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A person with great dreams can achieve great things. A person with small dreams, or a person without the confidence to pursue his or her dreams, has consigned himself or herself to a life of frustration and mediocrity.
Before taking any shot, a golfer must pick out the smallest possible target.
The foundation of consistency is a sound preshot routine.
The correct grip and stance are so important that if you plan on taking only one golf lesson for the rest of your life, I would recommend that it deal only with grip, stance, alignment, ball position, and developing a routine that enables you to mentally and physically set up properly every time.
A good golfer must not only accept the preeminence of the short game. He must learn to relish getting the ball into the hole, to love it as much or more than mere ball-striking.
why hitting putts feel so good
Anyone can learn to put his fingers on the right keys, just as anyone can mechanically place his putter or his wedge in the right spot. But to make beautiful music, a piano player has to let it flow, the way a putter or chipper has to look and react.
Putting is largely mental, and you have control over your mind and attitude. To become a good putter, you must make a commitment to good thinking. You have to fill your mind with thoughts that will help you, not excuses for poor putting. You have to decide that, come what may, you love putting and you’re glad that every hole gives you a chance to use your putter, because that’s where you’ve got a big advantage over all the players who dread putting.
“You just have to love whatever greens you’re playing on,” Player replied. To someone unfamiliar with the way great athletes think, Player’s attitude would seem to verge on foolishness.
But this kind of foolishness is precisely what all great putters have in common.
fear destroys putting. A good putting attitude is free of fear. A good putting attitude blends ideas that almost seem contradictory. The golfer has to believe the putt will go in the hole, but he must not care if he misses.
He has to find a balance between determination and nonchalance.
Playing golf well demands honesty.
this willingness to confront the problems in his mental game and not to blame them on the inevitable onslaught of the yips is one reason he will keep winning the occasional Skins Game to supplement his Social Security checks.
People who overread are, as Billy Casper once said, often really looking for a way to miss rather than a way to make the putt. And they forget a most important principle: It’s more important to be decisive about a read than correct.
For breaking putts, you will have to improvise a target. The idea is to try to make all putts seem straight. If you think the putt will break two feet to the right, pick out something two feet to the left of the hole—a
But remember that the goal is neither to hit them firm nor to have them die at the hole, but to sink them.
striving for perfection is essential, demanding perfection of himself on the golf course is deadly.
Golf is a game played by human beings. Therefore, golf is a game of mistakes.
to become a really good golfer, you have to learn how to wait. But you have to learn to wait with confidence.
If it won’t help them, they have to make a conscious choice to put that thought out of their mind and turn to one that will enhance their confidence.
golfer can learn to forget the bad shots and remember the good ones. One way is to permit yourself to enjoy your good shots. People tend
This is all the more important for amateurs who play once or twice a week. They need to keep their swings simple and their confidence high. They must learn to resist the kind of temptation that can lead to loss of confidence, temptation often garbed as well-meaning advice.
At least not often enough to make them worth-while. The key to successful strategy and a confident swing for golfers at every level is, instead, quite the opposite. Hit the shot you know you can hit, not the shot Arnold Palmer would hit, nor even the shot you think you ought to be able to hit.
teach a conservative strategy and a cocky swing. You want to play each hole in such a way that you’re confident you can execute each shot you attempt.
The best way to prepare a plan is to walk or mentally review each hole backward. Standing on the green and looking back toward the tee
tell all the players I work with, to be prepared for second-guessing. I learned playing quarterback for my high-school football team that if you call an audible and it works, fans and writers call you a genius. If it fails, they call you a dope. You have to know yourself well enough to shrug off either
Weekend players generally would do well to spend time practicing with a long iron or fairway wood until they have a club they know they can hit 200 yards into the fairway. It will make the game a lot easier for them.
The important thing is to be prepared for both bad shots and the bad breaks the course can dish out even on good shots. When they happen, as they inevitably will, you’ll maintain your equilibrium.
But in general, I recommend altering your game plan only in a conservative direction. I don’t like to see players under pressure make bolder and more aggressive choices than their plan calls for, especially in medal play. Too often, the new choice winds up costing them more strokes. Any time you’re not sure, make the more conservative choice.
A golfer chokes when he lets anger, doubt, fear or some other extraneous factor distract him before a shot.
Being nervous produces adrenaline. Being very nervous can produce a great gush of adrenaline. That can cause the heart to pound. It can cause the hands to shake. In a young golfer, or an older golfer who hasn’t learned how to handle it, this gush of adrenaline can be devastating. He stands over a shot or a putt and feels the trembling hands and the furiously beating heart. He doesn’t understand that this is simply a natural reaction to the situation. It’s the way the body is wired. He begins to think, “What the heck is wrong with me?” And that thought introduces doubt and fear, which, as we
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welcome the physical symptoms of stress as a normal part of the human condition. The successful golfer either has learned, or instinctively understands, that the pounding heart and the trembling hands are nothing to worry about. They are, at worst, another factor to be accounted for, like a following wind.
The successful golfer knows that rather than concern himself with stilling the hands and quieting the heart, he must focus the mind, blocking out distractions and attending to routine and strategy
Choking is not a congenital, incurable disease. It can be overcome if the golfer intelligently analyzes what went wrong in a particular situation and takes steps to correct it.
two of the common mental mistakes a golfer makes under pressure. He had let his thoughts drift into the future. He had started to dwell on the score
A golfer should always assume that his opponent will hit the best possible shot. Then, if it happens, he’ll be prepared to cope with it.
The best athletes realize that if they win the battle with themselves, they have done all they can do.
The best golfers have much the same attitude. Their primary concern is performing as well as they can, or as close to their potential as they can get. If they do that, and lose, they shrug and go on.
The point is that it never occurred to Nick not to want his competitors to get better. Nor would it occur to any of the players I work with. So it distresses me when I run into players, usually lesser players, who think it’s smart to use gamesmanship to throw off opponents in competitive tournaments.
So I advise players at all levels to cherish their competitors. It’s better for their games. It’s better for them. Never decide that you can’t stand another golfer, because you might find yourself paired with that golfer for the most important round of your life.
“You’ve got to go in there with the attitude that you’re better than they are until they prove otherwise, rather than the attitude that they’re better than you are until you prove otherwise,” I told him.
Great players lose more tournaments than they win because players with just a bit less talent got more out of their talent in a particular week.
To improve, you must practice. But the quality of your practice is more important than the quantity.
To understand how to practice you must first understand that there are two states of mind in practice—the training mentality and the trusting mentality. In the training mentality, a golfer evaluates his shots critically and analytically. In the trusting mentality, the golfer simply accepts them. In the training mentality, the golfer tries to make things happen. In the trusting mentality, the golfer lets things happen.
the closer a player gets to competition, the more practice time he must spend in the trusting mentality.
For a competitive round, a player should get to the course at least an hour ahead of time so he can spend his warm-up period steeped in patience and trust.
single day’s results, no matter how bad, never justified trying to overhaul his swing mechanics in the middle of a tournament.
I also don’t believe a golfer should spend hours practicing putts. Good putting is primarily a function of attitude and routine. Once a player masters those two, he really doesn’t need to hit a lot of practice putts.
A golfer can mentally simulate the experience of reaching his goal, whether it be winning a tournament or breaking 100. If he does it vividly enough, he can in effect fool the mind and body into thinking that the experience actually happened. Later, when he actually comes close to that goal on the golf course, he will not experience discomfort or disorientation. He will instead have a sense of déjà vu, a comforting and calming feeling that he has been in this situation before and handled it successfully.
“How old,” Paige replied, “would you be if you didn’t know how old you was?”
Bars
