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“One needs the mood of a warrior for every single act”… “There is no power in a life that lacks this mood. Look at yourself. Everything offends and upsets you. You are a leaf at the mercy of the wind. A warrior, on the other hand, is a hunter. He calculates everything. That’s control. But once his calculations are over, he acts. He lets go. That’s abandon. No one can push him; no one can make him do things against himself or against his better judgment. A warrior is tuned to survive, and survives in the best of all possible fashions.”
Carlos Castaneda: A Journey to Ixtlan
So which are you, the whiner or the warrior? Think back to the last round of golf you really cared about. At what level you play does not matter. Be it the final round of the Masters, the Middle Atlantic Section Championship, the club championship, a date with the boss, or simply playing with people you don’t know for the first time, pressure, while being a creation of the mind, is real, and cannot, as some so-called “sport psychologists” would have you believe, be pretended away. In order to ultimately feel as though you have succeeded at your level of play you will have to face pressure and conquer it. You will be forced to become “the warrior”, if only for a moment. But that moment of triumph in the face of adversity when you demonstrate to yourself your own capacity for mental toughness will be something that can raise you to a new level of confidence and can affect positively the way you live your life.
In golf, pressure builds slowly. The situations that cause you to feel tension and anxiety are usually ongoing or have been planned well in advance. If you face a final round close to or in the lead, you have obviously been playing well enough to get yourself in that situation. If you are nervous about an upcoming event, that event has probably been planned for a good while. You have had plenty of time to prepare for any eventuality. This is then the first law of the golfing warrior: prepare yourself thoroughly. You have either entered the tournament or arranged the game that is causing your stomach to grumble, so go ahead and get ready to perform to the best of your ability. If you feel you have been unfairly thrust into a situation, simply back out. No one is forcing you to do anything, and the idea is to enjoy yourself, not torture yourself. But if you do decide to play, remember that the decision is yours and that there are now no excuses for not preparing as well as time will allow. If it appears that time will not allow you to fully prepare, think about it again and look hard at how you can manage your time better. Get up earlier, use your lunch hour, pitch in the back yard, putt on the rug, swing in the mirror, do whatever it takes to make a full effort and then there is really no reason to whine about your performance. Simply go out and play as hard as you can, and whatever happens, happens.
Just recently the hot topic of conversation among all golfers has been the so-called “collapse” of Greg Norman in the fourth round of the Masters. Tom Boswell of the Washington Post suggests that Norman, due to some character defect or intelligence deficit, lacks the ability to play conservatively when prudence is called for, opting instead to gun for every pin with often disastrous results. While certainly dealing with pressure exists at every level, it’s always worth a chuckle to hear a non-golfer like Boswell, whose most recent brush with a pressure shot was probably in the Mixed Scotch Four-ball Pinehurst Stableford Scramble at the club, and whose on-course strategy problems consist of deciding whetether or not he can get it over the water from 100 yards, offer strategic advice to a player of Norman’s caliber. In golf, when the swing goes south and the game gets away from you there is very little you can do about it. To suggest that Norman could have simply aimed a little more to the fat side of a few greens takes for granted that Norman could actually, at that time, have hit the ball where he was aiming it, which, of course, he couldn’t. He mis-hit the tee shot short on twelve when the only thing that mattered was the distance the ball traveled, and on sixteen he simply went for the shot that Nicklaus pulled off in 1987, with much worse results. I consider Norman’s insistence on attempting the shots that got him six shots into the lead in the first place to be the warrior’s way, and that losing while attempting to bail out is a far worse thing. He was right there: it didn’t happen. If he didn’t keep getting himself into contention, the Boswell’s of the world would leave him alone, like the media left Faldo alone after his game slipped over the last four years. Norman didn’t try stupid shots, he simply didn’t execute the same shots and putts he had been making all week. And what’s more, he made no excuses for his failure, which, of course, he shouldn’t have.
The warrior need make no excuses because once he prepares, he follows the second , third, and fourth rules of the golfing warrior: make a firm decision, act with focus and abandon, and accept responsibility for the results. Once the shot is selected and struck, everything else is out of your control. A famous Ben Hogan story has Hogan being asked during a casual round of golf what was the most important shot he ever hit. “This one”, replied Hogan, “because it’s the only one I have control over. I can’t change the shots I’ve already hit, and I don’t know what shots I’ll hit in the future, so this becomes the most important one.” When asked by my students how I deal with pressure my answer seems too simple to them; “one shot at a time, with total focus”. I rely on what got me there in the first place, and execute to the best of my ability. My thought is always to do what it takes to make a good swing, or a good stroke. The results, good or bad, will take care of themselves. Set it up, commit to the shot, and let it go. Remember that any attempt to steer the ball restricts whatever natural motion you have built into your swing and takes it more off line.
Most tour-caliber golfers will tell you that no matter how well they prepare to deal with pressure or how mentally tough they are, when they are faced with an important round they feel a twinge of nervousness, enough so that it becomes difficult to settle down and execute well. The question of what to do when no particular thought or visualization seems to help get you back on track has interested athletes for ages. I’ve worked with sport psychophysiologist and martial arts expert Dr. Evan Brody on learning more specific internal control with breathing exercises which function to lower one’s heart rate and relax the body under stressful situations. I used these exercises to help me win the MAPGA Match Play Championship tournament, and I am looking forward to exploring such methods further. Suffice it to say that taking a deep breath has always been a tried and true way to calm oneself down, and learning specific techniques that Eastern martial artists have been using for centuries makes great sense to me.
If you were to name one characteristic that fits the concept of “warrior”, it might be that of toughness. Golf is a tough game, both mentally and physically, ( it’s a good bet that anyone who describes it as simple doesn’t play or compete much anymore), and to keep it from getting the best of you it would be a good idea to inject a little toughness into your personality. There is nothing more aggravating than bad golf, for the simple reason that you have no one to blame but yourself, and that in the end every excuse you may come up with to explain your poor performance rings false because ultimately you have control over what you do before you play and while you are out on the course. Excuse making and complaining are not necessary because the warrior understands the nature of the challenge and realizes that the struggle for mastery is long-term and requires a relentlessly positive approach. His design is to prepare, focus, and execute, take the good with the bad and gets on with it. He analyzes his failures and weaknesses and attacks them with vigor, and while he enjoys any advances he may make he is never lulled into thinking that he’s “got it”. By following the rules of the golfing warrior you will not exempt yourself from the capricious nature of the game, but you will enable yourself to break out of the cycle of poor preparation, bad judgment, and shoddy execution that plagues most golfers and keeps them from not only the simple enjoyment of the game but from being successful at it as well.
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