Fearless Golf: Conquering the Mental Game

second place I had at Disney hurts a little bit because I played so well head-to-head against Tiger, I believe that was 2000 and Duffy Waldorf shot 62. I tell you, I said to myself, when I had the lead going into Saturday, If I can hold off Tiger for the weekend, man, I was going to win. I held off Tiger, but Duffy shot 62 and beat me. But, you know, today I just told myself from the get-go, hang in there. And today when I got off to that start—I think I was at 4-under or something, I didn’t look at the board because I was like, You know what? Today, not that I’m infallible, not one of those
Caddyshack
things, but I was like, You know what? You’re in a great frame of mind, let’s just keep it going. Play the course. Don’t think about the leader.

    As noted above, I consider Jack Nicklaus to be the ultimate model of a mastery-oriented golfer. We’ve often heard Jack emphasize that he never played golf for records or money. “I never played for the money and I never thought about my place in relation to other golfers or their records,” he’s said. “When I turned professional there weren’t those big purses anyhow. Back then you played because you loved to play and compete. That was the reward.”
    Nicklaus is in great company when it comes to his view of achievement, as most people who achieve excellence in their chosen endeavors relay very similar sentiments. For instance, at the age of sixteen, astronaut Neil Armstrong built a small wind tunnel in the basement of his home where he would constantly perform experiments on the model planes he made. After being the first person to walk on the moon, he refused countless interviews and media opportunities. Instead, he followed his passion for aeronautics to a small town in Ohio, where he took a job teaching engineering. He was a task-oriented man who pursued aeronautics because he loved it, not because he loved the recognition it brought him. Similar patterns are seen in the lives of extraordinary people like physicist Albert Einstein, artist Pablo Picasso, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, football player Joe Montana, tennis player Steffi Graf, and golfers like Ben Hogan, Tom Watson, and Tiger Woods. For people who achieve excellence, it seems that perks and recognition are nice, but they are incidental to the love and passion of the challenge itself. In concrete terms relevant to today’s world, mastery-oriented golfers
tolerate
the media (and may even enjoy the insights of particular journalists), but they do not thrive on the attention and glory that comes with fame.
    Nicklaus once quipped that “Golf is my love and golf is my life.” His vision of golf was clear from an early age. Nicklaus’s teacher, Jack Grout, said, “For a very long period I don’t think the young Nicklaus ever really thought about anything other than golf, even the opposite sex! And the better he became at golf, the more he thought about it, and the harder he was inspired to work at it.” In
Two Great Champions
, Red Reeder illustrates Nicklaus’s mastery approach to the game of golf while at the same time revealing Jack’s indifference to others’ opinions. He wrote:

    Jack learned that the real opponents in golf are not the other players but the golf course and oneself. The player must know the course. He cannot lose his concentration. Jack would get so set on remembering the course and thinking about his next shot that he would stare straight ahead with a stern expression. As a result, the crowds were not too friendly to Jack. He didn’t get very many cheers or much applause. In their articles some golf writers made fun of him for never smiling and for wearing old rumpled clothes. Some of the fans even booed him on the course when he beat one of their favorites (like Arnold Palmer). Usually though, Jack was thinking so hard about his golf game he didn’t pay attention to the crowds.

    Jack Nicklaus, the model of mastery golf, wrote:

    Through that [learning how to read a golf course] came an ever sharpening awareness that one’s true opponent in every golf contest is never another player, or even the entire field, but always the course itself. The only thing a player can control is his own game, so concern about what other competitors may or may not be doing is both a useless distraction, and a waste of energy.

    In October 2002,
Orlando Sentinel
journalist Steve Elling began contacting those golfers who were able to beat Tiger in head-to-head competition (it was a