Fearless Golf: Conquering the Mental Game

failures in order to avoid anxiety and for their successes in order to take more credit than they rightly deserve.

    DiMarco: Perspective and Attribution

    Chris DiMarco talked to me about the turnaround in his game, going from barely being able to make a living to playing on a Ryder Cup team and contending for major championships. It’s not the successes that he builds from, it’s the acceptance of past failures.

    The biggest thing is, you have to be able to identify your faults and learn from your mistakes. Too many guys are afraid to take an honest look at themselves and why they aren’t winning. I have a good friend who should have won a tournament a couple of years ago. The guy who won went out and shot 31 on the last nine to win, but my buddy shot 3 over par to lose by two shots. If he had played the last nine like he played all week, 1- or 2-under, he would have won the tournament. But he never admitted that. He would say, “I ran into a buzz saw.” But he didn’t run into a buzz saw. He never admitted it to himself.

    For me, I remember the putt I missed to lose the International in 2001. It took me a long time to get over missing that putt. But you know what, I choked. I gagged it. If you are man enough to admit it, identify it, then you can fix it. If you don’t admit it, you don’t learn. Next time, my buddy won’t be prepared to deal with and play with a lead. On that point, I have people tell me, “Gosh, you should have made the Ryder Cup. You got screwed.” I say, “I didn’t get screwed. If I finished in the top ten I would have made it. Bottom line. That’s it. I had a chance. I could have hit the shots and played my way in, and I didn’t. I am not waiting to be a counting stick and rely on someone else to do me a favor. I can’t control those things. But I can control my play, and that’s what I’ve got to do. Control myself and play well enough to make the team.

    Fittingly, DiMarco found himself in a similar situation heading into the last weeks of the points race for the 2004 Ryder Cup team. Again, at the International, he let a weekend lead slip away. He came to the PGA the next week needing a big finish to earn his way into the top ten. DiMarco rallied on Sunday to get into a playoff. Although he didn’t win in the extra holes, he was proud of the way he handled himself and the emotions down the stretch: “As poor of a feeling as I had last weekend, my feeling this weekend was very good. I felt very much in control of my game. . . . I can promise you I did not hit one shot this week that I wasn’t ready to hit.”
    Even more important, despite the disgust of failing the week before, despite the pressure of a playoff, despite the disappointment of just falling short on the game’s biggest stage, DiMarco’s attitude at the end was that of the mastery golfer. Though we had never worked together before, he called me Sunday night to talk about what he could learn and how he could prepare himself to play his best. We talked every night throughout the week about his weekend fade at the International and the pressure of playing for a spot on the Ryder Cup team at the PGA Championship. I was thrilled not only with how he came through, but with how he responded to the whole experience and the gamut of emotions he felt. He told
Golf World
magazine, “My motivation was to prove myself, and I did. A lot of people pay a lot of money for drugs to have a feeling like I had out there. That is the best feeling in golf.”

    Finding the “right” attribution can require thoughtful introspection. We may have to admit an anxiety-inducing personal weakness as a cause for a particular failure or a reason outside ourself for a particular success. Two things are clear, however. First, only by making the right attribution for our lack of success can we hope to correctly identify the problem responsible for our failure, correct such problems, and set ourselves on the road to improved performance. Similarly, only by making the right attribution for our successful endeavors can we continue to execute the behaviors that led to our success. Clearly, golfers must always be able to, as Tiger Woods occasionally says, “keep it real.”
    Keeping it real is a necessary injunction in all of life’s endeavors, and certainly in golf. Once one has been true to that injunction, it is equally important to remember that unstable, internal, and controllable attributions are far better than stable, external,