Golf Flow

himself over to the experience, Matt won his first PGA Tour event.
    To gain insight into the shift that took place for Matt Kuchar, let’s examine the following passage from his postround transcript:
    Reporter: Take us through the emotions of the day when you started the final round. You had Joey in front of you and Mike Weir, and you knew it was going to be a shootout today, didn’t you?
    Matt Kuchar: I wasn’t paying much attention to any of that. To win the event, I was sure I needed to go low. But I never put a number in mind. I never paid attention. I didn’t really look at what scores the leaders shot, how many back I was. I went out there to the first tee and I hit the first tee shot. I didn’t look at a leaderboard and didn’t know how I stood. The 17th green is the first leaderboard I looked at.
    Actually, I got in the scorer’s tent and I’m adding up my scores, and, of course, you go hole by hole. And I add up my scores, compared to what the scorecard says on each nine, and I see I shot a 35 on the front. And I add up the back nine on the little marker’s scores of my notes, and I see “1-under, 2-under, 3-under, 4-under, 5-under.” Is that right? I had to triple-check that I shot 5-under on the backside. I didn’t even know that I went that low on the back. I must have triple- or quadruple-checked that that was the proper score. And sure enough, going about it just like Coach Heppler said my freshman year, six years ago. And I came out with a victory. It was exciting for me.
    Note that some of Matt’s observations seem to be in direct opposition to his goal-oriented behaviors.

Focal and Peripheral Awareness
    Like Matt, golfers in flow pay close attention to the task at hand, take in events around them that are helpful or neutral, and are immune to distractions and pressures. Strange as it may sound, the ability to do this isn’t unusual. Let’s look at the science.
    Consciousness theorists often refer to two states of awareness: focal and peripheral. Focal awareness occurs when we concentrate on something at the forefront of our awareness. For example, someone watching a Hitchcock film in a darkened theatre is usually demonstrating focal awareness, especially during the most dramatic and suspenseful scenes. Peripheral awareness occurs when we track marginal or background events while focusing on something else. Using the same example, the person watching that Hitchcock film might be marginally aware of the smell of popcorn, spot an imperfection in the screen, or notice that the temperature in the movie theatre is a little chilly.
    When golfers are in this zone of peripheral awareness, when they are attending to things other than their score or the mechanics of their swing and letting automaticity take place, they often have their best rounds of golf.
    When discussing their flow experiences on the golf course, golfers often report feeling hyperaware of everything around them, even though their attention is focused exclusively on the task of playing one shot at a time. Thus, the paradox of awareness in flow is that athletes’ attention focuses like a laser on the only thing that really matters: the current shot. While they are hyperfocused, however, they are also able to process, on some level, many features of the surrounding environment—a breeze, a change in temperature, a shadow, a distant sound—or any subtle change in their internal states, such as metabolism, mood, energy, rhythm, or the tempo of themselves or their playing partners.
    Curtis Strange, 2-time U.S. Open champion, 17-time PGA Tour winner, and NCAA champion, describes the experience this way:
Everything slows down. Honest to God, I am so aware of everything, but then very little matters, if that makes sense. Everything slows down. The positive thoughts are there, and there are no secondary thoughts.

Looking Inward and Outward
    Flow researchers suggest that the merging of awareness is not only between focal and peripheral but also between internal and external. Specifically, they suggest that people go through their lives with their focus largely attuned to one of two things: their internal frame of mind or the physical undertaking that is right in front of them. In other words, people are either internally self-focused or externally task focused. This idea may explain why golf can be so simple for young golfers. In the tender years before they’ve developed a full sense of themselves, they can simply focus on the task