Mind Over Golf: A Beginner's Guide to the Mental Game

by Don Sauers, Tom Nieporte

Overview

There’s an interesting point at which the psychological and technical sides of golf meet--and Tom Nieporte and Don Sauers discover this by talking with America’s leading golf professionals. The tips provided in this book will help golfers of any level discover or regain confidence that will drop strokes off of every golfer’s score. Any golfer must know how to master the eight major golfing skills, and from this book golfers will learn how easy it is to turn handicapping weaknesses into winning strengths. The most valuable advice here is sure to cultivate winners on the green!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781497634268
Publisher:	Open Road Media
Publication date:	06/10/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	108
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Don Sauers is a free-lance writer, retired advertising executive and amateur golfer. His books on a variety of subjects have been published by Doubleday and Harper.Tom Nieporte is a widely respected teacher and master of the mental game. He is Head Pro at Winged Foot Golf Club, site of numerous national championships including the 1984 U.S. Open and the 1998 PGA Championship. Previously Tom was a regular on the PGA tour, winning three times including the 1967 Bob Hope Desert Classic when he defeated Doug Sanders by one stroke. He also competed in 13 U.S. Opens and 13 PGA Championships.

Read an Excerpt

Mind Over Golf

A Beginner's Guide to the Mental Game

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By Tom Nieporte, Don Sauers

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

Copyright © 2001 Tom Nieporte and Don Sauers
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-3426-8

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CHAPTER 1

The importance of the psychological side of golf.

How important is the psychological side of golf?

If championship golf were simply a matter of mechanical skills—knowing how to hit all the shots—Tiger Woods, who may be the most competent shotmaker the game has ever known, would never shoot over 68. Birdies or better on all the par fives would be automatic. But even Tiger has suffered a few mini meltdowns, as he did on Sunday afternoon, November 6, 2000, when his uncharacteristically erratic play on the final two holes of the Tour Championship let the steadier Phil Mickelson take the trophy by two shots. Was it a loss of concentration or pure frustration? It may not have been either. Tiger is well know to play with virtually unshakable composure. He proved it on Sunday, September 10, 2000, when he defeated Grant Waite with a clutch birdie on the 18th to win the Canadian Open.

Waite later told Sports Illustrated (12/18/2000), "Tiger has the greatest concentration and the greatest discipline. He's like a Zen master." But on that fateful final day at the Tour Championship Tiger's lapse was clearly more mental than physical.

Is the mental game important to every golfer? Ask Greg Norman. Standing on the second green in a playoff for the '84 U.S. Open title at Winged Foot he watched Fuzzy Zoeller roll in a 65-foot birdie putt. Seconds later the visibly shaken Norman 3-putted from 20 feet. Was it a case of over-aggressiveness as some felt or was it simply nervous tension? In either case Greg had lost mental control of his game and, for all practical purposes, the title.

Or ask Hal Sutton. When play started on the final day of the '83 Busch Classic he has a solid 6-shot lead, but he soared to a 77 and finished behind Calvin Peete and Tim Norris. His problem? Negative thinking. After the round he told reporters, "It's nobody's fault but mine. I started having negative thoughts on the first hole and just couldn't shake them."

Johnny Miller is another champion who fully understands the power of positive thinking. After winning the first two tournaments on the '75 tour he said, "Every time I go out there I feel sure I'm going to win. The way I'm playing now I don't believe anyone can beat me." Confidence by the truckload.

For many years every aspect of Arnold Palmer's game was solid—mental as well as mechanical—but there were days when he had trouble figuring out what had gone wrong. Commenting on the nightmarish fourth round and the anticlimactic playoff of the 1966 Open against Bill Casper he said, "It was a new experience for me. I didn't hit bad but I got bad results. What happened? I'd like to know that, too. I guess I just don't do well in Open playoffs."

Casper had some insights of his own. Of the playoff round he said, "It's a spiritual thing. I just knew what was going to happen; that he'd go ahead by two strokes and that I'd catch up. I just knew it."

Casper's surge reflected a sense of destiny bordering on what the parapsychologists call precognition. "It all turned out the way it was supposed to turn out," he said. Could Casper's new religious fervor have made the difference? He was a devout Mormon convert. It might have made a difference if only by contributing to his trancelike composure. The cool Californian said, "When Arnie began to slip I was ready."

But what if Arnie hadn't begun to slip? What if he hadn't suddenly turned his sights away from the title and leveled them at Ben Hogan's record Open score? Or what if Arnie had been praying too? He might have been. As you'll see in a later chapter two out of three of the leading pros admit that they've prayed during tournaments. It's unlikely however that Palmer had felt in need of prayer. With only nine holes to go on the final day of regulation play he held a seemingly insurmountable seven stroke lead.

Then suddenly, mysteriously, he began to falter. He lost two strokes on the next four holes, and on the par-3 15th—the 69th hole of the tournament—he fell apart completely. Although Arnold still had a 5-stroke lead and a chance to crack Hogan's record, his habitual aggressiveness—not always a desirable psychological trait as we will see—lead directly to his defeat. Instead of hitting for the middle of the green he went boldly for the pin in the right rear corner, a habit shared most notably by Tiger Woods among today's top players. Some observers insisting that nobody really knows what was going on in Arnold's mind, maintain that he may have intended to play safe but simply hit a bad shot, but most observers of the Palmer personality believe he was trying to regain one of the strokes he has lost. Barely a foot or two off line his drive caught a cavernous bunker. He recovered reasonably well, blasted 8 feet past the hole ands two-putted for his bogey. Casper, seeming to gain confidence from Palmer's lapse, dropped a 20-footer for a birdie. From this point on, with his lead cut to 3 strokes, Arnie's downfall seemed to be as inevitable as it was spectacular.

Looking back, it seems important to point out that Palmer's unbelievable collapse shouldn't be allowed to overshadow Casper's magnificent steadiness. Billy scored one-fourth of all the subpar rounds in the entire 1966 Open. These included a do-or-die 68 on Sunday and a highly pressurized 69 in the 18-hole playoff. As usual he was superb on the greens. He didn't 3-putt a green during the four regulation rounds and through the first eight holes of the playoff.

Whatever made the difference in this dramatic U.S. Open we can be sure it wasn't entirely a matter of one man's superior skill. Who is to say whether Palmer or Casper, in those days, was the most skilled shotmaker? It wasn't entirely a matter of Billy's ability to roll putts with such incredible precision, nor was it entirely a matter of Arnie's failure, as he put it, "to get lined up properly on those last holes." It was a matter of the many complex factors, both technical and psychological, that come into play when two great champions struggle with each other and, perhaps more important, with themselves.

What exactly are these factors? One day, back when Tom Nieporte was a regular on the PGA Tour and I was a young freelance writer spending long weekend hours struggling to break 90, we discovered that we had something in common—in addition to large families. (Tom and his wife Joan now have 9 children; Martha and I have 5.) Recalling Yogi Berra's classic observation that baseball is 90% mental 50% of the time, we agreed that golf must be 90% mental 100% of the time, and decided on the spot to do some research on this fascinating subject.

What better place to start than with Tom's fellow professionals. Rather than psychologists we chose to question the men who fight the battle of mind over golf every day—for a living. While we did conduct several personal interviews and I checked numerous previously published news stories, articles and books, our basic research tool was the questionnaire that appears in the Appendix of this book.

(It has occurred to us that you might enjoy completing the questionnaire yourself before reading on, then comparing your answers to the pros'. You may discover that you think like a pro even though you may not score like one.)

Naturally, the results of any survey must be judged according to the qualifications of those who respond to it. With this criterion in mind, we are pleased to report that the information we have accumulated, summarized, and evaluated is of extremely high quality.

For example, five of the top ten money-winners on the 1966 tour are among the outstanding professionals who responded to our request for information. Among these five are Billy Casper, the calm, quiet man who defied "Arnie's army" and won the'66 Open, Al Geiberger, idol of "Al's pals" and winner of the'66 P.G.A. championship by a record four-stroke margin, Tom Weiskopf, and ex-Masters Champ, Bob Goally. All of these men are intensely aware of golf's psychological aspects and have graciously granted us permission to quote their replies.

Also among those who returned completed questionnaires were former Masters champion Doug Ford, and three top stars who have chosen to remain anonymous: one recent P.G.A. champion and two previous winners of the U. S. Open.

Of the fifty professionals whose opinions are included in our summary, over thirty were regular performers on the tour and only eighteen, perhaps because of the personal nature of some of the questions, indicated a preference to remain anonymous.

Any man who has ever topped a drive into a water hazard or shanked an easy approach to a wide-open green has known for years that the psychological side of golf is important. After watching a ten-inch putt roll five inches past the cup on the eighteenth, he may even have expressed the opinion over a gin and tonic at the nineteenth that it's the most important side of all. This belief had never been reduced to a meaningful statistic, however, until we asked our panel of professionals the following question:

Some golfers employ unorthodox techniques (short backswing, baseball-type grip, etc.) and yet compete quite successfully. Does this indicate to you that technique, as such, may be less important for the advanced golfer than the psychological factors?

The answer came back loud and clear. The pros voted close to three to one for the psychological side over the technical side. Thirty-five answered yes, thirteen no, and two were undecided.

A prominent psychiatrist, commenting on this result, said "The golfer's main problem isn't so much in developing technical competence as in being able to keep emotional factors from interfering with natural performance.

We see clear evidence of the importance of golf's mental side in the contrasting performance of two types of players on the tour. One type has all the right skills, both natural and mechanical. They possess all the ability and knowledge to compete with the best. But they remain also-rans because of some lack or failing in their psychological equipment. At the other end of the spectrum are the superstars who seem to monopolize the prestige tournaments and major titles.

Look at the Masters, for example. Between 1958 and 1965 Arnold Palmer placed first, second, or third every year except 1963, when he finished ninth. Jack Nicklaus won three out of four between 1962 and 1966, finishing second to Palmer in'64. He was such a steady winner at Augusta that his failure to qualify for the final two rounds in 1967 may be remembered as long as Gay Brewer's win; a win, incidentally, which was rich in psychological implications.

A comparison of Nicklaus' scores in the Masters of'65 and'66 demonstrates that a real champion will often score just as low as he has to score to win. In 1965 he shot 271 to beat Ben Hogan's previous Masters record by three strokes. In 1966 he shot 288, seventeen strokes higher, yet low enough to tie Gay Brewer and Tommy Jacobs and earn a playoff spot; a playoff he won with relative ease.

How can performance like this be explained? As we've already seen, not entirely by skill. Much of it is due to the ability of these superstars to "psych themselves up" for the major events, and to the psychological failings of many competing players who are as well, or nearly as well, endowed with talent. Tiger Woods seems to prove this major after major.

The key word in the above question is, of course, "advanced." The raw beginner, who has not yet reached the point where he has a naturally grooved or reasonably automatic swing, may have psychological problems, but they are of a different nature than those faced by the more experienced player. He is just beginning the battle of "mind over golf." He must someday learn how to improve his concentration and control his temper, but he must first learn how to swing the club.

One of the most interesting aspects of our survey was revealed in the answers to this, the very first question. It was the appearance on question after question of a minority vote which, because of the talents and achievements of some of the minority voters, had to be given serious consideration.

While Billy Casper, Doug Ford, Bob Goalby, and two of our anonymous National champions said that the technical side may be less important than the psychological side, P.G.A. champion Al Geiberger and one of our former U. S. Open champions disagreed.

The best explanation for this may be that some of the no-voters are in such good control of the mental side of their game that they are more concerned with the mechanical side. Geiberger, for one, is well known as a cool customer.

"He sets his own pace," said Arnold Palmer, asked to comment on Al's performance in the P.G.A. at the Firestone. "He has a good temperament and plays the course. He never bothers about anyone. Last year in the American Classic when he won here, I made a charge, finished second by four, and he didn't even know I was in the tournament."

Chances are Geiberger not only knew Palmer was in the tournament, but knew exactly how many strokes separated them. But he also knew how to keep this knowledge from upsetting his own concentration and composure.

On the other hand Bob Goalby, who voted yes, is conceded to be one of the most emotional and tempermental players on the pro circuit. That this accounts for his vote, choosing the psychological over the technical, seems to be confirmed by his answers to some of the later questions.

If this is a valid explanation, how do we account for Billy Casper's yes? From a psychological standpoint he's one of the game's steadiest performers. Yet there's little doubt among his fellow pros that he's far more complicated emotionally than his casual playing style suggests. They are aware that his attitude, as well as his performance, improved after his now-famous anti-allergy diet helped him slim down to 170 pounds from a portly 215. His wife, Shirley, can also attest to these changes. She has reported that, before his diet, he always woke up in a cheerful enough mood but then, after consuming a breakfast of eggs, bacon, toast, milk, and orange juice, often turned grouchy and depressed.

Billy has been careful to avoid, not calories, so much as foods which he feels (and his medical advisers agree) tend to upset his temperament as well as his diet. This seems to bear out Satchel Paige's advice. He suggested long ago that we should all avoid foods that "angry up the blood."

Although Billy's diet went a long way toward solving his psychological problems, it didn't solve them all. As recently as the'66 P.G.A. championship his tightly tuned nerves were upset by "fumes of factories." While the headaches that resulted from these fumes were physical factors, like the fatigue that resulted from extra weight, they had a direct negative effect on his mental attitude — an effect exceeding that on his fellow pros, who were playing under the same conditions.

CHAPTER 2

How fifty top pros rank the six major psychological factors.

Some golfers are more susceptible than others to attacks of that dreaded occupational disease, the yips. Yet there's probably not a player alive who hasn't at one time or another felt his knees turn to water and his arms to stone. Sometimes it happens on the tee, where there just doesn't seem to be a comfortable place to stand. More often it happens on the green, where the hands grow limp and cold and the cup seems to shrink out of sight. It used to happen to Hogan on the greens and they say it happens to Jack Nicklaus on the first tee. He has confessed to occasional pre-play nervousness, and once called the drive off the first tee the hardest shot in golf.

Even easygoing Al Geiberger, still a frequent winner on the Senior Tour, confessed that he was nervous before the final round of the 1966 P.G.A. championship. "Every athlete gets nervous," he said. "But I don't try to make a fuss over things, because I'm not a charger or dramatic. If I were, I'd lose control of my game."

Gay Brewer was so nervous before his playoff round with Nicklaus and Jacobs for the 1966 Masters championship that he spent a sleepless night. After tossing and turning for hours he got up at six-thirty. The only person close to the playoff who was more nervous than Gay was his wife. "She threw up three times last night and never slept a wink," he told reporters.

With golfers of this caliber suffering occasionally, if not regularly, from nervousness, we think we can discount it as a controllable psychological factor. It's just as human to be nervous before and during an important round of golf as it is to be elated when the victory is won.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Mind Over Golf by Tom Nieporte, Don Sauers. Copyright © 2001 Tom Nieporte and Don Sauers. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments,
1. The importance of the psychological side of golf.,
2. How fifty top pros rank the six major psychological factors.,
3. How to improve your game through gaining new confidence.,
4. How the pros rank the eight major golfing skills.,
5. Attributes and abilities the pros would like most to possess.,
6. What the pros feel are their strengths.,
7. What the pros feel we their weaknesses.,
8. What the pros think about practice and layoffs.,
9. Analysis of the "blank mind" theory. Mental tricks to help your driving and putting.,
10. Caddies and conversation.,
11. Dreams, superstition, and luck.,
12. When franquilizers and self-hypnosis fail, try prayer.,
13 "Gamesmanship" among the touring pros. Real or imagined? Intentional or unintentional?,
14. A positive attitude; foundation for all other psychological strengths.,
Appendix Professional Golfers' Questionnaire,
Copyright,