Fearless Golf: Conquering the Mental Game

Though his words have been abused over the years, when Nietzsche wrote “That which does not kill us makes us stronger,” he was suggesting that the hard times fuel success.

    Chris DiMarco may not be familiar with Nietzsche’s writings, but he does know the power of perseverance.

    “To be frank and honest,” he said to me,

    in golf the biggest thing is you have to admit your faults. If you mask the real reasons you aren’t winning and don’t actually identify the real thing that hinders you, I don’t think you are going to get better. You have to learn from your mistakes. I’ve just been able to learn from them. And let’s face it, in 1995 I wasn’t mature enough to be out here. I lost my card. My wife was pregnant with our first child and I couldn’t even play golf, so I had to stay home, which in retrospect was a blessing because that’s when I learned how to putt the way I do now and good things came of that.

    It is not easy by any means to see discouragement as the doorway to hope. But try it. You have history on your side.
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    Self-efficacy beliefs act as buffers against self-doubt during the trying times that every golfer endures. During times when the game gets difficult, the thought of hitting a good shot may often seem as “remote as the possibility of me flapping my arms and flying across this room” as Ernie Els once said. At every turn, these golfers modeled Lance Armstrong in his bout with cancer, and “believed in the power of belief for its own shining sake.” They drew on their beliefs in their abilities to overcome the odds and subsequently achieved notable degrees of success on the PGA Tour.
    The vast majority of golfers will never compete for the green jacket or the claret jug. Nonetheless, all golfers are similar in fundamental ways: They are trying to become better at a game that they love; they battle mountains created by nerves and by the yips and bouts of bad play that they cannot immediately figure out; they lose their patience; they fight self-doubt and shaky hands. Whether your goal is simply to improve your game or to win a major, neither is an easy process. But rest assured that you are not alone in your struggle, and know that the way you handle yourself at the bottom of the mountain will determine how high you climb.

    on playing badly well

    When he published
The Modern Fundamentals of Golf
, Ben Hogan changed the way most people look at golf. By explaining that the difference between good and great golfers is not the quality of their good shots as much as it is the quality of their poor shots, he allowed millions of golfers to become more forgiving of their misses. In doing so, they also learned to not dwell on their bad shots, but rather to learn how to get beyond them.
    It is this fundamental understanding that golf is a fickle game, and that you have to play within yourself and your abilities that day, that mentally characterizes sound golfers. Great golfers realize that they will not always have their best game, and so they adapt accordingly. The better they get, the better their misses, such that at the PGA Tour level, even their missed shots are not all that bad. Great golfers or those hoping to maximize their potential have to master the art of what Jack Nicklaus called “playing badly well.”
    This is where self-efficacy really shows up because one of the most difficult things to learn in golf is to trust a golf swing when you aren’t hitting the ball particularly well. Indeed, the natural reaction to bad shots is to change something in the golf swing, or to become tentative and try to be careful with the swing. An important jump forward on the road to greatness happens when golfers learn that caution can be implemented into their strategy rather than into their golf swing. You can pick more conservative targets, just don’t make tentative swings. That’s a delicate mental balance, of course, but what it means in simplest terms is this: Hit the shots you know you can hit.
    Put yourself in this situation: You’ve popped up your drive and are staring at a 220-yard shot to a green guarded by deep bunkers. The longest successful approach shot you’ve hit in the last two months has been 135 yards. What sense does it make to take out a 3-wood and try to loft it to the green? Not much. Yet many of us sit there and contemplate such a shot. If you decide to hit the 3-wood, do so with a firm resolve that it’s a shot you can execute. But hitting a couple