Golf Flow

our bodies change, our beliefs evolve over time, as do our cognitive processes and personal motivations. As such, if you plan to be a competitive golfer, you need to develop the mind-set of growing with the game and letting your game evolve as you evolve as a person. Thus, the overarching mind-set to get into flow is, quite literally, to
flow
with your own growth, development, and change.
    Steve Stricker understands the need to evolve. His name is probably familiar to most readers of this book. Steve has won 12 times on the PGA Tour, has 20 professional wins worldwide, and has been a member of three Ryder Cup teams and four Presidents Cup Teams. After joining the PGA Tour in 1994, Steve had seven good years before falling into a deep and well-publicized slump. After all but disappearing from the PGA Tour scene for a number of years, he was granted a sponsors’ exemption in 2006. Making the most of it, he went on to earn seven top 10 finishes that year. He was PGA Tour comeback player of the year in both 2006 and 2007.

To let their true talents emerge, golfers must often be patient and let their game evolve, as Steve Stricker has done.

    © PA Photos
    What happened behind the scenes, during the years when Steve was off the radar, is instructive. Of those dark days he admitted,
There were no physical injuries, but mental injuries there might have been, I’m not sure. I was obviously struggling with confidence and everything that goes when you’re not playing that well. I just put in a lot of time this winter. I worked hard at it.
    In 2006, when his game began showing signs of life again, he was constantly asked about his slump. It seemed that every time he was asked about it, he delivered some sort of lesson that he’d learned along the way. At the 2006 Booz Allen Classic, Steve provided some insight:
I just continued to practice the things that I was doing this winter. They’re starting to click. It makes sense to me. I’m understanding my swing again, what I’m doing, what I’m not doing. It’s almost like another phase. I mean, you can take any player, you kind of go through phases out here. A friend of mine was telling me last week, we were both talking about it, I started off my career and had some success, I was building up, then I kind of went into another phase where I kind of went to the bottom, had some good years in between. I’m starting to feel like my game’s coming around, my attitude’s coming around. I think it’s just the whole feeling or perception that I have about my game, my family, everything, is going in the right direction. Kind of a combination of things.
    As his game began to build momentum, he would sit in the press rooms and discuss how his perspective on the game had changed, what he’d learned about his swing, how important it was to play one shot at a time, and what it felt like beating balls from out of a trailer, out into the frozen Wisconsin snow. Through his adversity, Steve evolved technically, emotionally, and intellectually. He rolled with the ups and downs of the game and kept playing. By his admission, his motivation came from his love for the game.

Golfing Today for Tomorrow
    Our development as people travels through time. Although people have many perspectives on the exact nature of time, one of the more popular has to do with what is called the relational theory of time, which suggests that events do not take place in time, but rather that it’s the other way around. Time is defined by the order of the events that take place. As such, life becomes the main aspect of existence, rather than time.
    Einstein was aware that time is not what it seems, which is why his theory of relativity suggests that time is not only relative but also variable and flexible. Scientists who study time closely are convinced that time is not unidirectional and that, mathematically at least, time can be slowed and may even be able to be reversed.
    But for now that all remains theoretical, and for the purposes of this book we can say that time interacts with our psyches and with the game of golf. And here is something that is worth thinking about. For all the space that I’ve dedicated in this book to time, there is no such thing as now. Beyond an abstract concept, now does not exist because as soon as you think of a moment, that moment has become the past. In the words of Kai Krause, “Everything is about the anticipation of the moment and the memory of the moment, but not the