My next point is the one I lost last night (I’m still fuming). It is about the fact that you think you started to play carefully. This is a classic instance of allowing your conscious mind to take over.
Being defensive (or careful) is a conscious thought process, and is fine, but has no place in a sporting contest. Sport is a trivial activity and because it is trivial it means that its participants have the freedom to play “full-on”. The only point of wasting your life hitting a little white ball with a lump of finely honed steel is to bring something out of yourself and, very importantly, your opponent(s).
To play carefully is to deny the reason for playing sport in the first place. Also, it allows your conscious mind to interfere and therein lies disaster. The really clever bit about my method is that it distracts the conscious mind by giving it the task of following the routine. Following the routine is exactly what the subconscious wants and so by doing this we have engineered a situation where the conscious is helping the subconscious rather than interfering with it; and that’s why my method works so quickly and so powerfully.
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Ambition. There is no reason that I can see why we shouldn’t aim for scratch. I am a little concerned that you think that you are not talented enough, or that you are somehow not worthy of the status of being a scratch golfer at Royal Porthcawl. This might be an example of your view of yourself being the main barrier to progress. When you fully accept the magic of this method you will need pressure to perform at your best, you will actively seek out tough challenges and then your natural competitiveness becomes a formidable weapon. Yesterday you basically played par golf on a blustery day with recently slowed-up greens and spending a lot of your time looking for my ball! Also, the subconscious doesn’t really respond to a friendly round on a Sunday evening. My view is that you are easily talented enough and that once we get you chipping and putting with confidence you will come down towards scratch remorselessly. Just relax and enjoy the trip!
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[7. The 1967 Bell South Classic]
Forgive me but I think I need to get a bit stiff with you. The tone of your writing suggests that you went into the match lacking confidence in your ability. As you well know this is a killer. Getting selected to play at this level is a fantastic opportunity to test your progress and a huge privilege; you know very well that you were only selected because your play is worthy of a place in the team. The only allowable emotion is rip-roaring excitement at the prospect of playing another very good player. Tension is a good thing because it is another form of the pressure that inspired the 3-wood into the 18th on Wednesday. It is only a bad thing if it presents as muscular tension because tense muscles won’t swing.
There is a very simple and effective way of freeing yourself from these emotions that made you feel tense as you approached the match. The emotions will be based in a past memory; you need to find the memory and then tell someone close to you (wife, Dad, brother, all three!) about the event as honestly and emotionally as you can manage; really open yourself up to the memory and let it rip.
As soon as the story is told to another, so it . . .
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** [This is the moment you need to take from the round. My guess is that you were disappointed with the putt because you thought you had “choked”. You thought that you had buckled under the pressure of moving ahead of OP. You had putted really well up to that point, finally hitting your stride with four consecutive good ‘uns from the 11th to the 14th. Then you leave a putt 5’ short; and you would have felt it in the execution that your “timing” wasn’t quite there, that the stroke was a little nervy, that it reminded you a lot of previously fluffed putts. You would also have been reminded instantly of every other occasion in your sporting life when you have had to face the humiliation of “choking”. These are powerful memories and not easily overcome. The putting stroke is as delicate as they come in the sporting world, and is the place where any tightening of the muscles through nervousness will have unfortunate consequences.
Fascinatingly, it also happened to the golfers at the end of the tournament in Dubai. Cabrera-Bello could not hit a straight drive once he hit the front, but chipped and putted like an angel. Westwood drove and ironed beautifully over the same holes but tightened up on his last chip and couldn’t find the hole at all with his putting. Stephen Gallacher had a bit of both. Everybody who ever bothers to play sport, and enjoys the cut and thrust of competition, chokes. EVERYBODY. Everybody, but in their own way.
It would be an interesting exercise for you to go back over OP’s round and to try to identify where he choked: after all, he didn’t beat you!The key is the . . .
