You Don’t Have To Shoot A Low Score To Be A Great Golfer

Pal Springs California at Indian Canyons Golf Course

Let’s get the obvious out of the way.  If you’re playing golf for a living or trying to win a competition, from a friendly bet to a USGA event, the only determinant of outcome is the lowest score.  So, while score will always be a core part of this game, scoring low is not necessarily defines you as a great golfer.  Allow yourself to consider another perspective.   

Great golfers emerge from engaging in golf’s potential for personal transformation.   Golf can broaden what we know about ourselves and can challenge us to confront and master our dysfunctional thoughts and emotions.   Golf brings us face to face with the same issues that stand in the way of our facing everyday life with more openness and fearlessness.  Golf provides repeated opportunities that challenge us to grow, and golfers at every level will improve if they engage in the challenge. 

Here's an example of an “opportunity” that you might relate to.  You’re on the seventh hole, a short par 3 playing from an elevated tee to a green surrounded by prominent deep bunkers.  You’ve been playing well up to this point and feeling almost buoyant from making an  unexpected long putt  on the 4th hole.  The first sign of a problem on the 7th tee is your uncertainty about club selection.  Is it a hard 8 iron or a soft seven?  And now, you start thinking about how well you’ve been playing up to now, and how much you want to get on this green.  Afterall, its such a short hole and this is no place to mess up the round.  That would be disappointing and almost embarrassing in front of your playing partners.  Its only 130 yards. 

So what happens?  All these thoughts and emotions have hijacked your engagement in your pre-shot routine.  You end up trying to steer the ball and make a slashing, out of tempo swing.  You watch in dismay as the ball dives left into a hazard.  Worst swing of the day by far. 

Everyone has produced some disaster shots like, maybe more than a few times per round.  So what can you do instead? First, you need to learn to cultivate the self-awareness to see what is happening before you take that fatal swing.  Break out of the spell.  Step  back, push the re-set button, and immerse yourself fully in the mental and physical components of your pre-shot routine, as if this is the only shot you have to make all day.  This immersion will banish the club uncertainty, the excessive self-consciousness, the ridiculous narrative you were building up about your score and the drama you created.   I have no doubt you will have a better result.  outcome.  This is the road to becoming a great golfer. 

Becoming a great golfer has to do with the personal transformation that occurs when you repeatedly practice overcoming the thoughts and emotions that keep us from performing at the level we are capable of.   In a recent interview, Rory McIlroy was asked “What do you need to get control of in your game to win this tournament?”  His answer was “That’s easy, I need to get control of my thoughts and emotions and then everything else will fall into place.” 

This is what golf comes down to – the art of increasing our self-awareness and self-management capabilities.  That’s how we become “great” golfers.  These abilities are the hallmark of PGA players at the apex of their game, but all golfers should be aspiring to do the same, without a narrow pre-occupation with score.    And, when we engage with this mindset, good scores will “happen” more often.

It cannot be that all our training efforts, investments in new clubs, lessons, and hours watching YouTubes are simply to shave a few strokes off our handicap.   We can transform ourselves through repeated small victories of enhanced self-awareness and self-control as we strive to make better golf swings.  Along the way, as an added benefit, we become more present and effective in the world at large, not just on the golf course.  Each time we step up to the ball we have an opportunity to “be there.”  

Adopting this perspective that goes beyond score, also will also create or restore your sense of fascination with the game, with each hole, and with each shot.  As Shivas Irons said in Golf in the Kingdom,  “…Fascination frees our journey through the worlds and opens the doors to where we want to go... Fascination is the true and proper mother of discipline. And golf is a place to practice fascination. ’Tis slow enough to concentrate the mind and complex enough to require our many parts. In that ’tis a microcosm of the world’s larger discipline.”  

If you want to go further in your own personalized approach to better golf, you can contact me  through www.drrichgolf.com.  I work in person and through zoom.  Also keep in mind that you can pick up a lot more from my book Better Golf Better Life on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible. 

May the golf gods smile on you.