Fearless Golf: Conquering the Mental Game

caddie, at the seventeenth that this was the most fun I’ve had in five or six years.”
    Think of Tiger Woods in 2000, when the game’s next great player seemed at his invincible best. Yet at the PGA Championship at Valhalla that August he was matched stride for stride by Bob May, an unheralded, unruffled veteran who had never won a PGA Tour event. On the verge of the greatest year in the history of professional golf, Woods had everything to lose, yet he refused to wilt on the biggest stage in the biggest moment. Staring at an unsettling, sliding putt on the eighteenth green, knowing May had just made another birdie and knowing a miss would mean defeat, Woods faced elimination stout and strong and undaunted. He, like Hogan and like Nicklaus, also was fearless. “You have to reach deep inside yourself and you have to keep making birdies,” he said. “We never backed off from one another. Birdie for birdie and shot for shot, we were going right at each other. That was just so much fun. That’s as good as it gets right there.”
    When I turn my critical eye on all these great moments, there is one thing the great champions manage to overcome. It is a greater foe than any apparently invincible opponent, than any brutally penal golf course itself or even the unshakable enormity of any once-in-a-lifetime moment. It is fear, the most critical impediment to playing golf to your greatest potential. It matters not if you are a weekend hacker in the later stages of your usual Saturday game or a PGA Tour champion stepping to the eighteenth tee with a one-shot lead. If there is one universal truth to golfers of all levels, it is fear, fear of failure, fear of embarrassment, fear of the unexpected, fear of poor judgment. It is fear of long courses, of short courses, of narrow courses, of hilly courses and flat courses. It is fear of water hazards and sand bunkers, of short putts and long putts. We even fear things that in reality aren’t there, like that flagstick that looks to be inches beyond a bunker when it’s really a dozen or more yards.
    It is fear of playing with certain people or against certain people or even in front of certain people. It is even fear of knowing we are afraid, and it gnaws on our consciousness, undermines our skills, sabotages our capabilities, and infects our confidence.
    So let me be clear and succinct on the foundation of this book: A golfer’s greatest enemy is fear, but playing our greatest golf begins by making fearless swings at specific targets, regardless of the circumstances. In the simplest terms,
the greatest golfers play fearless golf
.
    The lessons I have learned from studying the great players of years past as well as today’s emerging greats are varied and complex, yet I can summarize them simply. What golfers of all abilities must come to see is that maximizing your potential in golf begins and ends with one requirement: You must learn to effectively deal with fear, to embrace its challenge to your skills and to overpower it so you can think clearly and effectively and play your best. Anything less invites the insidious decay of doubt and inconsistency. It is what Bobby Jones once called “the one kind of confidence that everyone must have in abundance.” His words from seventy-five years ago are as true as they are elegantly written, and they are a beacon for the rest of this book:

    There are many men who play golf exceptionally well when the issues are small, but who collapse when anything of importance is at stake. What causes the detonation is fear—lack of confidence in the swing—making them unwilling to trust it with anything that really matters. In the face of such an obstacle, tension takes the place of relaxation and strain upsets rhythm. The smoothest machine in the world cannot run in a bearing full of the gravel of uncertainty.

    When a man stands up to the ball ready to make a decisive stroke, he must know that he can make it. He must not be afraid to swing, afraid to pivot, afraid to hit; there must be a good swing with plenty of confidence to let it loose.

    fear and you

    Do you remember the first time you drove a car? Undoubtedly, you were excited. Most likely, the act of driving a car wasn’t foreign to you. You had been pretending for years: You’d spent time driving pretend race cars and tooling around in the bumper car ring at the local amusement park. You’d played video games that simulated the steering and shifting motions and the