Fearless Golf: Conquering the Mental Game

powerful education that lies at the foundation of a commitment to improve.

    The Attribution Tripod

    The attributions for success and failure that golfers make typically fall into three key categories. The key to consistent improvement is to accurately identify which of the following factors are responsible for your golfing performance.

    1. Personal/physical factors include individual health and fitness issues as well as swing mechanics and things such as grip, alignment, ball position, grip pressure, hip and shoulder turns.

    2. Psychological factors include attributions, achievement orientations, self-efficacy, anxiety, trusting your swing, and the other ideas covered in this book.

    3. Equipment includes drivers, fairway woods, putters, irons, wedges, and the golf ball, maybe even shoes, socks, hat, and glove, depending on how much uncertainty has invaded a golfer’s mind.

    One of the patterns that is important is the amount of control golfers feel they have over the things that influence their games. Indeed, because control is the foundation of our confidence,
believing we can control the things that influence our golf
is essential to playing with confidence.

----
    words of a champion: jack nicklaus

    In 1980, Jack Nicklaus was coming off his worst year as a pro, and his detractors were predicting that his time as a dominant player might be over. But Nicklaus, at age forty, still had the desire to be great, especially at the greatest events. In 1980, he won both the U.S. Open, setting a scoring record, and the PGA Championship, by a record-setting seven-stroke margin. It prompted one scoreboard operator at the U.S. Open at Baltusrol to post the phrase “Jack Is Back” next to Nicklaus’s winning score.

    How did the greatest player in the history of the game come back? Well, what’s interesting is that even the great ones fight fear and even the great ones need to be reenergized. Nicklaus explained those developments in a 1980 article he wrote for
Golf Digest
:

    It begins with missing the short putts—the four- and five- and six-footers you’ve mostly made when it mattered. Pretty soon you begin to fear leaving yourself a long putt or a chip shot, which in turn puts heavy pressure on your iron play. Then, because you feel you have to hit every approach shot stone dead, you become afraid of missing fairways, and pretty soon you’re playing scared on every shot, and you
are
missing fairways
and
greens, and pitch shots and chips and the short putts become even more important. . . . And the noose keeps tightening until eventually all your confidence is gone and you’ve completely lost the knack of scoring. It happened to me the last two years.

    It gradually ate into the rest of my game until finally I suspected every element of it, when really the only serious problem was my putting stroke.

    Nicklaus went on to explain the work he did to improve his game, but then he also explained something more essential. It shows that Nicklaus was the prototypical
kaizen
golfer, striving for continual self-improvement, despite not seeing immediate results. His potentially disastrous 1979 was a learning experience and a confirmation of his decision to play less and still excel. He set his goals and would not be deterred. He committed to an extensive evaluation of every aspect of his game, focusing particularly on his putting stroke. Similar to the way Nicklaus always played a round of golf, he had a game plan and he would not be deterred from it.

    “When we arrived in Baltusrol for the Open, I felt truly confident about every element of my game for the first time in at least two years,” he said. Mentally, the change in attitude was even more decisive.

    I came to a conclusion that I could only be true to golf and the all the people and institutions in it if I were first true to myself. I expected excellence of myself, and golf had come to expect—and deserved—excellence of me. Therefore, I should not play unless I could give my absolute best.

    I made two mistakes in 1979, but the number of tournaments I played wasn’t one of them. The first and certainly worst mistake was, to put it bluntly, complacency. I assumed I could go on living on my talent without really working on my game. . . . Mistake No. 2 came when with the big cut in tournaments came a cut in practice and playing time of almost half.

    I know now for sure that if I want to keep my place in golf it will take ongoing work as well as talent.

    If