Fearless Golf: Conquering the Mental Game

eyes from looking forward when they practice putting. You could get a playing partner to do the same for you. Another option is to focus on a spot beside the ball, or place a coin right next to the ball and focus on it so you can still read the writing on it after the ball has rolled away. Again, it’s not simply the act of not looking at the target before impact. It’s the idea of focusing on something that will not be detrimental to your stroke. Keeping your head down and your eyes focused over the ball is simply a better way to execute the putting stroke. Don’t think so much of making a good stroke. That should be obvious. Think instead of doing some task, some act that will naturally increase the likelihood of executing a proper stroke. The positive stroke is an aftereffect of this sort of concentration.

    There are psychological consequences as well. As information gets routed from the eyes and ears to other parts of the brain for processing, mental stressors come into play. Golfers who “choke” often report being unable to focus. Perception changes, so that those golfers begin to perceive normally innocuous situations as threatening. Where they used to see only fairways and greens, they now see only hazards.

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    words of a champion: ben curtis,
2003 british open

    Ben Curtis was not the name on everybody’s lips when the British Open came to Royal St. George’s in 2003. Curtis had one career top ten in his PGA Tour career before the 2003 British. Fortunately, it happened to come at the Western Open, where that top ten finish got him into the Open Championship field. Curtis played surprisingly steady for someone who had never played in a major championship of any kind. And while the favorites were falling away, Curtis held on down the stretch, holing a nervy twelve-foot par putt at the last that eventually would stand up as the winning score.

    His thoughts after hoisting the claret jug suggest a golfer who tried very hard to limit his focus to the things he could control, an amazing bit of resolve for the moment of his life.

    I was just in a zone and very focused on what I was doing so much that I didn’t really think about winning until afterwards. I’ve won in the past, just not at this level yet. I was shaking in my boots, obviously, but out there I was just very focused on what I had to do and let my work speak for itself. And if it was good enough, fine. If not, I can live with it.

    I was playing hard coming in, and I was trying to keep the course in front of me.
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    Fear plays tricks on memory as well. The brain has evolved to remember fearful situations so as to be able to avoid them in the future. Many chemicals, such as adrenaline, act like yellow highlighters to ensure the brain remembers fearful situations. Once a fear-causing experience has taken place in our lives, its memory can remain strong and vivid. For example, if you were to get into an automobile accident at an intersection, chances are you would flinch every time you went through an intersection for weeks following the accident. Your brain signals an alarm as it anticipates another crash, even though your conscious mind is aware there isn’t a car anywhere in sight. Psychiatrists and clinical psychologists make a pretty penny treating patients with unresolved fears, and in fact I get e-mails weekly from adult golfers who still have vivid, disruptive memories of embarrassing or fearful moments on the golf course that happened to them months and even years before.
    This tendency to remember fearful situations can be adaptive in some cases (for instance, remembering the details while walking alone down a dangerous street at night), but in golf these persistent memories become distractive. Just as Hogan admitted to remembering “the negative more vividly than the positive,” many competitive golfers who are caught in slumps report that, after a round of golf, they simply cannot remember any good shots. The negative, like cream, rises to the top of their memories.
    Golfers who choke even one time often report replaying the episode in their minds over and over again. They can’t seem to shake it. Such memories act in the same way as memories of a car crash. They make us frightened when we encounter similar situations. The trickiest problem, of course, is that of
anticipation
. As the old saying goes, Once bitten, twice shy. Past experiences that brought on fear cause us to anticipate similar experiences in similar