Golf Flow

the education of the game that either I learned from Coach Smith or I learned in the course of the coaching staffs that I’ve been involved with. Tex Winter was the most helpful because he was probably the one who would criticize my game more than anybody, and to me that’s a plus and driving force.
    Critiquing a pupil is an essential task of great teachers. Nadia Boulanger was the first woman to conduct several American symphony orchestras and was the principal influence on such greats as Aaron Copeland, Quincy Jones, and Elliot Carter. When asked about the teacher–student relationship, she provided one of my favorite quotations about developing excellence in people: “Loving a child doesn’t mean giving in to all his whims; to love him is to bring out the best in him and to teach him to love what is difficult.”
    You can approach a double-breaking, downhill-sliding putt as a fun challenge rather than an irritant. You can approach rainy, windy conditions as a chance to test yourself in various weather conditions. You can choose to interpret a month of poor scoring as a way that the game provides you feedback on your weaknesses and then view your task as a fun challenge to identify and correct that weakness. The bottom line is that golf is a game full of endless challenges, and you have the choice to decide how you want to approach those challenges.
    Some of those challenges are obvious, and some are not. We go through stretches of playing poorly because we are steep with our irons. We know the cause, and we go about correcting it mechanically. Just as often we go through stretches of playing poorly and have no idea what is causing the erratic drives, the inconsistent irons, or the off-line putting. Those times can certainly be frustrating, but they can also provide the impetus to learn the hidden details and nuances within our game and within ourselves. Contrary to what some cynics think, the game doesn’t pick on people, although I do understand the sentiment. In a game that is partly determined by luck, it can often seem that we’re getting none of the favorable bounces, that we’re always hitting into the wind, or that we’re always getting the unfavorable side of a draw. This frustration with the randomness of the game can be exacerbated as we watch an opponent’s ball bounce off a tree into the middle of the fairway or see his mis-hit drive somehow stay in bounds. The truth of the matter is that golf is a fair game and no one gets a free pass.
    The great American author Gore Vidal once observed that, on an eternal timeline, “everything happens to everyone if there is only time enough.” And so in golf, given enough time, everyone goes through just about every experience the game can offer: the goods, the bads, the highs, and the lows. During some rounds we get every bounce and every break, and in other rounds we get none of the breaks. At times we turn a 68 into a 74, and at other times we turn a 74 into a 68. An important turning point for many golfers comes when they stop trying to find ways to make the game easy and instead turn their attention to learning how to manage the game’s difficulties better. In that regard, no one has the responsibility (not me, not a swing instructor, not the competition committee at your club) to make the game easy for you.
    The best thing that I, or any teacher, can do is make you comfortable with the fact that golf is often fickle, unpredictable, and difficult and then provide you with strategies to enable you to manage yourself and your game through the variability. But as precarious as the game is, it is also honest, fair, and rewarding. On an eternal timeline, golf will reward good thinking as surely as it will punish bad thinking. And if you can be comfortable with the idiosyncratic, unpredictable, demanding nature of golf at the advanced level, then you will have taken an important first step toward allowing yourself to get into flow.
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    Laying Down a Pattern
    The following is an e-mail that I sent to a golfer during the 2011 season. It depicts how mastery golf is actualized, how we try to absorb adversity, and what types of things we consistently do to keep our mental tools sharp and functional.
You always hear me say how I want you to “lay down a good pattern” or “pay attention to the pattern you’re laying.” I realize that you may not know exactly what I mean when I say that so I thought I’d give you a quick explanation.
    A popular saying