Golf Flow

is no second-guessing. It is just going to happen. It will happen! And it does. And it’s neat.
    Curtis Strange, 17-time PGA Tour winner, 2-time U.S. Open champion
There is no thinking involved whatsoever. No extra thinking. Just very calm. A sense of knowing. I don’t hope or wish. I just have a sense of knowing. Even before I hit the shot, I know where the ball is going to go. I am not trying to hope it there, or wish it there, or guide it there. There is this sense that I know where it is going to go and that it is going to be good. One hundred percent I know where the ball is going to go. I know the club I’ve pulled is the right club. I know exactly where the wind blows. It’s a bit uncanny but you really do feel that certain . . . in that much control.
    Charles Howell III, 3-time PGA Tour winner
    The more that you try to control things, the further away you tend to get from having control. Consequently, overcontrol leads to clutter, to tension, and ultimately to poor golf shots and even worse putts. What are you supposed to make of the great clichés of golf, such as “Free it up,” “Let it go,” or “Let it happen” rather than “Make it happen”? We all know what coaches are alluding to when they say these things, but how do we get beyond the metaphorical? PGA Tour player Bryce Molder helps us refine our understanding:
I want to focus on making a good swing and not caring where the ball ends up. I don’t want to get in the habit of trying to guide a ball anywhere, so I have to care about trusting my swing without caring, per se, where it lands.
    Hence, the most control that you’ll ever have in golf is by giving up trying to control outcomes and trying to overcontrol motor patterns such as putting and golf swing—an oxymoron in any language but also a truism. On this note of puzzlement we move to the next paradox in the flow states of PGA Tour golfers: the paradox of effort.

Chapter 3
Effort
    Whether they play the game regularly as competitive golfers or play for recreational or social reasons, all participants of golf agree that golf is a difficult game. People may use words like
beautiful
,
fun
,
complex
,
maddening
,
sublime
,
addictive
, and even
fulfilling
, but few players ever use the word
easy
to describe golf on any sort of long-term, regular basis.
    Of course, many people believe that certain people were born to play golf, that the game comes easily for them, and that some athletes are simply naturals. Indeed, many people view golfing royalty much like other royalty and assume that the throne was conferred upon superior players as a birthright or a happy accident of genetics. Those who excel at golf are viewed in the same manner as kids who are considered child prodigies in music or academics.
    The media have fueled this misperception. Images of a two-year old Tiger Woods hitting golf balls on the
Mike Douglas Show
in 1978 are now part of our collective consciousness. More recently, video of a young Rory McIlroy swinging a golf club in his living room at the age of three was shown on television, and his swing then was compared with his current swing. The conclusion seemed to be that Rory was born great, that he was born with the swing that was winning him all those tournaments. A common assumption is that greatness is conferred upon our top golfers rather than earned through hard work, practice, and dedication and that these players are exempt from setbacks, adversity, slumps, and the full spectrum of distractions and emotions that regularly plague golfers all across the world.
    Nothing could be further from the truth.
    When he met Tiger at the 2010 Ryder Cup, McIlroy realized that even he had bought into some of the hype:
You put him on such a high pedestal. And then you meet the guy. . . . Before I’d met him, I thought he was super human. But once you meet him, you realize he’s just a normal guy who works hard on his game, and gets the most out of it.
    In a landmark paper that is widely studied in the arena of performance psychology, Anders Ericsson popularized the concept of the 10,000-hour rule. Ericsson argues that expert performance is the result of a tremendous amount of deliberate practice. Specifically, according to Ericsson, it takes 10,000 hours (20 hours for 50 weeks a year for 10 years = 10,000) of deliberate practice to become an expert in almost anything. Although debate continues within academic circles about the exact numbers, researchers generally agree that