Fearless Golf: Conquering the Mental Game

and uncontrollable attributions. I have already explained how attributions to inborn talent or ability are invariably problematic. Luck is another dubious attribution. Take it from Thomas Jefferson himself, who observed that “I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.”
    It does us no service as human beings to believe that the fruits of our endeavors are fixed, at the mercy of forces outside ourselves, and beyond our control. Such beliefs are a recipe for continual surrender and resignation in the face of adversity. They gnaw at our mastery beliefs and undermine our self-efficacy. They most certainly represent the first step on the road to accepting defeat. In keeping with the theme that I have tried to maintain throughout this book, such self-defeating attributions also foster cowardice and help ensure that we will succumb to fear rather than drive that scoundrel several hundred yards dead center down the next fairway.

B ecoming adept at golf requires a great many skills, but more than anything it requires a habitual devotion to improvement. It’s the idea of
kaizen
we talked about earlier, that zest to get better even if there is no immediate reward for the effort. When you think of this kind of commitment in golf, one great champion immediately comes to mind: Ben Hogan. Hogan once said that there were not enough hours in a day to practice all the shots you’d need to play your best golf. And, in truth, those words in many ways became his motto. Curt Sampson’s delightful history of golf’s glorious 1960 season,
The Eternal Summer
, paints a vivid portrait of the Hogan work ethic. Hogan may have been a perfectionist, but as Sampson describes in the book, his work—or the habit of perfecting his work—was a passion. “Despite appearances,” Sampson writes, “practice for Hogan was not self-flagellation; in a way, it was not even work.” As Hogan once said in
Golf Magazine
, “You hear stories about my beating my brains in practicing, but the truth is, I was enjoying myself. I couldn’t wait to get up in the morning so I could go hit balls.”
    Hogan embraced practice to the point of habit. Because of his dedication, great shots hit under the pressure of competition would be no different than the thousands of similar shots he had hit on the practice range leading up to an event. It is that same Hoganesque passion that you see in Vijay Singh, who became the number-one golfer in the world at age forty-one, the oldest player ever to reach that height for the first time in his career. Singh’s commitment can be seen in the two workouts a day he does to maintain his fitness level, but it is most visible in the three-foot-long divot lines that gouge the area of the practice range where he’s been working. Grooving his long, powerful swing has come from a habitual devotion to improvement, exactly what the golfer he admires most brought to the game. Said Singh of Hogan,

    I never met the person, but I’ve read every book he wrote. He never stopped practicing. There is a guy who worked. He found it in the dirt. That’s the way I want to be.

    There is a lot more satisfaction when you try to find it, and you find it yourself. . . . I just enjoy hitting good shots. I told my caddie a long time ago—I hit a shot in one tournament, it was great, just the way I want to hit it—and I told him, “If I keep doing that, I don’t need to play because it’s such a great feeling.” That’s what I like to do on the range. It doesn’t happen but maybe a few times in a whole session, but that’s what I’m trying to achieve.

    Now, the word “habit” has been liberally sprinkled throughout this book’s pages. Aristotle wrote that “we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, thus, is not an act, but a habit.” No less a philosopher than a football coach, Vince Lombardi observed that winning is habitual but that, unfortunately, so is losing. It was William James, the father of American psychology, who first brought the concept of habit to the forefront of psychological thinking, pointing out that “habits are the stuff of which behavior consists.”
    James argued that the vast proportion of an adult’s behavior consists of habitual actions learned during formative stages of skill development. In other words, there is a time during which our behavior is
elastic
, simply because we are in the process of learning. Once the learning has taken place, however, our behavior hardens and we begin