing would be smart to let their pros know that they want to commit themselves to a long-term plan of regular lessons and improvement. The pro, if he’s good, would respond by giving this kind of pupil no more than one change per lesson and one swing thought to help incorporate that change. The player would use that swing thought—but only on shots of more than 120 yards—until the new habit was ingrained. He would spend at least twelve hours on the practice range, working on the new move, before taking the next lesson. Then he would go on to the next change and a new swing thought. Over a year’s time, any player would improve under this regimen. And eventually, he or she would acquire a fundamentally sound swing and could play without swing thoughts.
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  The particular swing mechanics a pro teaches matter much less than the confidence he or she engenders in the pupils. If you encounter a professional who conveys the idea that you don’t have the talent to play well, drop him or her. You have to expect some awkwardness for a while as you try to master new movements. But if, after six months or so, you still feel awkward and still lack confidence, it may be time to consider switching teachers. Find a teacher who believes in you, who encourages and supports you, who makes certain you leave the lesson tee feeling better about your game than you did when you arrived.

  In my experience, a model for all golf teachers is Bob Toski. He’s a great player. He’s also a trick-shot artist, a singer, a dancer and a raconteur. That’s not why he’s a great teacher. He’s a great teacher because he believes in his students and will do whatever he has to do to help them improve.

  I first met Bob when I started working with the staff of the week-long Golf Digest schools, adding a day or two of talks on the mental side of the game to the instruction on the swing that Toski and his colleagues gave. At one of the first of these collaborations, I arrived at about 3 A.M. on Thursday morning. As I walked wearily into my hotel room, I heard a voice from the next room:

  “Rotella, get in here!”

  It was Bob. He was sitting up in his king-sized bed, looking like a little pea against the pillows.

  “I’ve been waiting for you. Sit down,” he said. “We’ve got a seventy-eight-year-old lady with a thirty-five handicap here this week. I’ve been trying everything with her, and I can’t get her to swing inside to out and draw the ball. Give me some ideas. We have two days left to get her to do it. I won’t be able to stand it if she doesn’t.”

  Two things impressed me right away. The first was that Bob, a former PGA champion and tutor to some of the best professionals in the game, was willing to ask a twenty-eight-year-old sport psychologist to help him. His ego wasn’t so big that he couldn’t try to learn something from someone with perhaps one percent of his experience in the game. The second was his utter refusal to consider the possibility that this woman was beyond help.

  We talked for two hours or so about various approaches that we could try with her. And by the end of the week, she did draw the ball. I trust that she happily hit draws to the end of her days and got her handicap under 30. I suspect, however, that I learned more from Bob Toski that week than she did.

  This is the kind of attitude you should look for in a golf professional. When you find one with that attitude, stick with him or her. Don’t spoil what he or she is trying to do by going to another teacher and perhaps getting different advice.

  YOU CAN MAKE your head a practice range. There is a technique that uses the imagination to fool the mind and body into reacting as if what is in reality nerve-wracking is familiar, safe and comfortable. It’s a form of daydreaming that is conscious and purposeful.

  Sports psychology has adapted this technique from studies of two natural phenomena: nightmares and nocturnal orgasms. In both cases, nothing is really happening to the individual. He is merely dreaming, of something frightening in the case of nightmares, or of something sexually stimulating in the case of nocturnal emissions. But the dream causes a genuine physical reaction. The body stiffens and trembles with fear from a nightmare, just as it would stiffen and tremble if faced with a genuine fright. The sexually stimulating dream causes a real orgasm.

  A golfer can mentally simulate the experience of reaching his goal, whether it be winning a tournament or breaking 100. If he does it vividly enough, he can in effect fool the mind and body into thinking that the experience actually happened. Later, when he actually comes close to that goal on the golf course, he will not experience discomfort or disorientation. He will instead have a sense of déjà vu, a comforting and calming feeling that he has been in this situation before and handled it successfully.

  If a golfer tells me he wants to win the U.S. Open, I tell him to try to imagine that experience as vividly as he can. He needs to create, in his brain, all the sensory messages that would bombard him as he actually played the last holes of the Open, in contention to win. He needs to smell the grass and hear the murmur of the crowd. He needs to feel the tackiness of his grips, the way the sweat trickles down his forehead and the churning in his gut. He needs to see the way the rough pinches into the fairways, to see the television towers and to see, in his own mind, his golf ball soaring high against the blue sky and landing on the short grass. He needs to imagine something going wrong, to hear the way the crowd noise changes when a ball kicks into the sand, and to imagine himself taking a bogey but retaining his equilibrium. He needs to imagine hearing a roar from some other part of the course and to imagine his response to a competitor reeling off a string of birdies.

  If a golfer tells me his goal is to break 90, I tell him to imagine himself on the way to shooting an 86. Like the professional striving to win the U.S. Open, he would try to simulate all the sensory experiences. He should imagine himself calmly refusing to get distracted when his buddies tell him after nine holes that he’s on track to shoot in the eighties. He should imagine staying with his routine and game plan. He should see the shots he will play on all of the final holes, both good and bad.

  This technique can be very helpful to professionals who have trouble maintaining a hot round. Sometimes a player finds that whenever he makes two or three birdies on the first few holes, he loses momentum. He can’t use that good start as a springboard to a really low score. One reason is that he doesn’t see himself as the kind of player who shoots 70, or 69 at best. When he gets to three under par, he unconsciously believes that he’s reached his limit. He starts to look for something bad to happen. He plays defensively.

  If this kind of golfer prepares his mind for shooting lower scores, he’ll have an easier time staying focused and making even more birdies the next time he gets off to a quick start.

  But the technique won’t work if your approach to it is perfunctory, any more than you would trick your body into a fright reaction simply by saying to yourself, “Okay, there’s a burglar coming through my bedroom window.” You have to imagine in vivid detail, much as a novelist draws the reader into a setting by describing the sensory experiences of his characters.

  Val Skinner used this technique just hours before she won in Atlanta in 1994. Because of rain delays, the players had to finish their Saturday rounds early Sunday morning. Val had several hours before she was supposed to tee off for the final round, in a group with Liselotte Neumann, the leader, and Judy Dickenson. She went back to her hotel and lay down. She imagined the way her round would go. She could see everything vividly, right down to the colors her opponents would wear. In her daydream round, she was thirteen under par. The holes had a vivid clarity. On one par-three, for instance, she imagined that she almost got a hole-in-one, but the ball lipped out of the cup and she had to settle for a birdie. Her daydream ended as she accepted the winner’s check on the 18th green. Then she got up and went to the golf course.

  She did not, of course, shoot thirteen under par. Nor did she almost make a hole-in-one. But she made up a two-stroke deficit and won the tournament. Her daydream, she thought, gave her a feeling of serenity that lasted throughout the round. So intently did she feel that she had won the tournament before she started her final round that when it came time to accept the winner’s check, she felt a bit deflated. She had a sense that she had been there and done that.

  In the evening, before your next important round, make a regular habit of lying down, closing your eyes, and trying this technique. It should help you. It certainly will be more pleasant than pacing around the room and worrying.

  22.

  What I Learned from Paul Runyan

  A FEW YEARS ago, I was in Toronto to speak to a meeting of 800 teaching golf professionals. I followed Paul Runyan on the schedule.

  Paul, who is in his eighties, stood up and began his talk by saying, “I must apologize to each and every one of you.”
r />   Every one of the pros came to attention.

  “A year ago,” Paul went on, “I spoke at your annual meeting and I told you I would work out forty-five to fifty minutes a day, without fail, every day of the year. I’m sorry to tell you that I got lazy two days last year and did not work out. I want you to know that I didn’t live up to my commitment, and I promise you that it won’t happen again this year.”

  Everyone in the audience looked startled. Some of them might have thought this was a rhetorical ploy of some kind.

  But I knew that it wasn’t. He was just telling them the truth about the way Paul Runyan lives his life and the way he honors his commitments.

  Doing instructional schools for years with Paul has given me a chance to observe him. He gets up each morning at 5:30. He stretches, exercises, and goes for a substantial walk before breakfast. Then he eats something healthy—oatmeal, perhaps. He’s basically a vegetarian.

  He gets to the golf course by seven o’clock or so, an hour before the instructional school starts. He goes to the practice green and chips, pitches and putts for forty-five minutes or so. He can drop ten balls in the fringe around a green and get all of them into the hole in less than twenty strokes; he’ll chip in more often than he’ll fail to get up and down. Then he goes to the range and hits wedges for ten or fifteen minutes, followed by maybe four or five drivers. He’s ready to teach.

  He teaches until noon, when he goes home and has a light, healthy lunch with Bernice, his wife. Then he teaches again until 4:30. After that, he’s likely to want to play nine holes, carrying his own bag. Paul’s only concession to age is playing a two-piece ball. As an octogenarian, he’s succumbed to the yen for distance that infects most golfers in their teens. His touch around the green is so acute that he can afford to give away the backspin and control most pros get from a balata ball.