Golf Flow

weeks in a row, he appreciated the chance to play 11. And in the 11th week, he won!
    You would think that after shooting 59 and winning for the first time in three years, Stuart Appleby would have wanted to take a break from the game, that he would have felt a sense of relief, as if a burden had been lifted from his shoulders. But his new perspective took root, and he wasn’t just talking different. He
was
different. So what did he do after shooting 59? He played the next two weeks in a row.
    He finally relearned the lesson from legendary teacher Harvey Penick: You never
have
to play golf. Golf is a privilege. You
get
to play golf. Stuart would not have learned this lesson had he not gone through his prolonged struggles. After he began to regain perspective, he developed appreciation. After he developed appreciation, the game let him back in. There are lessons in there for all of us.

Chapter 13
Camilo Villegas
    Maintaining Perspective During the Highs and Lows
    Bill Streicher/Icon SMI
    Bobby Jones famously said, “I never learned a thing from a tournament I won.” He was, of course, referring to a theme I’ve repeated throughout this book, namely that although bad golf can leave a very sour taste in your mouth, the implicit lessons are invaluable in the process of getting better. In the words of author Daniel Coyle, accelerating the learning velocity of skill development requires that we accept failure as part of the learning process: “Struggle is not optional—it’s neurologically required: in order to get your skill circuit to fire optimally, you must by definition fire the circuit suboptimally; you must make mistakes and pay attention to those mistakes” (Coyle 2009, p. 43).
    From this perspective it can be very instructive to study the career of my client and friend Camilo Villegas. By doing so, you will be able to understand the process that top golfers employ to keep their games razor sharp, appreciate the difficulty of keeping your game functioning at high levels over long periods, and learn perspectives that I believe will be helpful as you seek to increase your own learning velocity and improve your game.
    Anyone who has studied the career trajectories of golfers knows that golf is a game that has built-in highs and lows. Over the course of a 20- or 30-year career, every golfer can expect to go through various stages. Even Major champions such as Jack Nicklaus, Mark O’Meara, Ernie Els, Vijay Singh, and Retief Goosen experience fluctuations in performance. The reasons for these ebbs and flows in a career are often complicated. They can be motivational, technical, injury related, equipment related, or just a function of the natural variability that comes with refining the craft for a very long time. Regardless of the specific cause, the career trajectory of a golfer inevitably rises and falls.
    Fluctuations in performance are not isolated to golf. As documented in his film
Letting Go
, 11-time surfing world champion Kelly Slater went through several peaks and valleys in his heralded career. From 1992 through 1997, his wins rose year after year: 28 wins in 6 years, averaging 4.7 wins per year. His peak year was 1996, when he won 9 times. What followed was a 5-year stretch (1998 through 2002) in which he won a total of 3 times. Think about that: 9 wins in 1996, 7 wins in 1997, 0 wins in 1998 and 2000, and only 1 win each in 1999, 2001, and 2002. But was his career over? Hardly. After absorbing his 5-year slump, Slater began winning regularly again in 2003 and in 2008 won 6 times. If you graph Slater’s wins, the pattern is similar to what you’d expect from most great athletes, especially golfers ( figure 13.1 ).

Figure 13.1 Surfer Kelly Slater’s highs and lows from 1992 through 2012.
    In the words of world champion skier Bode Miller, professional sports entail “building years” and “performance years” (Miller 2005). Building years are when athletes work out the kinks in their game so that they can have performance years when all that work shows up on the scoreboard. Thus, rather than trying to avoid minor slumps, setbacks, and building years, it is typically smarter for athletes to prepare their minds to go through these ups and downs and keep their confidence intact.
    If there is one feature of golf at the highest level that most amateurs are unaware of, it is how infrequently golfers actually have their A-games and how much time they spend searching for the key to unlocking their