Fearless Golf: Conquering the Mental Game

rather than attack pins, he could hit to the center of greens until he could figure it out. As he said,

    while I am warming up before a round of golf I am just trying to understand my parameters that day so if I need to, I can take away 20 percent of my game, cut the golf course in half, and limit my errors. It isn’t me at my best, but a lot of times it takes bogey out of the equation, and lets me survive until I can work it out on the range afterward.

    Tiger Woods’s pregame preparation is similar. Tiger is always guided by the philosophy to “prepare for the worst, but expect the best.” Tiger knows that we all go through daily fluctuations. We are just a bit different from one day to the next; some days we are tighter or stiffer, or our tempo may be a bit quicker, or we are perhaps not seeing the greens the same way we did the day before.
    On that point great champions are consistent: Because there is daily fluctuation built into the human condition, their goal is to understand themselves to the degree that they know what they are able to do on a given day.
    Indeed, self-knowledge and self-understanding are what allow Tiger to know whether he has to play with his A, B, or C game. Thus, asking questions rooted in managing your games before a round of golf is the first key to effectively preparing to win golf tournaments.

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    matt kuchar: scoring blind

    Recall that Matt Kuchar won his first pro tournament, the 2002 Honda Classic, by shooting 66 in the final round. Of the round, he said,

    I didn’t really look at what scores the leaders shot, how many back I was. I went out there to the first tee, hit the first tee shot. I didn’t look at a leaderboard and didn’t know how I stood. And today, I didn’t look at a leaderboard until 17, and I actually . . . I got in the scorer’s tent and I’m adding up my scores, and, of course, you go hole-by-hole. And I add up my scores, compared to what the scorecard says on each 9, and I see I shoot a 35 on the front. And I add up the back nine on the little marker’s scores of my notes, and I see, 1-under, 2-under, 3-under, 4-under, 5-under? Is that right? Some good memories were brought back, talking some golf psychology earlier this week. He said, “Matt just put your head down. Don’t worry about where you stand. Don’t worry about how somebody else stands. Go play golf, add it up at the end, and if you win, that’s great.”
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    on the tee box: what is the best strategy for this hole?

    As various books on golf psychology point out, two of the most common problems that golfers face are getting too far ahead of themselves by thinking of outcomes, and dwelling on the past by thinking of what has happened on previous holes. In other words, one of the biggest challenges that golfers face is
staying in the present
. As it usually happens, bad holes carry over to create more bad holes. Bad putts on previous greens translate into bad drives on subsequent tees, and oftentimes golfers are so wrapped up in a previous hole that their mind is not focused on how best to play the current hole.
    As I have explained, even golfers who know that they need to stay in the present don’t necessarily know
how
to stay in the present. The solution is not to simply tell yourself to stay in the present. Telling yourself to stay in the present is like telling yourself “Don’t worry” when trying to give a speech in front of your peers. Telling yourself not to worry usually means that you are worrying, and that is likely to create more worry. Telling yourself to stay in the present usually means you aren’t in the present. There has to be a better way.
    That better way is to do the things you naturally do at those times when staying in the present is easy. When golf is easy, golfers ask themselves the right questions automatically. They don’t have to think about asking themselves natural questions like “How do I want to play this hole” or “How do I want to play this shot?” They just do it. They do not need to remind themselves to stay in the present because they
are
in the present, asking questions that focus their mind on hitting shots around a golf course.

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    words of a champion: raymond floyd

    What would make you think Raymond Floyd would win the 1986 U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills? At one point in the final round he was only one of the eight players tied for the lead in the championship. And of those tied for the lead, he was the only one who had blown a