I get a question every summer when I teach youth camps back home. Young kids will ask me something about golf that is almost impossible to explain in one sentence. “How do I get better at golf”.
It’s a good question, how do you get better at golf? There’s honestly no phrase that could encompass all of the things you need in order to improve but usually, for kids, a great place to start is simply practice.
Golfer’s mind via Steve Elkington
There’s a saying about golf that describes the game as being 10% physical and 90% mental. But what does this mean? Because after all, there are a wide range of mechanical skills that you have to perform in order to hit a variety of different shots. So could the key to golf really be so centered in your mind? Some of my most vivid childhood memories on the golf course centered around my struggle to control my mind and my emotions.
In the youth tournaments I played in, my dad would take off of work for the day and come caddie for me and to be honest it was the only way I could make it through some of these rounds. I was a hot head and expected an extremely high level of play from myself. I expected to play perfectly and to win always and when if I pulled the ball into the woods on an iron shot or missed a short putt these mistakes would consume my thoughts. My dad knew this and created an annoying method of reminding me to forget about the past hole. Say I tripled a hole before and was sulking as we walked towards the next tee. He would say come up behind me with a big smile on his face and exclaim “New Hole!”, to which my response somewhere around “I hate this stupid game” or “why do I even play this sport”. And these snappy remarks cracked him up to no end, and his contagious laughing eventually made me laugh, and by the time I had walked to the next tee I was over my mistakes and was ready to play golf again.
Now we can’t all have a caddie or a personal coach with us on the course as we play. And as I started high school this was a big problem for me. I would get in funks for a couple holes and it would completely ruin my round even though the rest of my scorecard was exceptional. It took me until late in my junior and senior year to finally learn how to limit the damage from one bad hole and keep it from carrying over to the rest of my game. Once I mastered this, I saw improvement like I had never seen before. There truly a limit to how much improvement you can make physically, after that, you need to start shaving strokes by sharpening your mind. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today.
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