Golf Flow

it was always in the context of how gifted he was at being able to shape golf shots. But the quality of his putting stroke, which I had watched on the practice green for years, did not correspond to his putting statistics. He had a perfect stroke, but his putting statistics were consistently outside the top 100 on Tour.
    One other thing intrigued me. Coming down the stretch at the 2007 Players Championship at famed Sawgrass Country Club with a chance to win, Sean tried making birdie on the par-three island hole and dumped his ball in the water. Sean had met Tantalus.
    But it’s what Sean had to say afterward that I found particularly interesting. Rather than apologizing for such an aggressive play, I heard him tell reporters at the media center, “I’ll make plenty of money in my career. I wanted the crystal.” I smiled. I didn’t know Sean O’Hair, but I could tell that he was something special. Sean O’Hair wanted to win golf tournaments. He was fearless.
    At the age of 28, Sean had been a professional golfer for over a decade. He had been chasing his dream for quite a while, and since a great 2009 season, the dream had been slipping away from him. Flashes of excellence were followed by poor play, so that playing at the level of his potential seemed perpetually out of reach.
    “Playing in a straightjacket” is how many golfers describe the way that the game feels when their minds are not letting them play freely. Indeed, forces were acting on Sean, and they were working against him—forces that he didn’t know how to identify or influence. All he knew was that when he played golf he felt like a cyclist pedaling into a perpetual headwind.
    By the time he reached out to me in July 2011, he had missed 8 of his 10 previous cuts. Compounding the problem was the fact that Sean was well out of the top 125 on the PGA Tour and in real danger of losing his playing card at the end of the season. The pressure was on. Sean would have to come off missing all those cuts and find a way to play well enough in the eight remaining tournaments against the best players in the world to earn enough money to keep his card. Sean was hardly in an ideal situation.
    We had work to do to rebuild the confidence that enabled him to stand over that shot and fearlessly pull the trigger. As you can imagine, this task is difficult when a person’s livelihood is on the line. On that day, July 9, 2011, Sean and I spent about seven hours talking about the mind— how it interprets pressures in golf, how those pressures influence perception and physiology, and how all those factors compromise the golf swing.
    Ultimately, I asked Sean to change his perspective. Rather than take the view of eight tournaments left, I asked him to look at the next 20 rounds of golf: “There is no Thursday, there is no Sunday. For the next 20 competitive rounds, I would like you to focus on the process we are going to implement.” He agreed that he would commit to our work for 20 rounds of competitive golf.
    Although a lot goes into great golf, some of the keys that Sean and I discussed are keys that you’ve seen throughout this book:
    The game attacks rhythm and tension.
Key: Have soft hands and play in rhythm.
Reactions matter.
Key: Reacting with anger breeds fear. Reacting with acceptance breeds freedom.
Situations change the value that we place on a shot.
Key: Treat every shot the same.
Golf bullies people into overthinking.
Key: Dumb it down.
    His first tournament, the following week, was the British Open. Sean played nicely on Thursday, shooting a 74 on a day when scores were generally difficult. On Friday Sean stayed patient and birdied his 13th, 14th, and 15th holes to move inside the cut line by a full shot. If he parred the 18th hole, he would make the cut by two shots. If he bogeyed the 18th hole, he would make the cut by a single shot. Barring a disaster, Sean would be playing on the weekend in the British Open. He stood on 18 and striped his drive. Shot 1. As often happens in links golf, the ball caught a ridge and funneled into the rough. From there Sean made the correct decision and simply tried to run the ball up near the green. Shot 2. The ball came out hot and plugged into the lip of a bunker, forcing him to play out sideways. Shot 3. He then chipped on to the green. Shot 4. His bogey putt slid to the left. Shot 5. He tapped in from 2 feet (60 cm). Shot 6. Double bogey. He missed the cut.
    In 1920 psychologist Sigmund Freud famously observed