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“Things just go from bad to worse,
Starts like a kiss, and ends like a curse.”
Jim Carroll
There is no way around it: no matter how good, bad or indifferent you are as a golfer it is inevitable that you will play bad. And what do I mean by bad? Well, if we check the Thesaurus we will find a number of other words to describe it- awful, terrible, dreadful, appalling, shocking, ghastly, horrific, dire, and unpleasant. One or more of these synonyms may appeal to you, but the truth of the matter is that the feelings engendered by bad golf are singularly indescribable, at least by words fit for a family publication. I would petition Roget to include horrendous and ridiculous in his list, although we begin to get into terms that amplify the scale of the bad, such as “unbelievably”, or “incredibly”. Suffice it to say that words don’t do justice to the emotions brought to the surface by playing at a level far below what you are capable of, especially in a circumstance where you are especially desirous to play your best.
As a player one of the things I am known for is my consistency. My stroke average for any given year is somewhere around 71 and I rarely shoot very low or very high scores. At the Club Pro level this kind of scoring average is good enough to make me competitive in most events, especially on more demanding courses. Last year my low round was 66, and my high round, with one exception, was 74. I had 20 scores between these two numbers, with 6 rounds in the 60’s, and only one that was higher. Unfortunately, this round came in the most important tournament of the year, the National Club Pro Championship, and it wasn’t just sort of bad, say a 77: no, it was 81, and it was demoralizing. More recently, after not playing competitively for 2 months, I went to Florida for the PGA Stroke Play Championship and fired stellar rounds of 82 and 84. Some of my friends were shocked at the scores, thinking that perhaps it was a misprint. My reply was “I’m not exempt. If you drive it mediocre, miss some greens, pitch it poorly, and miss every putt outside of two feet you are going to make a bunch of bogeys, a few “others”, and very few birdies to balance things out, and you are going to shoot high numbers”.
In discussing a particularly bad round of golf there are a number of elements to consider. First, it must be understood that no one is immune to bad golf. It is going to happen, and your greatest hope is that it doesn’t happen at the worst possible time, although that is usually exactly when it does happen. What we are left with is the art of dealing with it. What do we do as it is happening, and how do we extract something positive from it after it is over? It has been said, and I would definitely agree with the statement, that the measure of a man’s character is not how he handles prosperity, but how he handles calamity. In other words, anyone can be a great guy when things are going well, but what happens when the tide turns the other way and everything works in a negative direction?
After getting particularly angry at a poor shot while playing a few holes after work one afternoon my good friend and teaching compatriot Bernie Najar commented that he had never met anyone who hated a bad shot more than I did. My boss, Barry Fuhrman, the Head Pro at Woodholme Country Club, was looking out at the eighteenth fairway one late afternoon when he saw me in the distance getting ready to hit a shot toward the green. I fanned the ball way right of my target, and immediately let my club fly into the ground some distance in front of me. I recovered the offending iron and hit another shot onto the green and upon returning to the clubhouse encountered Barry: “Were you out there by yourself?” he asked. “Yes”, I replied. “Then why in the world would you throw your club? You were just practicing”. He was incredulous. “It was a terrible shot. It pissed me off”. Barry shook his head and walked back inside.
I believe that it is entirely necessary to have an extreme dislike of bad golf. The key is to channel that anger into something positive, and it is a sign of maturity when you are able to do so. What Sport Psychologists talk and write about most concerns the art of handling adversity. I want my students, especially the young ones, to get mad when they perform poorly. This shows me that they have the desire to do better, and that they have the will to excel. I spend a lot of time explaining to them how their anger cannot be allowed to negatively affect their next shot, either in their decision making or in their execution. Bobby Jones was a club thrower when he was young: I once came agonizingly close to hitting my mother with a helicoptered 7-iron. My father didn’t think much of my Herculean heave and informed me that a repeat performance would have me banned from the course for the remainder of my natural life.
It often takes quite a while to figure out that letting anger spill over into the next shot or the rest of the round is a sure recipe to continue your bad play. It takes even longer to get the idea (and some never do) that whining, complaining, making excuses, feeling sorry for oneself, or becoming generally despondent are no help in turning things around. There is only one productive way to deal with bad golf, and that is with relentless optimism. You can get mad, disgusted, and discouraged, but the secret is in the word “momentarily”. It is not healthy to totally repress the feelings and emotions that emerge when you are in the midst of failing at something that means a great deal to you. But you have to let it go and get on with the task of hitting better shots. Anger gets in the way of clear thinking. Get too disgusted or discouraged and you risk giving up, which is simply not acceptable.
It is rare to find a champion who has not persevered through bad times. Many have won events after starting extremely poorly. Hogan once started a round with a triple-bogey seven. After making eight birdies and no bogeys for a 67 his playing partner commented on his great “comeback”. “That’s why they have 18 holes” Hogan responded. Tiger, Nicklaus, all the great ones have gone through slumps, and every player has suffered a crushing defeat as a result of less than stellar shot making or putting. What we learn from them is the ability to recover and come back with heightened effort to get back in the winner’s circle.
What fuels the ability to overcome adversity is the ability to learn from mistakes. No one is perfect, as Bob Rotella and countless others have pointed out, and we will all screw up at the most inopportune times. It is precisely at those times that we need to keep a clear head and objectively assess what happened. It may have been a quirk, a bad break, and act of God that we could do nothing about. In those cases it may be best to discount the event totally and erase it from our minds, in effect pretending it never happened. That might be the case if it were one shot, or a series of holes at the end of a tournament that caused us to lose, but if you catch yourself falling into the “woe is me- I get nothing but bad breaks” attitude you had best give yourself a quick kick in the rear and remember that breaks even out over time and that no one gets all the bad ones.
Playing a horrible round of golf when you prepared well and believed you were going to play well is another matter. Any competition, no matter what the stakes, is a test of what you have been working on to improve your game. I am a firm believer that you must compete, and thus put pressure on your game, in order to assess honestly how you are coming along. Whether this is the PGA Championship, which is the ultimate test for my game, or the Club Championship, which might be your ultimate pressure, or perhaps just a weekend match with your buddies, your results will give you an indication of where you stand and what you need to work on to get better. Until you subject your game to a little heat you will have no real idea whether or not the swing thoughts you are using on the range will transfer effectively to the course. And make no mistake about it: there is no substitute for an elevated heart rate to tell you if your latest theories work or not.
Analyzing a particular round requires closer evaluation, which usually begins with getting off by yourself with a piece of paper and a pencil and going over your round. I like to list fairways hit, greens hit, and putts, and I note where I missed each shot (right, left, short or long etc…). If you have been playing and competing for some time you probably are already aware of tendencies and weaknesses that permeate your play. Many a veteran mistakenly becomes lazy in analyzing each round and thus misses newly forming patterns that eventually will require far more work to fix than if they had been caught early. For players who are just beginning to compete this analysis is a must. Try to think of the round as not being finished until you go over it shot by shot in your head and on paper. Doing so will provide you with the blueprint for your practice in the days and weeks that follow. It will also provide you a clearer picture of your ability to make decisions during your round. This so-called “course management” aspect of your play is almost entirely dependent on your experience; in other words, the more times you face a certain predicament the better your chances to select the correct course of action. Again, you are constantly learning from your mistakes, which you can only make when you throw yourself out into the crucible of competition.
I am a big believer in video. I bring my camera and tripod to every tournament, and usually take a few pictures after each round to see how my swing is functioning. When I teach one of my main goals is to get my students to know what to look for when watching video of their swings so that they can eventually feel comfortable using the video without me around. You have probably heard many times that there is a large gap between what we “feel” and what is “real”; in other words, what we think we are doing or not doing is often far removed from the reality of what is really going on. For example, most players who hit the ball to the left feel as though they have “come over the top” of the ball and have struck it from the outside-in, thus yanking it to the left. Using the video, however, often shows a far different scenario: for most decent players the left shot is a direct result of coming too far from the inside, and instead of allowing themselves to push the shot well right of the target their hands make an unconscious adjustment and over-close the club face, leading to a shot that starts almost straight and then hooks way left. The “feel” of the shot is based on what happens in the impact area: in this case, when the hands flip over the right shoulder gets into the act as well and wheels around to the left, giving the player the sensation of “coming over” the shot, all caused, as the video will plainly show, by the club approaching from an overly inside path. Without the video to tell us what is really happening we are left to guess at what we might be doing wrong.
My conviction is that technique is the first, and most important, key to good golf, especially when it is played under pressure situations. You will hear endless talk of the “mental game”, and certainly it is an important facet of a player’s ability to perform. But I have always been of the mind that until you can hit the ball decently it doesn’t really matter how you “feel” about it. Golf pundits like to use the word “choke” to describe bad golf under pressure (which is especially annoying when the “expert is not even a decent player), but I prefer to see it as a breakdown in mechanics. The better you get, the better you play under pressure. Success breeds confidence, not the other way around. What do you have to feel confident about when every time you get nervous you scattershot the ball all over the place, or jab every other 3-footer? To stay positive in the face of extremely bad golf, it is always my preference to work on things I can control, namely my swing, my putting stroke, my pitching, bunker play, or whatever other facets of the game that are keeping me from scoring better.
In my estimation the only mental factor that is tried and true at all times and for all circumstances is to remain positive and get to work on improving immediately after a bad round or series of rounds. Get out to the range, take a lesson, go to the gym, just do something constructive that makes you feel like you are moving in a positive direction. If you need a day off go ahead and take it, but avoid the “burnt out” excuse you hear so often from Tour players who play every day for weeks on end. You are not a Tour player and don’t play and practice 10 hours a day seven days a week. You are not “burnt out”. Take a little time off then get back to it. Laziness never helped anyone get better, and it certainly won’t help you play better the next time you tee it up.
We all want to avoid the dreaded “slump”. Even if your play has been consistently bad for longer than you want to remember the only way dig yourself out of your hole is to keep doing the work that good golf requires. If you don’t enjoy practicing you are going to have a hard time of it. If you can get your bad golf to inspire you to work even harder then you have a great chance to play better in the future.
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