I play a lot of scrambles and Captain’s Choice tournaments. I have the pleasure of being the “ringer” that people like to invite to help out their team. It’s genuinely very fun (and also pretty flattering, so I need to check my ego).
But having played so many of these, I hear a lot of the same cliché ideas, and the performance psychology in these groups is not exactly PhD level. Here are some of the things I hear from players:
- “I get a stroke here so this is my hole.”
- “We’ll get it in the fairway then you can try to bomb it.”
- “We’ve got par so you can be aggressive on this putt.”
- “Alright we really need to start making some birdies.”
- “Let’s play these in 3 under and get to -10 which should be good enough.”
I like Jon Sherman’s response to those last two in his book 📕 The Foundations of Winning Golf,
“…as if there was some kind of magical button they could press that wasn’t available earlier in the game.“1
I think about this kind of stuff all the time, and I’ve played around some of the best amateurs in the world, so when I hear proclamations and pre- and mid-round resolutions like these I kind of mentally roll my eyes.
But the fact that I hear these kinds of things every time I play in one of these tournaments tells me that most golfers actually believe these are true.
But not only are they cliché and silly, they can be actively unhelpful.
The underlying problem at the root of all of these is the pressure they add. Each one of those cliché phrases is increasing the perceived importance of a given shot. You are making mistakes less acceptable.
Here’s a mental game general rule of thumb:
Needing something creates a fear of not getting it.
So anytime you say “I need to birdie this” or “we gotta make this” or “this is an easy one we should take advantage of it” you may feel you are inspiring clutch performance like Leonidas and the Spartan army, but you’re actually just creating an underlying fear of failure.
Stay Neutral
Golf shots, scores on a hole, length of a hole, score for the round… these are all inherently neutral. But we tend to ascribe them with meaning for whatever reason. Maybe to make us feel more victorious when we pull it off. While that higher meaning can get the juices flowing, those juices are often flowing in the wrong direction.
The Solution
Instead of saying “We have to…” it would be better instead to say “It’d be nice to…”
Right off the bat, you’re reducing the fear of failure. You’re giving yourself permission to fail.
Permission to fail sounds like a losing mentality, but it’s actually the most free you can be. When you’re allowed to screw up, then you won’t play scared of screwing up. You’re free to just swing.
So now when you look down at the scorecard and see this is a short hole you feel like you “should” birdie, you can change that to “it’d be nice to birdie this hole, but it’s ok if we don’t. Let’s focus instead on picking a good target and fully committing to this shot.”
Sherman again:
“…the golfer who is steadfast in their approach and resists the temptation to continually feel like they are playing to the brief moments that come and go during these matches will prevail.”2
This may sound boring, but I hate to break it to you: boring golf is good golf.
One thing for you to work on this week:
If you play an event and you hear someone else say something like “let’s start making some birdies” you can internally say “the way to make a birdie is to go through a good process on each shot, and we’ll see what our score is after the ball hits the bottom of the cup.”
To-do: When “should’s” and “need’s” and “have to’s” get thrown around, stay neutral, give yourself permission to make mistakes, and go through your process.