Fearless Golf: Conquering the Mental Game

Thursday. I don’t care what they do. I know that if I play my game, I am going to be there. Golfers who think about the field and the nonsense, the things beyond their control, that’s ridiculous.

    We do not have control over the behavior of those we play with, but we do have control over the degree to which we let them affect our own golf game.

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    words of a champion: jim furyk, 2003 u.s. open

    How do you win a major championship? You stick with it. You keep believing in the possibility of your potential. And you are sure of it, even without a whole lot of evidence to support it and maybe more than a little to contradict it. Jim Furyk knew winning a major was his potential. He wasn’t having an incredible stretch of winning in 2003. He had played very well, but he hadn’t actually won anything. But the courage of his convictions pushed him when he arrived at Olympia Fields Country Club for the U.S. Open. That courage was a comfort in a pressure cooker. He let the press know how that steady approach led him to winning the U.S. Open. This exchange from the champion’s press conference shows that sense of self-efficacy quite clearly.

    Q: Fluff [Cowan, Furyk’s caddie] said you were more relaxed this week than he had ever seen you. Why was that and how big a factor was that for you this week? Did you have a sense that something big was going to happen this week?

    JIM FURYK: Not after the first nine of my Thursday round. But coming in this week—yeah, I was pretty relaxed. I wasn’t hitting the ball as well as I would have liked to on the weekend before coming here, Monday, Tuesday, not great. But every day I just kept improving, kept getting better. My whole goal was—I talked to my wife a couple of times last week, Thursday, Friday, and I talked about winning the golf tournament. And I really—I’ve had such a good year. I’ve had some confidence in my game. I really wanted to come in here, not focusing on playing well, I wanted to come in focusing on winning the golf tournament and what I needed to do to do that.

    In the past at the U.S. Open, I played a bad round at Pebble Beach, I played a bad round at Southern Hills and at Bethpage, for the last three Open championships, and I let the conditions, I let the course setup, I let things bother me and I didn’t play well because of it. I came in here this week knowing that I would have to improve on that if I wanted to play well this week. I felt the physical part of my game was in pretty good shape. I felt like my mental attitude has been good all year. But if I was going to improve on my play in the last three U.S. Opens, I had to have a better attitude. I was going to have to improve on my attitude, and it showed this week.

    Think about the next thing you want to accomplish with your golf game. Certainly, you have to put in the work to develop your skill to a certain point. But you also have to commit to believing that the physical skills are there. Have faith in your skills and you’ll have it in yourself. Let the natural ability take over, instead of letting the circumstances inhibit your skills.
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    the story of dave:
attributions and waggles

    I had spent the early part of spring working with a talented, nationally ranked junior golfer who was struggling with his game (we’ll call him Dave). Dave had spent months in a self-described “slump” and his scoring average was up five strokes from the year before. As happens with many golfers, his confidence was shot, his attitude was negative, and his enjoyment for playing and practicing golf was diminishing by the day. In a lot of ways, his attitude was no different than what you might find in the average golfer struggling with his enjoyment of the game.
    The first question I asked him is the same I ask of all golfers who come to see me; it is the same question I ask when they leave after treatment is completed (when they are hopefully playing better): “Why do you think you are playing the way you are playing? What is the cause of your poor play these days?” In this case Dave was attributing his poor play to incompetent teachers, errant weather patterns, and a series of bad bounces he’d gotten in tournaments. All external attributions over which he had little control. No wonder he was feeling helpless. In his mind, the Golf Gods were orchestrating events to sabotage his game and he had no say in the matter.
    Over the course of the next couple weeks I watched Dave practice and