Golf Flow

Your touch on the greens is perfect. And your mind is quiet. If you were describing yourself as a piano, you would describe yourself as perfectly tuned. Before you know it, you’re walking off the ninth green, and you realize that you haven’t made a single bogey, that you’ve just shot your lowest nine-hole score ever, and that along the way, you’d lost track of your score. Your last realization is that you are also late for dinner because you’d also lost track of time.
    Does that sound familiar? I’ve heard assorted versions of that story from countless golfers over the years. They begin a round of golf with no expectations of shooting a score or playing a particular way. They are on the golf course simply to enjoy the process of playing. To a degree, they mentally check out, and before they know it they are enjoying their afternoon, immersed in their round of golf. They are lost in the moment, lost in the task or experience, oblivious to the pressure associated with passing time. In fact, as they are playing golf, the way that they experience time changes.

Bullet Time
    If you’ve seen the movie
The Matrix
you are familiar with a special effect that filmmakers use known as bullet time. Bullet time provides the viewer with an alteration of time and space that parallels the real experiences of flow. Bullet time allows viewers to perceive typically imperceptible and unfilmable things (such as a flying bullet) by slowing them down. Bullet time also changes camera angles so that viewers can view the experience from outside themselves—experiencing the moment as both subject and object—all in a slow dimension of time. Generally, golfers in flow experience something akin to bullet time. Time on the course moves slowly, almost eerily so, and sometimes time even seems to stand still, such as when Phil Mickelson won the 2004 Masters Tournament by making five birdies on the back nine:
I would certainly go back to what got me here in this event, the Masters, the back nine at Augusta. To shoot 5-under those last seven holes, it was a very slow-motion back nine. Everything was going at a slow pace, and I could see very clearly the shot that I wanted to hit and how I wanted the ball to roll on the greens.
    Note Phil’s description of his back nine as a “slow-motion back nine” in which he experienced everything moving at a “slow pace.” Phrases like this provide insight into the mental transformation that takes place when golfers get into flow. As with most flow states, the result of Phil’s flow state was exceptionally good golf. 12-time winner Justin Leonard described it this way:
When I get into flow, things slow down a little bit. Your whole process slows. You breathe real easy and there’s not a whole lot going through your mind at the time. It just seems like everything slows down a little bit. And you instantly see the shot you want to hit so you’re able to play fast. Efficient. You enjoy it as it goes on but once it’s over, you’re like, “That was over way too fast.”
    Phil’s and Justin’s descriptions of their flow states document that golfers do indeed experience time subjectively rather than objectively. They also validate that the transformation of time is associated with their golfing performance; generally, the more time slows down when they are in flow, the better they play. Finally, these descriptions (along with accounts from dozens of other interviews that I’ve collected) suggest that when golfers are in flow, their brains can experience time as both fast and slow simultaneously (hence the paradox of time). In other words, how we experience time changes from person to person and from moment to moment within the same person, depending on a number of features that I will discuss later in this book.

Double Time
    Contrary to what happened with Phil and Justin, the subjective transformation of time does not always influence golfers positively. Golfers often tell me that when they’re playing badly and are not in a flow state, a round of golf can seem to take forever to end. Additionally, we’ve all seen golfers who, when they choke, tend to freeze over their shots and take longer than they would when they are playing with confidence. Ironically, although they take longer, their subjective interpretation of time is quite the opposite; even as they take longer over each shot, they feel rushed and jumpy. In these instances, players who are struggling and trying to get into flow