Golf Is Not A Game Of Perfect Quotes

Fuck golf anyway. Stupid goddamn game, chasing a ball around a perfectly good cow pasture.

A golfer has to learn to enjoy the process of striving to improve. That process, not the end result, enriches life.

The smaller the target, the sharper the athlete’s focus, the better his concentration, and the better the results.

People by and large become what they think about themselves.

attitude would always win out over ability.

You cannot hit a golf ball consistently well if you think about the mechanics of your swing as you play.

A golfer can’t force results to happen. He can only do everything possible to give those results a chance to happen. As Tom Watson once put it, to become a really good golfer, you have to learn how to wait. But you have to learn to wait with confidence.

Even when you're keeping score, golf is all about focusing on the shot at hand, the total score being a sum of those shots. On magic mushrooms, each shot was an act of self-expression - a karate kick, a pirouette, a paintbrush stroke. The course was an aren, a stage, and a canvas. That's the way it felt playing in the backcountry, too. Going beyond the simple visual appreciation of a landscape and interacting with it beyond the reach of the physical body. Launching shots across canyons and rivers and down mountainsides and beaches. The motion of the body determining the motion of the ball - its flight an extension of the body like a spider riding the wind on a silken thread or a perfectly cast fly arcing down onto the surface of the water. This is the part of the game that is hard for nongolfers to see. You have to play to feel it. It isn't visible through the TV screen or from outside the picket fences and privet hedges. The forest gets lost in tress of tartan and argyle, visors and V-necks. Golf seems to be one thing but is very much another, and backcountry golf and mushroom night golf are as true to the nature of the game as any stuffy country club championship or Saturday Nassau or fourball.

It will try to send the ball in the direction of the last thing you look at or think about. If that happens to be a pond, you can find yourself in severe trouble. So if you’re preparing to hit an approach shot over water, or a pitch over a bunker to a pin, it’s important that you have an established habit of focusing your mind firmly on your target.

Second, golfers often have a problem of perception. If a player, facing a tee shot, starts to remember shots she’s hit out of bounds, is she being realistic? Or is she being unduly harsh on herself? If she thought about it, she’d probably remember that she’s hit far more tee shots in bounds than out of bounds during the course of her golfing career. Remembering one of the good shots, therefore, would be far more realistic than remembering a shot that sliced out of bounds. But golfers, particularly high-handicappers, often perceive themselves too negatively. They allow the bad shots to dominate their memories.

golf, oddly, gave Updike a spiritual thrill; from the very beginning, he was acutely sensitive to what he called “the eerie religious latency” of the game; when he wrote about it, he invariably invoked the supernatural. “Intercession” set the pattern, ending with a curse and turning on a seeming miracle. On his second time around, long after his progress across the course has become “a jumbled rout,” Paul yearns for divine intervention: All he wanted was that his drive be perfect; it was very little to ask. If miracles, in this age of faint faith, could enter anywhere, it would be here, where the causal fabric was thinnest, in the quick collisions and abrupt deflections of a game. Paul drove high but crookedly over the treetops. It dismayed him to realize that the angle of a metal surface striking a rubber sphere counted for more with God than the keenest human hope.

You can't wait until a few putts fall and a couple of birdies go on the scorecard before you start trusting. You have to start replicating the state of mind you have on a hot streak as soon as you step onto the first tee.

If you're going to be a victim of the first few holes," I said, "you don't have a prayer. You're like a puppet. You let the first few holes jerk your strings and tell you how you're going to feel and how you're going to think.

When everyone around you is telling you you have great potential, and they expect you to win all the time, you can quickly start to hate and despise the potential you have, to perceive it as a burden. Val Skinner, one of the players I work with on the LPGA Tour, has struggled with that problem. She came to the tour as the Collegiate Player of the Year, and she hits it a long way. When she didn’t win immediately, she got frustrated and critical of herself. She’s had to work hard to realize that her physical talent is only one factor in her golfing ability—and not the most important factor.

It’s the same way with your mind,” I said. “You’re going to have to decide before the round starts how you’re going to think, and do it on every shot. You have to choose to think well.

Weekend players generally would do well to spend time practicing with a long iron or fairway wood until they have a club they know they can hit 200 yards into the fairway. It will make the game a lot easier for them.

Everything that happens from the tee to that 120-yard range is almost insignificant compared with what happens thereafter.

Golfing potential depends primarily on a player’s attitude, on how well he plays with the wedges and the putter, and on how well he thinks.

always had a shag caddie stand precisely where he intended

Winners and losers, Wooden said, are self-determined. But only the winners are willing to admit it.

On the other hand, a basic play, in perfect order, can be achieved by, say, whistling fidgetingly while playing yourself. And I once converted two down into two up when playing golf against P. Beard, known also as the leader of an orchestra, by constantly whistling a phrase from the Dorabella Variation with one note – always the same note – wrong.

NOT MANY PEOPLE think that their state of mind is a matter of choice. But I believe it is. Unfortunately, major branches of psychology and psychiatry during this century have helped promote the notion that we are all in some sense victims—victims of insensitive parents, victims of poverty, victims of abuse, victims of implacable genes. Our state of mind, therefore, is someone else’s responsibility. This kind of psychology is very appealing to many academics. It gives them endless opportunities to pretend they know what makes an individual miserable and unsuccessful. It appeals as well to a lot of unhappy people. It gives them an excuse for their misery. It permits them to evade the responsibility for their own lives. But I didn’t get into psychology through the normal academic route.

In the morning, I spent ten minutes thinking about all the things I was grateful for. I repeated positive, empowering phrases again and again. I feel great. Today is going to be a great day. Good things are coming my way. I visualized facing several scenarios—good and bad—on the golf course and then executing the perfect shot in each situation. I imagined winning the Gateway Championship—seeing myself with the trophy in hand.

This is all the more important for amateurs who play once or twice a week. They need to keep their swings simple and their confidence high. They must learn to resist the kind of temptation that can lead to loss of confidence, temptation often garbed as well-meaning advice.

and a confident swing for golfers at every level is, instead, quite the opposite. Hit the shot you know you can hit, not the shot Arnold Palmer would hit, nor even the shot you think you ought to be able to hit.

I sometimes tell young players that being nervous on the golf course is a little bit like being nervous the first time you make love with someone you really care about. Nearly everyone is nervous in that situation, but nerves are part of what makes the experience so exhilarating. If it didn’t make you nervous, it wouldn’t be so gratifying. In fact, it might be a little boring

Many of the players I work with also pick an intermediate target on the tee to help them with alignment. This can be an old divot, a bit of paper, or the remnants of a wooden tee. All that matters is that it is precisely on the line between the ball and the target. The player picks both the target and the intermediate target as he stands behind the ball. Then he walks up to the ball with his eye on the intermediate target. He uses it to help align his clubface and his body.

You can't talk yourself out of problems you behave yourself into.

The spiritual dimension is your core, your center, your commitment to your value system. It's a very private area of life and a supremely important one. It draws upon the sources that inspire and uplift you and tie you to the timeless truths of all humanity. And people do it very, very differently.

That process, not the end result, enriches life. I want the people I work with to wake up every morning excited, because every day is another opportunity to chase their dreams. I want them to come to the end of their days with smiles on their faces, knowing that they did all they could with what they had. That’s one reason golf is a great game. It gives people that opportunity.

In contrast, the disabled kids we worked with focused on what was in their control—their chance to learn to play. And they learned, despite their limitations. It started to hit me that attitude, self-perception and motivation heavily influenced success in life. I realized that happiness had more to do with what you did with what you had than with what you had.

I used to play golf,” said Serge. “It’s a frightening game. Forget football or even NASCAR.” He whistled in awe. “Golf takes it to the brink.” “That bad?” “It’s the mental component. They try to hush it up, but the game can destroy the strongest men. Every year, dozens of ugly psychotic breaks. Frustration builds over a lifetime until a tee shot lands in the water of a sadistic island hole, and then a hedge-fund manager hurls all his clubs like tomahawks at the other guys in plaid knickers before stripping off all his clothes and making ‘snow angels’ in a sand trap, prompting a special unit from the pro shop to hustle him away through secret underground doors. Fortunately, I have the perfect emotional composition to excel at golf.

The foundation of consistency is a sound preshot routine.

golfer must train his swing and then trust it.

If we agree that alcohol has some control over you once you start drinking, enough that drinkers regularly drink more than they set out to, surely alcohol can make you do something you never imagined yourself capable of. I am appalled by how many awful things I did under the influence. Addiction is humbling, and I have been humbled enough to know that I am capable of anything, no matter how abhorrent, if the circumstances are right. Anyone is. Believing yourself immune to mistakes increases your chance of committing a repugnant act. All humans are painfully capable of failure. We are only human. It only takes one slip-up, one lapse in judgment. Don’t be fooled—everyone makes mistakes. No one intends to kill another person while driving drunk. Yet it happens all the time. In the U.S., someone is killed by a drunk driver every 51 minutes.154 Have you ever gotten so drunk you threw up? Did you set out to do that? If your judgment is perfect, would you have allowed that to happen? Even if you consistently make great decisions and keep yourself and others out of harm’s way, do you want to be the person at the party who cannot shut up? The person whose breath reeks of wine but can’t tell because their senses have been numbed to the smell? We all know the person who goes on and on, and unfortunately, unlike on Facebook, we can’t skip to the next interesting story. I know from experience, no one wants to spend time with “drunk Annie,” who can’t stop talking or laughing loudly at her own jokes. You may feel that a little alcohol is good for your conversation skills or your golf game. The problem with alcohol is that once you start drinking you can’t judge the point where a little is good and a lot becomes a disaster. When you are making a fool of yourself, or when your conversation skills wane, you remain unaware. Even if you could gauge the exact amount to drink, booze doesn’t make you cleverer, funnier, more creative, or more interesting. There is nothing inherent in alcohol that can do this. More often when a shy person gets drunk, they end up emotional, weepy, and repetitive. We don’t realize how bad we look when drinking because we are drunk and so is everyone else. It’s the old question: If everyone jumped off a cliff, would you? With alcohol, as a culture, our answer is disturbing—yes.

A single, perfectly executed drive, out to 250 yards, can make up for twenty flubbed, duffed, hooked, sliced, shanked, and pulled drives that end up in the woods. Every amateur golfer knows and embraces this theology. For many, it’s the only thing that keeps them coming back to this game again and again. You remember the great holes or entire courses that you’ve played out successfully and conveniently forget the bad ones. Psychologists call it motivated forgetting. Psychology aside, I suspect this rationalization, by golfers, falls into the same category of things from which God saves idiots. Without it, I suspect there would be exponentially fewer golf enthusiasts in the world. - The Hermit of Carmel