Golf Psychology Online

If you only buy one golf book this year may I recommend that you make it Straight Down the Middle: Shivas Irons, Bagger Vance, and How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Golf Swing by Josh Karp. Josh takes you on his almost 2 year odyssey to find his inner self and game, by way of Bagger Vance, Shivas Irons, Zen Buddhism and any other spiritualist method that takes his fancy. In his often hilarious quest to discover whether finding inner peace will lower his scores, or will lowering his scores help him find inner peace Josh meets a myriad of golf coaches and fellow golf junkies and has produced a book that could do for the alternative golf teachers of the US what Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence did for the restaurants of that beautiful area.

The fly leaf of the book tells us “Josh Karp first played golf in the 6th grade and went on to become one of the worst players on some very bad high school and college golf teams” this is the type of self effacing headline that will always catch my interest and is a theme he continues with throughout, fighting his inner golf demons in pursuit of his goals. As a sports psychologist and Mind Factor golf coach I have a veritable library on the subject of sports psychology but I could not honestly say that any of these books is suitable for reading in one go, Straight Down the Middle: , is and indeed I did.

Josh is a journalist and author living in Glencoe Illinois with his wife and 4 sons, his first book, ‘A Futile and Stupid Gesture: How Doug Kenney and National Lampoon Changed Comedy Forever,’ won best biography at the Independent Publisher Book Awards.

Golf Psychology.

From a very young age we are constantly asked the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Titles have come to define a person in today’s society, how often when people meet for the first time will the question “what do you do for a living?” be asked. By defining oneself by what one does rather than who one is a person makes themselves emotionally vulnerable to changes in their situation be it losing their job or losing their form. When a person allows one element of their life to define them as a person they have made their world far too small a place for them to be able to live in.

It is imperative in the world of sport that a person realises that their sporting self is a part of their core self and not their self in entirety. It is almost a certainty that at some point in a career a sportsman or woman will suffer a slump in form, if they believe themselves to be judged by what they do the path back to form will be so much harder than for those who understand a core self.

As an exercise I ask a player who has come to believe that their performance represents them in totality imagine they are about to race Usane Bolt over 100 metres, ask him if he expects to be able to beat the fastest man in the world over this distance, of course the answer will be no. I ask him to see himself crossing the finish line and imagine how he will feel about himself for coming a distant second in this race. Will his worth as a person have diminished as a result of this defeat, is Usane Bolt a better person for having beaten him, of course not, all that has been proven is that one person is a faster runner than the other. I then have the player imagine he is competing against Bolt in his chosen sporting discipline, if for example he is a professional golfer have him imagine he is playing one of his best ever rounds and beats Bolt by a big margin, I again ask, has his worth as a human being been improved or has Bolt’s been weakened, again no.

Staying with the golfing example, I ask the player if he is as good a golfer as Tiger Woods, unlikely, but I also ask him, especially in light of Tiger’s recent much publicised indiscretions, if he can think of anything that would show Tiger to be a better person than he.

The aim of these exercises is to have the player understand the three key qualities that he needs to develop to strengthen his core self, these three qualities are; Appreciation, Acceptance and Value. To be aware of what is without judgement or endorsement, to find delight in even the most simple of events and to be able to value that that is worthwhile. In learning these qualities the individual should be able to better perceive and value their sport as merely being part of the whole.

Byron Nelson said it helped to still his nerves to put his game into some sort of perspective. He maintained the thought that no matter what happened on the golf course he could return home and his wife would be glad to see him, and even if, for some reason or other she wasn’t, his dog would definitely still love him. A player must be helped to understand that it is absolutely fine to be disappointed with a poor performance but that the feeling must not be all encompassing and certainly has no effect on their value as a person.

It is highly unlikely that a player will have no other interest than their own sport, be it other sports, family, arts entertainment of any sort or maybe as a collector of something, players should be helped to understand that these interests or hobbies play just as vital a role in defining them as their sport, indeed outside interests are a positive help in that they provide a down time from the intense pressure of constant high performance demands. As unlikely as it is that a coach should come across a player with no other interest than their sport, in the event that they do it is imperative that they work with them to develop an interest or two and help them to see the value of it to them and their sport, and also to remind them that sport at the top level does not last a lifetime and that there needs to be life after sport.

The world will not be affected by how straight someone hits a golf ball nor the score they mark down at the end of a round, it will not go into meltdown because someone foul throws the javelin or puts an attempted drop goal wide. These are purely facts of events that may or may not be recorded somewhere but will in no way change the overall scheme of things. This cannot be an unduly difficult concept for anyone to understand and once they do they will be in a position of freedom to lose or win, but knowing either way they have given of their best and in doing so will only have enhanced their core self.

And finally, whilst my articles are written from my stance as a sports coach, this is an area that covers every part of a person’s life, if you believe your job, social standing, relationship or any other single thing defines you as a person you are in danger and should address the situation.

Golf Psychology

Continuing our series of articles on making your practice harder than the game we now take a look at getting up and down from around the green to save par, or maybe better. In the world of tour golf this is known as scrambling and is a vital part of every golfers game, in any given season the best figures for hitting greens in regulation on both the PGA and European tours will be between 75% and 80% with the average in the high 60’s, this means that for most players on over a quarter of the holes they play they will need to chip, pitch and putt well to keep a score going. The short game is the least physically demanding part of golf and yet how many players do you hear bemoaning the fact that they can’t chip, or putt or just as often both, this is a ridiculous mind set to get into that leads to all sorts of duffs, jabs and thins as the players total lack of confidence in this area prevents him from ever making any decent sort of strike at the ball. But, how often do you see players’ duffing chip shots around the putting green, the answer, apart from complete novices, is almost never. Standing at the putting greens edge with a pile of balls repeating the same shot over and over again is really no way to practice if you wish to improve this aspect of your game, practice needs to have a consequence and be as close to or harder than the real thing. Karl Morris has given me a great training drill to help you in this area, it takes up very little time but pays big dividends fast and is called “Par 18”.

Par 18 involves playing 9 par 2 holes around the practice green, depending on your skill level choose 9 spots around the green from which you will attempt to get up and down in 2, vary the degree of difficulty, maybe 3 easy, 3 medium and 3 tough starting positions. As with the driving drill you only play this game once, unless, you complete the drill in 20 shots or less then you go again but this time using 2 balls, taking your worst score at each of the 9 holes if you manage to get round in 20 or less you go again with 3 balls and so on, the best I’ve heard of anybody getting to is 5 balls, but that was a young Pro who has a fantastic short game. By the way, the Pro who achieved this said that when he was putting his 4th ball for a 2 at the 9th hole to get to go again with 5 balls every part of him was shaking, how good a drill is this if it can produce that sort of pressure when he really is only practicing after all and how useful will it have been when he faces a pressure putt in competition.

I recommend that you play this game no more than 3 or 4 times a week but it is most important that you keep a record of your scores and work out your weekly average, you should see a steady improvement but if you don’t the exercise is still valuable as it obviously means that your technique is flawed and needs to be worked on with your Pro.

Golf Psychology

Probably the most outstanding statistic in any sport is that of the great Australian batting legend Sir Don Bradman. “The Don” averaged 99.94 runs for his test career, the next closest is the South African Graeme Pollock with 60.97, and the highest for any current player is Jonathan Trott with 64.24. What, you may ask, has any of this to do with golf, apart from the fact that Bradman enjoyed his golf immensely playing off a handicap of 1 at The Royal Adelaide Golf Club. Well the answer is the way Bradman practiced, at a young age the cricket mad Bradman invented a game in the yard behind his parents house that involved him throwing a golf ball at the brick part of an old water tank a few yards away and then trying to hit the rebound, not with a cricket bat but with a stump. What Bradman had done was made his practice much harder than the real game, he said that no bowler could create the speed and variation which the golf ball did bouncing of the brickwork at him at all angles and then having to play his shots, not with a full width bat but just a skinny stump, how big the ball must have seemed to Bradman and how wide his bat when it came to playing for real.

So why, I ask do golfers, in the main, practice in a way that is so much easier than the actual game. Is standing on the range aiming the driver down what is in effect an unmissable fairway really going to improve your skill level, well sure you’re maybe grooving your swing but how is this going to help when you are faced with a tee shot to a narrow fairway with out of bounds on the left and water on the right, the answer is not a great deal because you haven’t been practising for a tight shot, you’ve had all the room in the world to aim at.

Take a leaf out of Don Bradman’s book and make your practice more demanding than the game. Next time you get the driver out on the range first get a couple of umbrellas or suitable stakes and place them 25yards apart around the distance you normally drive, these markers are now your fairway. You now have 10 drives with the aim to get a minimum of 7 between the markers, if you fail, take a note of where your misses were as this is invaluable information to take to your Pro when working on the technical side of your game, and that’s it for the day, you only get one chance to play and as soon as you fail go on to practising other areas, this way you are practising with a consequence and putting an element of pressure into the drill. If you succeed, you now draw the markers 5yards closer together and start again trying to score 7 out of 10 between the markers, if successful reduce your target area again, to 15yards. It’s up to you how much you want to keep reducing the width but if successful at 15yards normally you should go back to 25 again and just keep through the drill going until you fail to make 7 out of 10. Just imagine when you get to 15yards for the first time, you have 6 balls in the target area and only one ball left, now you are really making a tight shot under pressure – just like the real thing.

Golf Psychology