Finding the Champion Within – Part One

The sun shines.  The grass is impossibly green. The air is warm and comfortable.  You walk off the tee with the others.  You talk.  You enjoy.  It’s a beautiful day and a beautiful place to be.  One of life’s real pleasures.

The group is collegial and the repartee is fun, like it always is.  Jokes about the wager and the ‘match’ have created a little excitement.  Just as the challenge of the game itself always does.  Meeting the challenge is always satisfying.  This is golf.  And why we play.

You part from the conversation and walk over to your ball, stand behind it have a quick look.  Okay.  A decent lie.  Stance reasonably level.  Yardage you’re comfortable with.   The green is open and the pin accessible.  Wind not a factor.

You begin to think your way through the shot.  Should land short and to the right, playing for a bounce left off the fringe.  You’ll finish below the hole leaving yourself with an uphill right to lefter.  Aim at the left edge of the back trap.  Right at the edge.  That’s the line.

You take the club and grip it.  You waggle it and feel the heft.    You stand over the ball and feel the terrain and what it demands of your balance.  You take a little practice swing.  You have all the details now.

Behind the ball again, you look at the left edge of the back trap reminding yourself of this or that.  “Don’t rush,” you might tell yourself.  Or, “hit down on it.”    Whatever your current ‘reminders’ are, you quickly run through them.

You pick out the flight path: you’ll aim at that left edge of the trap and hit a full, high shot. You remember what it feels like to hit that high floater: Down on it.  Whack.  Like that.  And as you feel that whack again, you trace the desired arc of the ball through the air, watching as it heads for the edge of the trap, rises, stalls and then lands a little short and a little right, jumps left, and rolls out up to the pin.

“Just like that,” you think, “I know that shot.”

And then as you step up and address the ball, the last and most important item in your pre-shot routine: you focus on the moment of contact and project exactly what that will feel like.  That’s always the last thought before, and as, you swing.  What it will feel like.

“That feeling…  Just like that…”

Somewhere in the next nanosecond or two, just before ‘takeaway’, doubt pops in.  Out of nowhere, you flash back to the feel of the club-head on the ball push-slicing it into the water on the right.  What?!

Or, smothering it O.B. to the left.  No!

Or, skulling it into the bunker in front.  Ugh!  Jeez!

Or, chunking it halfway there.  C’mon!!!

These flashes are embedded in memories from previous rounds, previous failures, previous crises.  And they’re not just thoughts or pictures.  They involve the actual feel of the swing.  The feel of the bad contact.  The feel of the miss-hit.  You have a flash feeling of slicing it.  Or hooking it.  Or skulling it.  Or chunking it.  That feeling is lurking in your muscles.

These things pop into your stream of consciousness because you FEAR them.  Because you’re afraid of repeating them.  Because you know that you make mistakes, and in spite of all of your careful and meticulous planning and pre-shot preparation, you might make that mistake AGAIN!

Like now.  At a crucial point in the match.  And, hey!  Listen up, there’s no “might” about it.  You ARE going to make that mistake again.  Right now.  With this shot.  And everybody looking.

“Get that thought out of your head!” you tell yourself.  “Forget it, I’m going to hit this shot as planned!  I’m not going to chunk it!”

Now you’re having a dialogue with yourself.  Your concentration has been broken.  All the positives have gone right out the window.  That pre-shot routine is worthless.   With these negative images dancing in your head and miss-hit feelings reverberating in your body, you haven’t got a chance of hitting that high floater!  These little nightmares have poisoned the shot.

“No.  I’m going to hit it cleanly,” you think, as the dialogue continues.  “I’m not going to chunk it.”  You try to convince yourself: “I’m going to hit it cleanly.  Cleanly… Head steady…  I have this shot.  Let’s go…”

You make the swing, …  and nine times out of ten, the worst happens.   … Chunk.  Splut.  Doink.

The mind will almost always take that last disastrous cue and run with it.  Whammo, into the water you go.  Splash!

O.B. over the fence as predicted.  Two extra big ones on the card.  Hole and match down the drain.

Skulled as feared.  Into the damned trap.  Nightmare ahead.

Or just a plain old ‘Chunk’ like you knew you would.  Now they’re looking at you.  And smirking.  They turn away so you won’t see them laughing.

In that painful post disaster moment, that moment of acute embarrassment, and acute anger and acute frustration, you’re thinking, “What the hell!?  Why did I DO that?!   What’s the matter with me?!”

But there is no answer.  Only the silence of failure.

Stand by.  Help is on the way.  In Part Two of “Finding the Champion Within.”

Cover Photo via Flickr