Fearless Golf: Conquering the Mental Game

“Quick” at the Top

    Physiologically, fear can make us get “quick” at the top. As with overly tight grip pressure, most of us know this feeling, too. Here, the downswing starts before the club is properly set at the top, so the body begins moving into the shot while the arms are still going back. Why does this happen? Well, tighter muscles and a racing mind are okay if you’re trying to execute a relatively one-dimensional task like outracing a saber-toothed tiger before you become his dinner. Tight muscles and a racing mind are not such a good combination if you’re trying to execute a relatively unnatural act like hitting a small ball with a small piece of metal and making it go into a small hole far away. Fear can make us want to do things quicker; a properly executed golf swing is controlled, and sometimes that means slower.

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    words of a champion: payne stewart,
1999 u.s. open

    The late Payne Stewart’s final victory was unquestionably his most emotional, and in many ways it was his most complete as a supreme champion. Stewart began the final day of the 1999 U.S. Open at Pinehurst’s venerable No. 2 course leading by a shot, and in damp, chilly conditions, refused to buckle under the pressure. He holed out with an iron will, completing the round with only 24 putts, and coming down the stretch, he holed a 25-foot putt at 16, a nervy three-footer for birdie at 17 to retake the lead, and an epic fifteen-footer for par to win his second U.S. Open title. Stewart’s assessment in the moments after claiming the trophy reflects a man committed to playing fearless golf: “I wasn’t thinking about Phil or Tiger or David or anybody. I was thinking about getting the job done and doing what I had to do to give myself a chance.”

    Stewart talked about how he had a specific game plan for playing the golf course, hitting certain clubs on particular holes, regardless of the situation. And when it came down to the difficult closing hole, Stewart would not let himself panic even when his tee shot trickled into the rough. Needing a par, he had to trust his game plan and ignore the temptation to try to muscle a long iron from a difficult lie in heavy wet grass. He was left with a fifteen-foot putt, a putt he knew, a putt he had practiced earlier in the week. All that preparation, all that pressure, all that fear and Payne Stewart played fearlessly. “I didn’t question how I played the hole,” he said in the press tent afterward.

    I kind of knew what lie I had, and so I dealt with it. When I got up on the green, I was saying, “Look, you’ve given yourself a chance. You’re here. Do the same things you’ve been doing. Believe that you’ve read it right and make your stroke.” So I stood up there and read it. And I said this is an inside left putt, just believe that. And I stood up there and did my routine and kept my head still, and when I looked up it was two feet from the hole and it was breaking right in the center and I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe that I’d accomplished another dream of mine.
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    Problem 3: Deceleration

    The third way that tension and fear influence the golf swing is that golfers change their rate of acceleration on the downswing. Tennis great Jim Courier once explained to me that when tennis players get nervous they often hit the ball short because they decelerate. The same thing happens to golfers who feel psychological resistance. They decelerate into the ball. On the full swing we call this trying to “steer” the ball or “holding on” too long. When trying to execute chip shots, this deceleration often results in either a thin shot off the blade or a chunked shot where golfers “lay the sod” over it because they swing in a jab motion. When golfers feel fear over a putt, deceleration manifests itself in the form of a “jabbed” putt along with a slight flinch of the eyes and slight movement of the head (which influence direction and line). Why? Well, think about the fight-or-flight syndrome. When you’re running from a tiger, you want to know how close he is to biting your leg. So you do what you can to get informed, even looking back over your shoulder when we all know that such a posture isn’t the best if you’re trying to run your fastest. Well, when you’re nervous in golf, your mind is overly occupied with results (not the process), even in the midst of executing a shot. You fear a left shot, so you hold on to the finish. You fear a