Golf Flow

essentially reducing the communication between motor and nonmotor regions of the brain. A gradual withdrawal of conscious, particularly verbal, thoughts about the golf swing occurs as a golfer slides into flow. As control gradually rises, the game of golf should feel more effortless.
    Because the purpose of this chapter is descriptive rather than prescriptive, I will wait to expand on how you can harness the power of this effortless effort. For now I simply ask that you make sense of effortless effort and appreciate your brain’s ability to myelinate and ultimately, the power of automaticity.
    Here are some other descriptions of flow that reflect the sense of effortless excellence that golfers experience.
When I’m in it, golf is effortless. Things just seem to happen rather than you working hard to make them happen. It becomes a more natural, more rhythmic flow to your game or your stroke or your swing than trying to be repetitive and mechanical.
    Davis Love III, 20-time PGA Tour winner
You get over it, and there is really not any doubt in your mind how you want to play the putt for whatever reason. You just look up and you are seeing right where you want to putt it. Every putt that has break, you are just seeing right to that point where you want to putt it until it breaks and your speed is really good. It is kind of like playing with the bank’s money in Vegas. You just don’t feel like you can lose. You got the big “cush.”
    John Huston, 7-time PGA Tour winner
Effortless. 100 percent effortless. I’d say effortful is trying too hard. Every shot feels forced. There’s a “try” element in the game, in the shot. Flow is totally effortless. There is no try. There is no anything. It just is. It’s absolutely zero trying. No effort. Zero. It just happens.
    Charles Howell III, 3-time PGA Tour winner
To me when things are flowing, things seem to go so easy, it is effortless. Calmness, no panic, everything is under control. I think it is when effort and talent come together is when you reach flow.
    Hal Sutton, 14-time PGA Tour winner
    What an elegant insight Hal provides: “when effort and talent come together.” In a sense, that combination is precisely what generates flow—a great deal of past effort combined with the inherent talent, and the trust in both the effort and the talent—to allow the combination to pay off.

Chapter 4
Awareness
    Everything about golf indicates that the athletes are in pursuit of an objective. Whether it is to shoot a particular score, win a match, or practice a certain shot, golfers behave as if achieving their objective is all they have in mind. This purposeful, outcome-oriented behavior is even more prominent in competition in which diversions that draw attention to the score are plentiful. On the PGA Tour, money lists, leaderboards, and various statistics that measure every possible outcome abound—scoring average, proximity to the hole, putting averages, which side of the fairway tends to be missed, up and down percentage, strokes gained putting, and FedEx Cup points!
    In this results- and outcome-driven context the paradox of awareness emerges. Although people are going after outcomes, they completely lose track of the outcomes, get lost in the moment, and turn themselves over to the experience that they are having. In these cases, playing golf becomes almost ancillary to enjoyment of and immersion in the experience of the moment.
    Consider the case of Matt Kuchar at the 2002 Honda Classic, where he shot a final-round 66, including a back-nine 30, to claim his first PGA Tour victory. Here are the facts. Matt signed up for the tournament. He drove to the golf course every single day that week and practiced. He was in a competitive frame of mind. He knew where he stood at the end of each day. He was, by all measures, engaging in what psychologists call purposeful, goal-directed behavior. He was there to achieve a desired, measureable outcome: winning a PGA Tour event. All of his explicit behaviors that week demonstrated that Kuchar had an outcome in mind and was working toward it.
    But during that final round of golf, a change took place. Matt’s awareness shifted to a quiet, calm, transcendent state of being immersed in the totality of the experience. Instead of becoming more focused, more intense, and more attuned to his score, Matt went blurry. He relaxed, zoned out, and detached from the intensity and pressure of the back nine on Sunday. And because he turned