Dr. Bob Rotella, Bob Cullen『Golf Is a Game of Confidence』 783.8

Golf Is a Game of Confidence (English Edition)

面白エピソード満載，といったところでしょうか（語彙力）

Introduction

GOLFERS SOMETIMES ASK ME FOR MY DEFINITION OF CONFIDENCE. I've been fortunate enough to spend more than twenty years working with athletes as a head coach, a trainer of the mind. For about a dozen of those years, I've been teaching and coaching professional golfers. Here is one of the best definitions I've come up with: / Confidence is playing with your eyes.

In all sports, confidence separates winners from also-rans. The best athletes combine confidence with physical compe-tence. But every smart coach I've ever known, if he has to choose between a competent athlete who lacks confidence and an athlete of lesser physical gifts whose mind is ready to maximize his potential, who is confident, will pick the confident player.

These eighteen golfers have two things in common. They love the game. And they all have something to teach you about confidence, about playing with your eyes.

No. 1: How Brad Faxon Stayed in the Present

He knows, and even enjoys, the fact that our conversation will revolve around two basic and interrelated ideas that we have discussed many times before. One is staying in the present. The second is committing to the process. A large part of this book will be devoted to elaborating on those two ideas.

Staying in the present sounds simple, so simple that even some teaching professionals can't understand how it can be difficult.

To play golf as well as he can, a player has to focus his mind tightly on the shot he is playing now, in the present. / If the golfer thinks about anything else, that pure reaction between the eye and the brain and the nervous system is pol-luted. Performance usually suffers. This is just the way human beings are constructed.

But a player who is committed to the process of hitting good shots will never draw a club back until he knows where he wants the ball to go and believes that the club in his hands will send it there.

When Brad is putting well, he comes close to having the ideal mind. He never thinks about speed. He feels that thinking about speed is like thinking about how far to throw a ball when you're playing catch. The outcome is likely to be an awkward toss. In the same way, thoughts like "Don't run it too far past" or "Get it there" lead to lots of three-putts.

Once he's over a putt, Brad doesn't think specifically about getting the ball into the hole. He's already picked out a line that he's convinced will do that. He concentrates narrowly on the task at hand-getting the ball rolling well on the line he has selected. Then he waits to see what happens, letting the green take care of everything else. He knows that when his mind is right, his system and his senses will take care of touch and direction much better than he would if he tried consciously to control those variables.

To be sure, success breeds confidence. But great players don't depend on success at the first green for their confidence. They strive to maintain the same attitude whether or not the first putt falls. Brad, for instance, deliberately avoids measuring how well he is putting by how many putts fall. He knows that too many variables, some of them beyond his control, can influence that. He tries to monitor whether he is putting confidently and getting the ball rolling well on his intended line. If he does that, and the ball comes close to the hole, he feels that he is putting well. If the first one or two don't fall, he believes that only increases the chances that the third or fourth ones will.

Brad was smart enough to trust himself and go with his in-stincts. He knows that being trusting and decisive have more to do with the success of a shot than calibrating the distance. Almost invariably, a player's second thought about club selection is based on doubt. Predictably enough, it rarely works as well as the first idea.

I teach players to welcome these nervous symptoms rather than fear them. They work and practice all their lives to make it to a situation like the one Brad was in, a situation that gets the adrenaline flowing.

The hard fact is, any player on the back nine who's thinking about his acceptance speech is not likely to have a chance to deliver it. He pulled the birdie putt, missing by four inches. The crowd gasped as if the putt had just missed, but Brad knew he had hit it badly. Four inches on an eight-foot putt is a canyon-sized miss for a player of his caliber.

IF YOU'VE GOTTEN the impression that a great round of golf comprises dozens of skirmishes in the mind of the golfer, not all of which are won, you're right. I have recounted this round in detail because it illustrates that even the best players, playing as well as anyone has ever played, wage constant war with doubts and fears and distractions. Some weeks it's easier than others. But if they don't conquer the doubts on a particular shot, the best players pick themselves up and gather themselves to work on the next one. That's what Brad did in the final round of the PGA. He wasn't perfect; he was merely striving for perfection. He disciplined his mind to give himself the best chance he could to play as well as he could. And he saw how good that could be.

Thinking well can't guarantee shooting low scores or win-ning. It only gives a player the best possible chance to score well and win. If it were foolproof, golf would not be a game. It would be a laboratory experiment.

No. 2: How Fred Arenstein Broke 80

PROFESSIONALS LIKE BRAD FAXON ARE BY NO MEANS THE ONLY GOLFERS who can benefit from paying full attention to the business at hand-staying in the present—and from an unwavering commitment to the process of hitting good shots. Both concepts are as beneficial for weekend golfers as they are for touring pros. A golfer I know named Fred Arenstein demonstrates why.

Like a lot of golfers, he saw 80 as the border that separates the kingdom of golfers from the kingdom of duffers. Mathematically, there's not much between 80 and 79; it's a difference of less than two percent. But in Fred's mind, and I suspect in the minds of hundreds of thousands of others, 80 seemed as big a barrier as the Atlantic Ocean did to pre-Columbian Europe.

Nearly all golfers would be better off if they forgot about the score as they played.

THERE'S A WIDESPREAD misimpression among weekend golfers that to shoot in the 70s, a player must have a swing that a pro could envy, It's not true. / On the average golf course, from the white tees, a lot of players could break 80 at least once in a while, All they need is a swing they can repeat with fair consistency, a good short game, and the right mental approach, Like Fred Arenstein, they need to stop keeping track of their scores and focus their attention exclusively on the present.

No. 3: How Jay Delsing Kept Trusting

I certainly understand the importance of sound swing me-chanics. But there is a time and place for working on mechanics, and it is not on the eve of a tournament. Lots of the players I work with have decided, at one time or another, that they need to improve their swings. The smart ones take some time off from the tour, go to a teacher they trust, and work on the new movements until they can execute them without thinking about them. Then and only then do they return to competition.

It's tough even for a successful player to shut out the buzz of swing tips and theories that is in the air on a tournament practice tee. Ben Hogan found a way to do it. He would go to the far right end of the practice tee and keep his back turned to the rest of the players. He didn't want to see how other people swung; he knew his swing was different from the norm of the day, and he didn't want anything undermining his belief in it. And he didn't want to discuss or debate swing mechanics as he practiced. But not many golfers have Hogan's discipline. They're gregarious people, and the practice tee is one place where they can loosen up and be friends with their fellow competitors.

A golfer cannot score as well as possible if he is thinking about his swing mechanics as he plays.

I prefer that golfers play without swing thoughts. The ones who fully trust their swings can do that. But I know that lots of golfers have been playing with swing thoughts all their lives and feel naked without them. I tell such players that they can have one, and only one, swing thought per round. Any more than one and they are liable to bog their brains down in a welter of mechanical thinking.

But trust is not a collectible, like a rare postage stamp, that you can buy, mount, and own forever with no additional effort. Every golfer needs to work on trust in every competitive round he plays.

No. 4: How Davis Love III Got Back to the Masters

Davis was a big basketball fan and a friend of Michael Jordan, who had attended the University of North Carolina at about the same time. So we talked about the way a good basketball player's head operates. He could see that Jordan didn't stop in the middle of a move to the basket to think carefully about mechanics. Jordan locked his eyes on the rim and let the ball go. I wanted Davis to react to his targets in the same way.

In putting, the challenge is to make a free stroke to a specific target. Guiding, steering, or being careful with a putting stroke are faults bred by doubt.

A player has to know himself. He has to know how much and what kinds of practice he needs to be at his best. And he has to put that practice in. But going past that point can be counterpro-ductive. It's analogous to the twin pitfalls-being too tight or too sloppy-Davis had to learn to avoid in his putting routine. A player needs to find the happy medium. / This notion appealed to Davis. He has always wanted to be as good as he can be. He dreams of winning major championships and he is willing to work as hard as necessary to fulfill those dreams. But he wants to be his best as efficiently as possible. Partly because he's had wrist problems, he's not interested in practice for the sake of practice, not interested in the quantity of balls he hits. He has other interests that are important to him—his family and his hobbies. He loves to hunt and fish.

A golfer's brain and nervous system perform best when they're focused on a small, precise target.

The golf world knew what Harvey Penick had meant to Tom Kite and Ben Crenshaw. Not so many knew of his link to Davis. Harvey Penick had been Davis Love, Jr.'s college coach, but more than that, his ideal. "My Dad," Davis III would say, "basi-cally thought Harvey Penick was the greatest man who ever lived. He was golf to my Dad."

In a sad, ironic way, his grief over Harvey Penick's death helped Davis. It eliminated any possibility that he would be euphoric or giddy after New Orleans. It helped him avoid the letdown that players often suffer the week after winning a tour-nament, when their thoughts tend to linger in the immediate past rather than focus on the present. It reminded him of many of the wise things that he had heard from both Mr. Penick and his father. Equally ironically, of course, grief similarly helped Ben Crenshaw to focus.

No. 5: How Val Skinner Won the Sprint

FEW PLACES ON A GOLF COURSE DEMAND BETTER THINKING FROM A golfer than the short, reachable, but dangerous par five. The eighteenth hole at the new LPGA International course in Daytona Beach is just such a hole—452 yards, with a lake lining the left side of the hole from tee to green.

I don't teach any hard-and-fast rules for making decisions about strategy on par fives. But there are a couple of constants. First, a player must always weigh risks against rewards. What's the worst that can happen if a long second shot goes awry? If it can go out of bounds, with a stroke and distance penalty, that increases the risk side of the calculation. If a lateral water hazard is the worst penalty, the risk is reduced. A player could drop at the water's edge, pitch to the green and still make par if she sinks her putt. And if the worst hazard is sand or rough, the risk is minimal. In those cases, the potential for an eagle or birdie almost always outweighs the risk.

The second constant is the game plan. I want professionals to make their decisions about par fives on Tuesday and Wednes-day, during practice. That way, their decisions are more likely to be coolly taken than they would be in the heat of competition. Of course, a plan has to have some flexibility, taking into account such things as the presence or absence of favoring winds. But in general, a player who thinks she is executing a plan is more likely to be decisive than a player who walks onto a tee wondering what to do. And decisive players, by and large, hit better golf shots.

I am a believer, and always have been, in a conservative strategy and a cocky swing. But the important half of that phrase is not the conservative strategy. It's the cocky swing. A conservative strategy is the means to an end. The end is a confident, decisive frame of mind as the golfer swings at the ball. / The right choice is the decisive choice.

Acceptance is critical after a bad shot. An angry player can't really execute a pre-shot mental routine.

One of the ironies of the game is that bad players have a harder time accepting bad shots than good players do. Show me a foursome of once-a-month players who can't break 100, and the chances are I'll be able to show you a dozen instances per round of muffled curses, shouts of "I can't believe it!" and thrown clubs. And these are people who never practice and have swings that look like steam shovels falling off a ledge.

It's more important to be decisive than to be correct, I said. Because as far as I'm concerned, if you're decisive, you are correct.

No. 6: How Paul Runyan Beat Sam Snead 8 and 7

WHEN THE FINALISTS IN THE 1938 PGA CHAMPIONSHIP AT SHAWNEE Country Club began making their way to the first tee, it would have been hard to find a spectator or sportswriter who didn't think the outcome was a foregone conclusion. One of them, dressed that year in a floppy newsboy's cap and a long-sleeved white shirt, was Sam Snead. The other, a natty wisp of a man with precisely combed blond hair, was Paul Runyan.

FORTUNATELY FOR ME, Paul Runyan always considered himself first and foremost a teacher of golf. Nearly half a century after his triumph over Snead, he was still teaching at Golf Digest schools, which is where I got to know him and started to learn from him. / He remains a model for any golfer. At eighty-seven, he is spry and active. He gives lessons at a course near his home in California. And he still plays. He shot a 73 in one round with his friends recently—a 73, he added, that was not helped by a single long putt. He had a five-dollar bet with one of his friends that he would break 70 at least once before the end of the year.

No. 7: How Patsy Price Broke 90

The statistics are simple. A player who shoots in the 90s generally hits no more than one or two greens per round in regulation figures. That means that on sixteen or seventeen holes, he or she is going to face a chip or a pitch to the green. / Most high handicappers, by definition, rarely get up and down; sometimes they take four strokes, because they leave a shot in a bunker or stub a chip. If they learned to get up and down even a third of the time, they would save enough strokes every round to play in the 80s at least part of the time.

Later on in an athlete's development, it's possible to reach someone who's learned to throw hard, or swing hard, to perform with more control. But it's nearly impossible to teach speed once the pupil has learned to throw or swing for control.

In competition, how you score is more important than how you swing. And Patsy tended to neglect work with the scoring clubs, particularly her wedges. She loved hitting tee shots—-that was a problem in mechanics. She loved putting— that was an intellectual exercise that challenged her. She didn't bring the same intensity to her short game.

But if a person with a 20 handicap like Patsy's came to me and asked for just one tip to lower her scores, I'd tell her to do what Patsy did—to get enthused about that short game. Falling in love with the short game and playing golf confidently are intimately linked.

No. 8: How Tim Simpson Battled the Yips

A LOT OF GOLFERS HAVE TOLD ME THAT THEY HAVE THE YIPS, THAT putative disease that turns strong men jelly-kneed in the face of four-foot putts. There have been so many that sometimes I think you could staff all the pro shops around the country with players who mastered the art of striking the golf ball well enough to go on tour but could never get over their fear of putting. And of all the golfers I've tried to help with putting woes, none has fought the battle more tenaciously than Tim Simpson.

Tim can pinpoint the moment when his putting problem seemed to crystallize. It was in the final round of the Players' Championship in the spring of 1978, his second year on the tour. A gale was blowing off the Atlantic that day, with gusts strong enough to knock over a big tour golf bag. Tim had a one-foot putt on the seventeenth hole. The wind blew him off balance as he stroked the putt, and he missed. / The missed putt preyed on Tim's mind. It cost him several thousand dollars at a time when he was struggling to establish himself as a professional. It reinforced a notion that he had begun to develop that his putting wasn't tour quality. He fell into a spiral of bad thinking and bad putting habits.

The leading money winner on the tour in those years was Tom Watson. Tim had heard that Watson, like Bobby Jones, advocated a short putting stroke, like driving a tack into the back of the ball. Tim had always been a putter who moved the club with his shoulders and had a long, smooth stroke. But in those days, copying Tom Watson's putting style didn't seem as self-evidently dangerous as it might seem now. Tim tried to change, to be more like Watson.

ONE OF THE first things I told Tim was this: The disease called the yips doesn't exist, except in the mind.

It's a natural trick of perception. If you're hitting the ball badly, you generally come into the clubhouse thinking that your putting wasn't so bad, and perhaps even saved you from a miserable round. If you're hitting the ball well, you're likely to focus on your putting as the only thing standing between you and a string of 62s. Tim frequently came off the course with a 69 or 68, feeling unhappy because he thought it should have been 64 or 65.

Putting, perhaps more than any other stroke, is affected by attitude, by how the player thinks about putting, by his confi-dence. And no one is afflicted by nature with a bad attitude. That's something golfers choose to develop entirely on their own. Conversely, they could choose to develop a positive attitude about it. When Tim did, he won a lot of money and several tournaments.

No. 9: How Byron Nelson Won Eleven Straight

Of all the records in the long history of the game, the two most impressive are Bobby Jones's Grand Slam of 1930 and Byron Nelson's streak of eleven straight victories in 1945. Unfor-tunately, Jones is no longer around to talk about what went through his mind in 1930. But Byron can talk about the 1945 streak, and if he is asked, he will.

"But I found that as my game got better, starting in around 1936, I'd practiced and worked enough so that it was like you were going to sit down at the table and eat a piece of steak. You take your piece of steak and your knife and fork and you don't think about how you cut your steak or how you feed yourself, any more than you would about how you put on your shoes and tie them. That's automatic. And I felt that was the way my game was. Automatic.

"I looked for a faraway target—a tree, a house, a barn, a flagpole, maybe a bunker in the distance that I couldn't reach. And I'd look at that and I'd take the club away from that. And then, when I came back through, I'd try to make sure that the back of my left hand was going right to that target."

"I still think that players who are consistent are players who forget what happened," he said. "The next shot is what counts, not what happened. I see players who are going along real good and they mishit a shot and they'll be standing in the fairway, swishing that club back and forth, trying to figure out what they did wrong. That's a mistake."

It was clear that Byron had, through experience and some helpful teachers, picked up virtually all of the fundamentals of golf psychology that I teach today. He had learned to trust his swing and not to think about mechanics as he played. He had learned to visualize his shots. He had learned the importance of his short game; he had learned to rely on feel near the greens. He had learned to accept the results of any shot and let go of anger and frustration. He had learned to stay in the present and not to worry about outcomes.

Only one thing still puzzled me. Byron had published a couple of golf instruction books in his heyday. Both were full of photographs and text about swing mechanics. Both ignored the mental aspects of the game that had obviously helped him reach the top. Why? / "Aw," he said, and smiled, almost sheepishly. "People didn't talk about that sort of thing in those days."

No. 10: How Bill Shean Prepared for the Club Championship at Pine Valley

NOT MANY PEOPLE THINK OF AN AIRLINER AS A PLACE TO PRACTICE GOLF. But that is where an old client of mine, Bill Shean, did his best work getting ready for the 1995 club championship at Pine Valley.

If I start with a player who has a dysfunctional swing and a yen to break 70, I tell him that he needs to take swing lessons. But, quite frequently, the player who comes to me is someone, like Bill, whose physical skills are more than adequate for his aspirations. When I tell him that, though, I am often met with skepticism. It's intriguing that people are quite willing to believe a swing teacher who tells them their mechanics are all wrong. They have a hard time believing someone who tells them their mechanics are all right, but their mental game is not.

But Bill had little or no sense of the mental side of the rou-tine, and that is the side I care more about. Even more than grip, stance, posture, and alignment, a sound, consistent mental routine is the foundation of consistency. So we worked on it Before every stroke, I asked him to stand behind the ball and observe the situation. Assimilate the information about lie, wind, yardage, and anything else pertinent. Choose a club, trusting his first instinct. Pick out a target. Picture the shot he wanted to hit.

A conservative strategy joined to a cocky swing produces low scores. Reckless boldness joined to a doubtful swing is a formula for disaster.

But he discovered something else. Normally, Bill is a gregari-ous, pleasant golf partner. If he has guests, he wants to make sure that they enjoy themselves. But when he immersed himself in his pre-shot routine and his game plan, he felt he couldn't do those things. He became quiet and detached. It felt, he said, like he was working. He decided that he wasn't quite ready for the commitment I was asking for. And he by and large stopped doing what we had talked about.

To reinforce his commitment to it, Bill decided to keep a differ-ent, private kind of score. He would, of course, write down the number of strokes he had taken. But after each hole, he would also write down the number of strokes he had taken after faithfully following his routine. He might, for example, make four on a par three. But if he had followed his routine on each shot, he would write "4-4" on the scorecard and grade himself at 100 per-cent. Or he might par the hole but lose his concentration on his first putt. Then he would write "2-3" and grade himself at only 67 percent for the hole. He vowed that the percentage score was the only one he would keep running track of and care about.

The tournament would be, he would later reflect, one of the warmest memories of his life. It would be a weekend when all the effort he had put into golf-improving his swing and his mind-came together and bore fruit. It would be a weekend when he proved to himself that his balanced commitment to family, work, and sport was compatible with excellence. It would be a weekend that told him the best things in his life were still ahead of him. / But none of those things were on his mind as he stepped off the eighteenth green that morning. An assistant pro, Jason Lamp, asked him what he had shot. / "Eighty-three percent," Bill said. / He had, he calculated, stuck with his mental routine and his game plan on 56 of 67 shots. It took him a moment to realize that Lamp wanted to know how many strokes he'd taken.

No. 11: How Billy Mayfair Rebuilt His Confidence

BILLY MAYFAIR, WHO WON MORE THAN $1.5 MILLION ON THE PGA Tour in 1995, keeps a notebook in which he jots down ideas that emerge in the conversations we have over the course of a season. Here is what he wrote after our first session of 1995, a few hours before the start of the Phoenix Open: / "Enjoy what you're doing. Have fun." This may seem like belaboring the obvious. Golf is a game. It's supposed to be fun. Any little boy knows that.

There is no bigger canard in golf than the old saw that practice makes perfect. It doesn't. Golf is a game played by human beings, and no matter how much they practice, they will remain imperfect. They will make mistakes. / Athletes who become self-critical perfectionists are flirting with trouble.

That, in fact, is what I'd recommend to any player who is suffering a crisis of confidence. The first step ought to be the rediscovery of the joys of the game.

A lot of players who think perfectly well in run-of-the-mill tournaments have the misimpression that it takes something different to win a big event—a major championship, a World Series, a Tour Championship. It doesn't. The players who win big events are usually players who are comfortable enough to think exactly as they do in lesser events, to stay with their routines and stay in the present.

All great athletes, I think, have had to go through a period of fire, a period of despondency and near despair. The fire is like the smelting process that burns ore and turns it into precious metal. Without the fire, the process cannot happen.

No. 12: How Dicky Pride Crossed the Fine Line

GOLF IS A GAME OF SMALL GRADATIONS. THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A good drive and a drive out of bounds can be a few millimeters of change in the swing plane. The difference between making a living on the tour and looking for another line of work can be as small as a stroke a round. / So it is with the mental game. Players who win may think only slightly differently from those who don't. They trust their swings absolutely; others occasionally entertain a few little doubts. They marshal the right thoughts and attitudes on nearly every shot; others admit distractions several times a round. Those subtle differences can have an enormous impact on results. A good mind can be the difference between struggling in golf's minor leagues and winning on the PGA Tour.

It's not very important where you've been. Life is about where you're going.

I told him that success wasn't a matter of how much he knew about the mental game. Lots of people know the principles. It's a question of who applies those principles consistently and who applies them at the right moment. Psychiatrists and physicians, for instance, get great educations about the ailments, mental and physical, that afflict human beings. They understand how to stay healthy. Yet their suicide rates are among the highest in the country. Knowledge isn't much good unless you use it.

The hard fact is that the optimal state of mind isn't an object that a golfer can acquire, own, put on a shelf, and take down for use whenever it's required. / Rather, it's a condition that can be fragile, ephemeral, and maddeningly elusive. It emerges from the confluence of a lot of factors, some very subtle. And the factors vary from golfer to golfer. The best a golfer can do is ascertain as best he can the factors that work for him and strive to make certain they are present every time he competes. / The optimal state of mind is something a player must work on patiently, every day.

No. 13: How David Frost Learned to Close

ONE OF THE HIGHEST COMPLIMENTS A PROFESSIONAL GOLFER CAN Frosty liked the ga receive is to be known by his peers as a closer. A closer is ir putting. He took th someone who puts tournaments away, who wins when he gets and bought a mixed b into position to win. / My friend David Frost is a closer. / some irons, and a ladies Frosty is by no means one of the longer hitters on the PGA Tour. The Nike Tour or the NCAA Tournament, for that matter, are full of players who can outdrive him. But he is an excellent putter, an accurate iron player, and a deft wedge player. Those is of a proper stance a are skills that assure him of making the cut in nearly all the leis layed and practio tournaments he enters. When he's putting particularly well, he's a threat to win.

Frosty had to do two years of uniformed service, and he did them in the police force, where he walked a beat and served as a court orderly. When he finished with that, he got a job as a marketing representative for a cigarette company. He played golf on his weekends, squeezing seventy-two holes of tournament play into two days of thirty-six holes each. / Again, this differed from the environment in which most American golfers develop today. Typically, the best juniors get college scholarships. The best college players immediately turn professional. They never experience the discipline of earning a living outside of golf the way that American players of earlier generations did.

Which comes first, confidence or winning? The implication, in some minds, is that you can't win until you have confidence, and you can't get confidence until you've won. But if that were the case, no one would ever win for the first time. The fact is that the confidence required to win can be learned.

No. 14 How Guy Rotella Came to Golf

I thought, Great. I spend my days teaching people to stay in the present. But today I don't do it myself. / That's part of the challenge of the game. It's not enough to learn what to do. You need the discipline to make yourself do it every day. / Fortunately, every new day is a fresh chance. So I'm hopeful that Dad will invite me back to the Member-Guest. If he does, I plan to redeem myself.

No. 15: How Nona Epps Learned to Come Through in the Clutch

IT SOMETIMES SEEMS TO ME THAT THERE ARE BUT TWO KINDS OF parents: those who want their kids to play golf, and those who want their kids to play golf better.

I'm tempted to refer all of these parents to a friend of mine named Charlie Epps, because Charlie is a proven expert in raising a young golfer the right way.

To start with, Charlie understood two key principles. One is that no parent is going to make a kid like golf. And the second is that it will do no good to restrict a child to golf at the expense of other sports. / The best way to introduce a kid to golf is casually.

This means that the parent has to recognize that his or her own game has a lesser priority when a child is along. If you're determined to get in eighteen holes or if you're interested in shooting your best score, leave the child somewhere else.

A child of almost any age can't spend too much time playing golf and practicing. But children burn out if they're doing it because someone requires it and they're not having fun.

Parents, I think, would be amazed at how often something they ve said will pop into their children's brains at a critical moment. If they knew how often this happened, they might take care to improve the odds that it would be something positive and helpful.

No. 16: How Pat Bradley Finished Her Victory Lap

THE MOST INTENSE ATHLETE WITH WHOM I HAVE EVER WORKED MIGHT not draw a second glance walking through the average shopping mall. / Our media stereotype of the intense, mentally tough athlete is a masculine one —maybe a linebacker, shot full of pain kill-ers, laying waste to quarterbacks on Sunday afternoon. Not many sportswriters associate intensity and toughness with the image of a slightly built woman, prematurely gray, with a shy, unassuming demeanor. But mental toughness has no gender. Pat Bradley is slightly built, shy, and unassuming. But Pat has an intensity that can sear you when she chooses to reveal it. She is as mentally tough as any human being I have ever known.

She didn't want to talk about the tournaments she'd won. She wanted to talk about the times she'd finished second. She wanted to know how she could convert those second place finishes into firsts. She understood that no matter how good a player is, she faces two choices. She can get better. Or she can stagnate.

What Pat did have was an appreciation for the power of her own mind. She felt she was capable of seeing every shot before she hit it, of willing herself to get the ball in the hole. And that kind of resolve can more than make up for a little bit less than optimal length off the tee.

She liked another idea I mentioned to her. I told her that our bodies and brains are, in one sense at least, like computers. The data that a computer receives will inevitably be reflected in the data it puts out. / This reinforced her ability to see her shots before she hit them. She believed that she could win because she had the strongest mind, the best ability to visualize successful shots. She gave her mind only positive input.

No. 17: How Claude Williamson Got from Stumpy Lake to the Cascades

WHEN A GOLFER I KNOW NAMED CLAUDE WILLIAMSON WALKED ONTO THE first tee for a quarterfinal match in the Virginia Senior Amateur championship last summer, he had already come a very long way.

There have probably been hundreds of Virginians who played golf as youngsters, moved to New York, and had to give up the game. There have no doubt been thousands of New Yorkers who never played as youngsters, moved to Virginia, and took it up. But Claude may be the only Virginian who's ever moved to New York City and taken the game up there. One Christmas, his wife bought him a set of irons. He embarked on his golfing career at twenty-four.

As a result, his handicap continued to fall, until he was just about a scratch player. It had taken him twenty years of consistent effort to get there, but he made it.

It's a waste of time to make a commitment to becoming good, to practice consistently, and then go out and believe in someone else more than you believe in yourself. At the very least, a player has to enter a tournament with the attitude that he's better than anyone else until someone proves otherwise. Put the burden of proof on the competition.

Moreover, you can remind yourself that you are your real opponent. If you can win the battle with your mind and emotions and play your best game, then you can't really lose. You may simply find out that on this particular day, someone had a better golf game than you had, or that you ran out of holes.

This is a problem a lot of amateurs encounter. They have a match they badly want to win. But they can't get to the course in time to warm up. Or the course doesn't have a practice tee. / The best way to handle this situation is to find time to visualize the tee shot you want to hit. Take a lot of practice swings and make sure your muscles are as loose as you can make them. Pick up a club you can trust; if your driver has been balky of late, or the hole is tight, it might be best to leave the driver in the bag for a few holes. Concentrate on your target and your pre-shot routine. And no matter what happens, don't assume that the first tee shot, good or bad, will have any influence on the shots you play thereafter.

Most dreams are attainable if the dreamer is ready to devote consistent, intelligent effort to them.

No. 18: How Tom Kite Honors His Commitment Appendix More Rotella's Rules

ONCE IN A WHILE, SOMEONE WILL APPROACH ME AT A GOLF TOURNAMENT or clinic and tell me what a relief it is to learn that he can become a first-class golfer just by changing the way he thinks. / Or someone out on the tour will come to me because he's heard that I help players get better just by changing the way they think. They might even bring up an example, saying that they observed the way Tom Kite improved after he started working with me-just by changing the way he thinks. / I am at once flattered, embarrassed, and slightly irritated by this kind of compliment.

The difference between a dream and a fantasy is commitment.

To improve, a player must practice in the right way, working on both his swing and his mind. / As he practices, Tom is constantly challenging his mind and his creativity in an effort to do both.

Appendix: More Rotella's Rules