Fearless Golf: Conquering the Mental Game

mastery approach to the game try to play each hole as it needs to be played, to the best of their ability. They know that success on a previous hole does not mean much to the hole they are facing and that prior shots or future outcomes have little bearing on the task before them. They understand that great golf is the summation of individual shots and that every shot is a chance to get closer and closer to perfection. Because they view golf this way, they find it easy to immerse themselves in the process of playing golf, and they often concentrate to the point of ignoring everything around them. Golfers in a mastery mode are not competing against those first three things above.
    It is the insistence on playing the golf course rather than other players that marks the difference between the top players like Tiger Woods and Vijay Singh and the rest of the field. They are driven by a motivation that goes beyond the leaderboard or the situation. Playing the golf course is the reason a great player turns five-shot leads into eight-shot leads. The truly dominant, truly fearless golfers play to the level of their capabilities, not the level of their competition. The effort and motivation remain constant regardless of where he stands in a tournament. Tiger once said, “I will try as hard as I possibly can. Just like I do every round. That’s a given. My effort, that’s a constant.” Likewise, in the course of winning seventeen times in two years, Vijay strived to not let himself get caught up in the enormity of the achievement. He just went out and hit golf shots. The winning took care of itself. He said at the end of 2004, “Every tournament you start off even on Thursday, and whatever you’ve done a week before, you can throw that out the window. To me, every time I tee it up, it’s a new event. You need 100 percent focus on that event.”
    That sort of dedication to competing against a golf course every single round prevents the great player, the fearless golfer, from the emotional and motivational differences most golfers feel between Thursday and Sunday. The top players’ intensity, motivation, and commitment to each and every golf shot are the same on Thursday as they are on Sunday. They have to be. And a successful attitude at the start breeds success at the finish.

    glimpses of mastery golf

    Even top-notch golfers whose approach to the game is mastery oriented fall into the trap sometimes. Steve Flesch is a tour veteran and a mastery golfer whose key motivation for playing golf is simply “to challenge myself and see how good I can become.” Indeed, few athletes anywhere are as competitive as Steve. However, for a round in 2000 he lost his mastery perspective and shifted from playing the course to playing an opponent. He went into the final round of the Disney Classic with the lead. In our interview, he recollected:

    I remember Disney two years ago. I was playing with a lead and paired with Tiger and Jeff Sluman in the final round and I was two shots ahead of Tiger. Of everyone to be paired with, right? I figured that if I could hold him off, he was the guy, that I would win the golf tournament. Even though I am the one with the lead, I am trying to hold him off. I was in control the whole day. I really wasn’t nervous. I still felt like I was the guy they had to chase and I still stayed aggressive. I still didn’t change the way I played. I played great. Unfortunately, Duffy Waldorf shot 62 that day to beat me by a shot. I shot 69. I did what I had to do but even though I stayed ahead of Tiger, I think I needed to keep playing the golf course to where I didn’t just try and beat him. I do think I got to a point where I was trying to just make pars where I should have stayed just as aggressive. Played the course. Play the golf course and not another individual and I probably would have won because I had the game that day.

    I use this passage to illustrate two things. First of all, how someone like Steve, who typically has a strong mastery orientation, can slip into thinking about results. Second, to illustrate a simple and rather obvious reason why playing an opponent often leads golfers to play to the level of their competition rather than to the level of their capability.
    Now contrast this mindset with Steve’s remarks about his first professional win at the 2003 HP Classic in New Orleans after which time he learned the importance of mastery golf. Three years later, Steve had learned a lot:

    The