Fearless Golf: Conquering the Mental Game

situations. Anticipating the possibility of missing yet another fairway, a golfer may flinch during his swing. Although psychologists also point out that fear has healthy and adaptive characteristics, few memories are as easy to trigger and hard to shake as those created by fear.
    How is it that a sport as innocuous as golf can instigate processes designed to protect us from being eaten in the wild? Well, the mind does not just respond to “actual” threats such as lions, tigers, and snakes. It also responds to “perceived” threats such as embarrassment, disappointment, and frustration. Golfers who learn to fear situations in golf actually condition their minds to perceive situations as more threatening than they really are. They often beat themselves up for making the slightest mistakes, the psychological consequences of which are similar to a car crash. They result in subsequent hesitation, tentativeness, and fear. Thus, by beating themselves up and dwelling on mistakes, golfers engage in a sort of “fear conditioning,” by which they can easily learn to perceive the slightest irregularity (a bad bounce, a bad hole, or even a string of good holes) as a warning sign. The fear response goes into effect. Make no mistake about it, fear can be habit forming.

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    words of a champion: davis love iii,
1997 pga championship

    It may have seemed that Davis Love walked onto the PGA Tour in 1986 with the greatest expectations of success, but when he went more than a decade without claiming that first major title, there were doubters, including himself at times. But at the PGA at Winged Foot in 1997, Love entered the final round poised to win that first major. He had come close several times before, but this particular Sunday he started strong and finished even stronger, birdieing the final hole under a rainbow to win the championship by 5 shots. Coming so close and finally succeeding, the lessons learned by Love are just as applicable to the player on the verge of breaking 80. He told the gathered press that day that part of the difference this time could lie in his having fallen short the times before, that winning the big one

    is an inner battle. Obviously, my golf game is good enough to win a major. It is fighting the inner battle that week of, one, getting your golf game ready and then getting your mind there for 72 holes, and controlling the emotions and living through the bad breaks and the good breaks and riding that emotional roller coaster. And I know that you have to be there a few times to understand how to handle it. I mean, I was just as nervous today as I was last year at the U.S. Open. My hands were shaking just as bad, my stomach was churning just as bad. But I reminded myself of what I had to do, to hit the golf ball, to make the putts and keep myself focused, and I got through it. If it wasn’t for the times that I haven’t won, made the mistakes, and learned from them, I don’t think I could have made it. I could have double-bogeyed those last three holes the way I was feeling. But, I played them good because I had been there before and lost it before and knew what that feeling felt like.
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    Fear can change your entire perspective, and worse, it institutes a downward spiral that resupplies its own strength. Golfers with lower self-confidence (or what we come to know as “self-efficacy” in later chapters) who interpret physiological arousal as fear produce more of a stress hormone called
norepinephrine
whose job is to tense the muscles. It is worth reading that passage again: Norepinephrine tenses the muscles. Every teacher of the golf swing in the world will tell you that a proper golf swing cannot be executed with tightness in the muscles. Tight muscles are not compatible with a relaxed, smooth, flowing, seamless, and full golf swing. In a phrase, the difference between being psyched up or psyched out often has to do with the meaning we assign to these physiological states. As psychologist Albert Bandura has written, “The difference between being psyched up or psyched out is a matter of interpretation.” When an event is interpreted as exciting, the body relaxes. When it is interpreted as frightening, the body tightens.
    The cycle commonly known as the “downward spiral” you see when golfers choke nearly always begins with a dip in self-efficacy. The spiral goes something like this: Low self-efficacy results in interpreting physiological change as fear rather than excitement. Fear