Golf is a frustrating game. The single biggest thing to enhance my performance on the golf course is not to control the technical. I accept my technical limitations and, in reality, my swing is probably better now than it used to be. No, the main thing for me is controlling my head.
When I went through a good spell – my best spell – of golf last summer, a few things were going well. First of all, I was playing regularly. I was making the most of my club membership and probably playing four or more times a week. There are some annoying people out there who can turn up and play a few times of year and seem to pull out a pretty decent swing from nowhere. Those people are technically known as bastards.
As well as playing regularly, I’d spent a lot of time working with a coach on my technique. Since pretty much starting golf again during the first summer of Covid in 2020 (not quite the summer of summer, eh?), I’d been having lessons. If I was going to spend time playing golf again, I was determined to do it properly. Bizarrely, my summer of sweet, sweet golf was actually as I took a bit of a break from weekly lessons. I’d probably had too much to work on seeing my coach once a week. With bigger breaks between lessons, I was able to find a hybrid game, somewhere between what I could do at the end of a weekly forty minute lesson and what I could maintain over the length of a round on the golf course.
Playing regularly, having lessons slightly less regularly and my third big thing was working on my mental game. I’ve written before about my slight fascination with self-help. That fascination translates to a shelf on my bookcase. Golf meets self-help is one hell of a combination: golfers are always tinkering on self-improvement. Working on my golf mental game was like self-help nirvana. I’d read The Zen of Golf, the books by Bob Rotella, subscribed to Imagine Golf. They’re all grand, but the source which had the most cut-through was Jon Sherman.
In fairness – and I’m sure Sherman would be the first to agree – the advice was a mixture of his own wisdom and all of the advice he’d distilled from reading so much of what was out there as part of his own game improvement. I worked on a lot of things from reading Sherman. The main ones were focusing on enjoyment and focusing on what I can control. Bizarrely, one of the things you can’t control is the swing you turn up with day-to-day. Sometimes its in mint condition, sometimes there’s a little kink hiding somewhere in your technique that you can’t quite put your finger on, or even if you can, you can’t work out how to solve. You have to just ride out that kink; it’ll normally go away.
The other thing I really tried to work on was positive self-talk on the course. As friends will attest, I’ve always been a talker. I like to witter on, I benefit from externalising. On the golf course, I’d always externalised my feelings when things were going badly (as my friends will again attest to). Last summer I tried to externalise my thoughts before things when bad. If I had a good shot, I’d talk through it. Not just the happy platitudes and smug self-congratulations. I’d try to externalise what I was doing and what I was thinking. Then if I hit a dodgy shot, rather than an emotional response, I’d try to externalise what was going on, not primarily in terms of technique but what was going through my mind. So if I felt like I’d rushed my swing, or if I wasn’t feeling confident over the ball, I’d talk it through. Ostensibly I’d be talking to one of my playing partners, but whether they were politely listening or not didn’t matter, really it was about my process. Whether it was correlation or causation, this ‘chatter’ worked (chatter is a technical term by the way, which I’d seen a lot of, er, chatter about).
Moving to the USA, I realised I couldn’t play as much golf. That meant I had to change the goalposts, I wasn’t going to score like I used to. As I said, my improvement was closely linked to playing regularly. Now I had to accept scoring higher and focus more than ever just on the enjoyment…
Today’s round was one of those microcosm rounds, pretty much summing up where my game is at in its entirety. I played a great Maryland course called Renditions. A sand quarry restoration project, the course consists of eighteen replica golf holes bringing together some truly epic courses from the US and the UK. There are US Open courses, British Open courses, a Ryder Cup course. Then there is a full recreation of Augusta’s Amen Corner, complete with the Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson bridges! As a result, the layout had great variety and, playing off the white tees designed for mere mortals, the course had enough forgiveness to make it challenging and forgiving in good measure.
Another thing I’ve had to get used to playing less over here is also practising less. Even ahead of a social round back in the UK, I’d often loosen up on the range. Here, I typically turn up, take a few swings on the first tee and off I go. You have to take this into account and sometimes the first few holes can be a write-off. Today, whether it was down to excellent course design, my flukey performance or some combination of the two, I got off to a raring start. After an opening double-bogey courtesy of a three-putt, I then had a string of three pars. By the end of the front nine, which had included Amen Corner, I was sat on a gross 44. I’d tried to play comfortable and compact, trying to feel a shorter and slower swing. It seemed to be working. Then started the reversal which attracts the old adage: it’s a game of two halves.
For no discernible reason – and that is the problem, you don’t consciously start to do too much differently – things started to go wrong. On ten, I recovered from a weak tee shot with a decent fairway wood that had me pin-high but off the green in two. My eight-iron, which had up to that point acted as a great little nudger around the green, just went on vacation. With the ball skipping over the green I had to have another go which, thankfully, landed not too far off the pin, two-putt distance. Sadly nobody told my putter it was two-putt distance and I had my second three-putt of the day, together with my first triple-bogey.
This is where the positive self-talk should have come in. If I were playing regularly, it may well have done. Instead my old habits kicked back in and I was fuming. I also started to think about the score. How could I go out in 44 and now be on 51 after one dodgy hole. Standing on the eleventh tee, I was thinking ‘short and slow’ but what actually translated to my body was an ugly, snappy swipe which topped the ball, bouncing some sixty yards or so. That red mist was now in residence. I was too focused on recovering, too much pressure, crap shot. The next one was better, but on a longer hole it was still shy of the green and I after some scrappy play I had back-to-back triples.
From that point on, every time I thought I was getting back into the game, I’d have a dodgy shot. I got my head back under control but was still beating myself up about the score too much. After those triples, I had three disasters. Even one of those was acceptable though: on the replica of the island-hole 17th from Sawgrass I was (only) three off the tee and then the undulating green got the better of me. The par 5 from Carnoustie featured an OB fairway wood and another duffed chip. The last par 3 of the day saw me flailing around with a wedge when, in reality, I’d given up on scoring and should have done better.
Allowing for the fact that each bad shot means at least one more shot to get you back on track, it wasn’t too mad. I only really calmed myself to this conclusion when I reviewed my round on Arccos, but over the course of the full round I had many more good holes than bad and with the exception of that wedge, I hit more good shots with every club than the number of bad shots with that club. I think I’d have been able to have those positive thoughts out on the course when I was in better habits last summer. I’d probably have reminded myself that, white tees aside, there was still plenty of challenge in these championship-style holes. I’d have stopped beating myself up for three-putts on winter greens where reading the pace is tough (especially when I was two-putting more than I wasn’t).
Ultimately, I enjoyed the day. It was great to be out playing golf. The course was great fun, especially Amen Corner. Sure, I played some crappy golf in places, especially the back nine, but I also played more good golf, with ten bogeys or better compared to just five holes with a triple or worse. My main frustration and most important learning point is that it took me a post-round debrief to calm to this conclusion. I was more than capable of mid round meltdowns when I played multiple times a week. Playing sporadically is only going to make these wobbles more likely. I know this. I know I want to focus on smiling not scoring, but I think I need to bring back more of the positive chatter to keep those principles at the forefront of my mind.
Commonplace 