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What is the Mental Game and When Does it Begin?

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David F. Wright, Ph.D., PGA

I wrote an article for another publication last year that described a golfer’s behavior off the course as a reflection of his behavior on the course. The thesis of this article was: If you want to get to know someone well, play golf with them.

Notice how your playing partners handle success and failure. Does their mood change when they make a birdie? Do they look to you for "approval" after they hit a good shot? How do they handle poor play? Do they get angry when they make a bogey or hit a bad shot? Do they throw clubs? Do they verbally abuse themselves? Do they cheat? Do they help you look for your lost ball? Do they pay attention to your success? Do they talk about themselves? Are they interested in you? Do they give up after a few bad holes? Do they blame others or the course for their poor play? Is this someone you would like to have as an employer, employee or friend? Bobby Jones said he hired many attorneys in his day and he always played two or three rounds of golf with them before he signed a contract.

The above is a personality model of the mental side of golf. When psychologists look at personality theory as related to golf, we suggest that players must play within themselves. We embark on teaching our students an internal dialogue and movement pace that will produce the best performance in them. If they are fast paced off the course, they will be fast paced on the course. It is a general consensus that students should not try to swing or play at a pace that is not consistent with their personality. This is not always true.

Golf great Byron Nelson worked with Tom Watson during the early 1970’s. Nelson observed that Watson did everything quickly off the course and noted that because of this he would always tend to swing too quickly. Nelson worked with Watson during the 1974 US Open. He taught Watson to move more deliberately and slowly as he walked into and set up to shots. He even had him quiet his waggle. The net result was a slower swing pace.

In subsequent interviews regarding his work with Byron Nelson, Watson noted: "My rhythm is better now than it ever has been. I’ve learned that rhythm is the basic factor why people play well or badly. Under pressure, your rhythm gets faster. It is hard not to swing a little bit faster or think a little bit faster when you get under pressure."*

Johnny Miller says he would take 20 minutes to shave on Sunday, the fourth round of a tournament, especially when he was leading. European Tour player John Jacobs said he would take 15 minutes to put his shoes on the day of a tournament. These players intuitively knew that slowing down their movement increased their mental focus and quieted their nervous system.

You can overdo trying to slow down according to Nick Price, another player who is known to have a fast swing pace. Price says: "Being really slow under pressure can be just as bad as being really quick. Just don’t go against what you normally do."* The key is to recognize that pressure, on or off the golf course, results in quickened movement and tempo. That’s a difficult thing to feel during play. During times of pressure, a feeling of slowing down will bring you back to your best performance zone.

So, the mental game starts with your personality. If new learning environments like a golf lesson, where you are required to perform in the presence of others, produces anxiety, your tempo will be compromised and your retention of the content of that lesson will diminish in direct proportion to your level of arousal.

Anxiety triggers a flood of information through a neurological system in your brainstem. This system processes the sensory information to the brain and selects out content that makes up conscious thought. We refer to this filtered focus as concentration. Your ability to concentrate diminishes as anxiety levels rise. Retention of new information is muddled.

Here the mental game is reduced from a personality level to a neurophysical state. Learning and memory are part of this neurophysical state. Learning and memory are insidious processes for most people in every aspect of their life. A basic knowledge of a few simple principles will increase your consistency in both practice and play.

1. Learning, memory, and performance are enhanced when you are relaxed. When you are relaxed, your ability to concentrate increases. Before going to practice, play or take a lesson, develop a routine of breathing, relaxation, and concentration exercises. I will be covering many of these strategies in future articles.

2. Learning and memory are most efficient when behavior is sequenced in the correct order. Let’s assume you have come to Pelican Hill to take a lesson from me. During your first lesson I give you the fifth verse of an eight-verse poem. The second lesson I give you the fourth verse. The third lesson I give you the first verse until I have given you all eight verses, out of order. During each lesson I have you practice the verses, not necessarily in the correct order. The ninth week l ask you to recite the poem in sequence, verses one through eight. You will recite the poem with hesitation after each verse and much thought.

The average golfer practices the verses of their routine out of sequence or they just practice the end of the sequence of their routine. They stand on the range and rake and hit one ball after another. Picture the following, we have all been here. We are on the range, warming up in preparation to play. We are raking and hitting one ball after another looking for that feel. Suddenly it clicks. We can’t miss. We have found the magic bullet. When we get to the course, we have lost the feel. We have not practiced the full sequence of our routine. We left out the first two or three "verses" of our routine, standing behind the ball, seeing the shot, feeling the swing and aligning ourselves to a precise target, among other necessary things to hit a good shot.

When you find that feeling on the range, blend it with your full routine. As you walk behind the ball and begin to blend the feel, you will struggle for a few swings, then it will come. Now you are ready to take this feel to the course to play. [By the way, Johnny Miller called the days that feeling does stay with us WOOD—works only one day.]

With regard to sequencing and routine, Jack Nicklaus says: "I feel that hitting specific shots-playing the ball to a certain place in a certain way-is 50 percent mental picture, 40 percent setup and 10 percent swing. That’s why setting up takes me so long, why I have to be so deliberate...I can set up exactly right in relation to the shot I have pictured, I know I have no chance of executing it as planned."*

3. We learn through repetition. When we were in school, we learned new content by reviewing it over and over again. The more we reviewed the content, the better our retention. We learned our multiplication tables, poems and similar content through recitation. Verbal learning and motor learning occur in the nervous system in exactly the same way, repetition.

We are a society in search of a quick fix, the magic bullet. If you are going to learn a new swing and/or override the ingrained nervous system pathways of your old swing, drills practiced in the proper sequence are the only way to make change. Short, spaced, focused drill practice will promote the most efficient learning.

For example, practicing set up and swing motion drills in front of a mirror at home with a focus on feel for 5 minutes each evening will promote the most efficient strategy for change. Daily drill practice will gradually begin to "spill into" your practice and play. Please remember, practice makes permanent. If you set up incorrectly, and do your drills, you will ingrain bad swing habits. See your PGA professional often enough to review your drills to insure you do them correctly.

When Nick Faldo began to rebuild his swing under the tutelage of David Leadbedder, he said he committed to two years of poor play. He also said he knew he would have rounds in the mid to high 70s on the European tour, which he did, until he could make the changes on the range and then gradually get comfortable repeating that new swing in a pressure situation. The average student is looking for a "fix" they can immediately take to lower scores.

4. We retain information that is the most emotionally charged. That part of your brain which is responsible for emotion is also responsible for converting short term to long term memory. That is why the things we remember from our past are those things with the greatest emotional content. What do you remember most after a round, your great shots or poor shots. Most players focus on the missed putts, bad tee shots, problem clubs, etc. more readily than their good play. A focus on poor play erodes your confidence. I will elaborate in a future issue on strategies to build confidence by using a scorecard where you rate your shots on a 1 to 10 and forget about hole score. Suffice it to say, stop emoting over poor play or you will be doomed to repeat it. Focus on those great tee shots, well hit irons and putts.

5. When we learn, we process the information first in thought and pictures and then in feel—you will play your best golf with feel and images and your worst golf with a thought of your golf swing or a focus on pieces of your swing. Take a piece of paper and sign your name at the top. Under your signature copy your name. Look at every horizontal and vertical line. Be sure you don’t just sign your name again. Make certain the every curve is the same as your signature. You have a swing signature just as you have a written signature. If you are focused on your swing in thought, trying to reproduce in pieces everything you learned in lesson, magazine or the Golf Channel, you will most certainly see a degradation in performance similar to the one you experienced when you tried to copy your signature.

If you are taking lessons and doing drills, focus on the total feel of your golf movement. If you are not taking lessons, try the following: I haven’t met a player at any level who didn’t know what their best swing felt like. Focus on the total feel of your golf swing until you can feel in practice swings that “9” or “10” swing three or four times in a row. Then, set up to the ball and focus on repeating that entire swing, not pieces. It will take you 10 to 30 swings before you can repeat the feel. Once you can do it, you will know that is as mechanical as you should ever be on the golf course.

Remember the SIXTY-PERCENT Rule. A study was done with two groups of Scuba divers. Each group was taught a list of words and phrases. One group learned the list under water while the other learned the list on land. They were both tested in their original learning condition and then they changed places and they were re-tested. Upon testing in the new condition, they retained only 60 percent of their original learning. This is called state dependent or contextual learning.

The average golfer takes a lesson, has success, goes to the golf course and struggles compared to their range and lesson performance. Many players will abandon their set up or swing changes and begin to search for something that will "work."

Know that it is going to take you many attempts in every new state or context in which you practice your new learning. These states very from a lesson, to the range, to a casual round, to a tournament round.

So, the mental game begins in the microcosm of your nervous system and is expressed in everything from your personality to your learning style. In future articles I will teach you specific techniques to get the most out of your mental game.

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