The Best Golf Advice I Ever Got
It has nothing to do with mechanics, and it’s helped me execute when the pressure is on for over twenty years.
You have to understand, I got this advice after the internet became a thing but before the mobile revolution. This was before YouTube, social media, blogging and podcasts enabled anyone to deliver content to everyone.
It was before you could sit up all night watching John Rahm or Henryk Stenson swings in slo-mo from every angle like they were teeing it up in the Matrix.
In this bygone era, we were forced to read physical magazines and books about golf (Kindle and apple news were both a ways away). And we’d look at motion-capture photo sequences to try and divine what exactly Fred Couples was doing with his hips as he initiated his downswing.
Even worse, if you were one of the countless Ben Hogan acolytes (as I am), you were forced to stare at the black and white illustrations in Hogan’s Five Lessons book. Beautiful illustrations, without a doubt, but they never once sprung to life on the page to unlock his secret.
A lot of the books I gravitated to at the time — this was over 20 years ago — had more to do with golf strategies and less to do with the mechanics of the golf swing. And I read a ton of them.
One I remain really fond of is Ray Floyd’s Elements of Scoring. It’s a very “between the ears” golf book. And twenty years ago, I was just beginning my commitment to excelling at the mental part of the game, so I ate it up.
In addition to books were the magazines. While I still read them on my phone, I rarely hold a physical copy of one unless I’m bored at a Hudson News as I make my way to the gate. But in ancient times, I was subscribed to all of them, devouring and saving every issue.
On a side note, one of the things I learned from the mags back then was this: You will never go broke by promising to fix a slice. Every issue’s cover featured a revealed secret, tip, trick, fix, thought, motion, action or drill promising to cure your slice. Sometimes with a PGA pro’s name attached to it (“Faldo’s Secret To Eliminating Your Slice”), and sometimes with a Leadbetter, Harmon or Haney by-line (“How Harmon Tamed the Tiger’s Slice”).
But the truth is this: In all the years of reading those magazines cover to cover, there’s only one piece of advice I can remember. I still remember it and utilize it on the course to this day. And it had nothing to do with my takeaway, hips, arms, downswing, stance, grip or follow-through. It’s a purely “between-the-ears” bit of advice.
Fast-forward to 2022. Now, we have so much access to “between the ears” content, it’s sometimes hard to filter through and find anything that resonates. There’s a ton of great information and useful content on podcasts, social and apps.
In fact, I’d say your average golfer now has more access to fitness, psychology, mindfulness, meditation practices and course management approaches than an average PGA pro did twenty years ago. The content we have access to now were either unknown, inaccessible, cost-prohibitive or all three back then.
Maybe that’s why, 20 years ago, this one piece of golf advice cut through so cleanly and wrote itself in permanent marker on my brain. I forget which magazine it was — either Golf or Golf Digest. It was a Spring issue, because the article was of the “pre-season tune ups and tips to get your game in gear this year” variety.
It featured the usual suspects: time for a new pair of golf shoes, why you should get your clubs re-gripped, the benefits of taking a lesson, pre-round stretching, etc, etc. Side note: It’s funny to think how far we’ve come with golf fitness alone since then.
But nestled between other typical, thinly veiled advice to buy yourself a game was the pearl. I apologize, because I am about to paraphrase the advice. It was a short paragraph, but over time I simplified the advice and boiled it down to a mantra-like phrase:
Be confident, not calm.
This advice was for when you’re standing over a shot and it’s crunch time. It could be a friendly weekend Nassau, your club championship, a local USGA qualifier or just the last hole of a round where you’re in danger of shooting a personal best. When you feel those nerves start to scratch at you, don’t try to calm down. Instead, be confident.
The point is this: when you start to get a little clenched from pressure, people will advise you to calm down. Count to ten. Take a few deep breaths. Whatever. This advice is counterintuitive and instructs one to do the opposite.
The reasoning remains sound: Professional athletes pay sports psychologists a ton of money to train them in techniques to stay calm, but you don’t. So the second you consciously tell yourself to calm down, you’re almost certainly going to experience the opposite effect. In trying to ease the tension, you’re just going to end up more tensed up. Because in trying to banish it, you’re focusing on the nerves and the tension they create.
That nervousness — that pressure — it’s an energy. Instead of trying to douse this energy or suppress it, harness and redirect the energy into confidence.
And here’s the key: the confidence isn’t some make-believe placebo. It’s real. For instance, if you’re standing on the fairway 160 yards out with a seven iron in your mitts, you’ve hit that shot dozens, hundreds or thousands of times before. You have that shot. So be confident.
Be confident in your read of the green. You’ve read hundreds. Confident in your ability to lag a putt close enough for a gimme. Or to hit a three-footer firm and in the center of the cup so any subtle left-to-right break is rendered irrelevant.
Hell, be confident in your ability to play the ball back in your stance and slap a low, screaming 2-iron slice under some tree limbs and over a fairway bunker in front of you so it runs right on up close to the green. Why? Because maybe you’ve hit your drive into the rightside woods a thousand times before. And as a result, you have this very specific brand of escape shot in your bag (see any “How-to-cure-your-slice” articles in any issue of Golf Digest from the last 60 years).
The point is, you’ve done this before. And you can do it again. Practice makes better and repetition builds confidence.
Now, it’s been twenty years since this advice clicked like a light switch in my head. I’m a different person now. And I’m experienced in and a big proponent of mediation and mindful practices (not just for the purposes of golf, but also in pretty much every aspect of my life — but more on that another time). But to this day, I still draw on this advice. It’s as sound today as it was the day I read it.
I’ll be the first to say there’s a ton of wisdom in mindful techniques and practices on the course and in-the-moment when you might not be feeling like “pressure is a privilege”. But I’m also not some kind of enlightened mindful guru who can snap my fingers and shift instantly into Andy Puddicombe mode.
So when I feel the tension — that nervous energy — I call on this one bit of advice. And when I do, it immediately initiates a series of “if-then” statements in my head.
This process refocuses nervous energy into a confidence earned from the years of practice and experience that have led me to this moment.
And this is one of the many reasons why I believe every swing you make — on every course and every range — counts. Because they’ve all lead up to your next swing.
Whether it’s the first drive after you sneak out of work early to try to play nine before dark — or the final putt to win or lose a tournament you’ve worked for decades to qualify for.
Your collective experience and practice — your focus and feedback — is a mountain you stand on. And when it comes to golf, that mountain is made up of swings. Every swing you’ve made has prepared you for your next swing, and it’s the only swing that matters. So don’t try to calm down. Instead, be confident.
Keep swinging, -H
