Golf is Not a Game of Perfect

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  ALSO BY DR. BOB ROTELLA

  BOOKS:

  Parenting Your Superstar

  Scientific Foundations of Coaching

  Psychological Foundations of Sport

  Mind Mastery for Winning Golf

  Mind, Set and Match

  AUDIO TAPES:

  Golfing Out of Your Mind

  Putting Out of Your Mind

  CD-ROM PROGRAMS:

  Lower Your Score (with Tom Kite)

  SIMON & SCHUSTER

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  Copyright © 1995 by Robert Rotella

  All rights reserved,

  including the right of reproduction

  in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-6331-0

  ISBN-10: 1-4165-6331-8

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  I dedicate this book to my loving, enthusiastic and always encouraging wife, Darlene and to my daughter Casey, for their constant support of my passion for coaching the minds and careers of athletes.

  I dedicate it as well to all the fantastic golfers and teachers who have let me teach them, learn with them and learn from them. Thanks for the trust. Thanks for the honesty and candor. Thanks for the opportunity. And thanks for being willing to go for greatness.

  Introduction

  OVER THE PAST THIRTEEN YEARS, I’VE BEEN FORTUNATE ENOUGH TO work with many of the greatest golfers in the world. This book is an effort to share with others who love the game what I’ve taught some very successful golfers and what they’ve taught me.

  The psychology of great golf is quite plain and logical. Most players with whom I work are at first amazed by the simplicity of what I tell them. They’re surprised to find that there is nothing weird or mysterious in what I do. With a bit of relief in their voices, they tell me that the type of thinking I teach strikes them as good common sense.

  Sport psychology, as I teach it, is about learning to think in the most effective and efficient way possible every day. It’s the psychology of excellence. My job as a coach of mental skills is to help players go where they might not be able to go on their own, given their old ways of thinking.

  They may have learned ways of thinking that work on a driving range or a practice green. What I offer is a way of thinking and playing that works under the fire of competitive pressure, that breeds consistency, provides the best chance to “go low,” and helps players find a way to win.

  The challenge lies not in understanding the concepts I teach, for, as I’ve said, they’re simple and make common sense. The challenge lies in thinking this way every day on every shot.

  To meet this challenge, golfers must understand the power within themselves. They must learn to tap this power and let it flow into their golf game.

  One of my goals in writing this book is to expose people who love golf to the truth about free will. I am convinced that it is the power of will that separates great golfers from those who never reach their potential.

  Though I teach psychology, I have never known for sure where the mind ends and where heart, soul, courage and the human spirit begin. But I do know that it is somewhere in this nexus of mind and spirit, which we call free will, that all great champions find the strength to dream their destinies and to honor their commitments to excellence. All great champions are strong on the inside.

  They all learn that competitive golf either builds character or reveals character. They learn to be honest about their thoughts. They learn to relish the game’s mental and emotional challenges. They learn to appreciate the value of thinking in an athletic manner. Finally, they learn that golf is a game, and it has to be played.

  I also know that it’s all too easy, in this age of videotape, for the media to overlook the role of the mind. Television cameras can’t take pictures of thoughts. But anyone who plays championship golf will tell you that at least half the battle occurs inside the golfer’s mind.

  This book will equip you for that challenge. Because I think it’s important to learn from the experience of other players, I’ve drawn lots of illustrations from the history of the game and from conversations I’ve had with the players I teach. I hope these anecdotes will help readers understand and remember the principles I want to convey. They are the honest truth about golfing excellence.

  Read and enjoy.

  Contents

  Foreword by Tom Kite

  1. On My Interpretation of Dreams

  2. What Nick Price Learned from William James

  3. Train It and Trust It

  4. How Stuart Anderson Created His Own Reality

  5. The Hot Streak: Staying Out of Your Own Way

  6. Rediscovering Old Scottish Wisdom

  7. What the Third Eye Sees

  8. Your Rod and Staff

  9. Let the Short Game Flow

  10. What I Learned from Bobby Locke

  11. Golf Is Not a Game of Perfect

  12. Anyone Can Develop Confidence

  13. What Mark Twain and Fred Couples Have in Common

  14. Fighting Through Fear

  15. What I Learned from Seve Ballesteros

  16. Conservative Strategy, Cocky Swing

  17. Game Plan

  18. Thriving Under Pressure

  19. When the Scoreboard Looks at You

  20. Competitors

  21. Practicing to Improve

  22. What I Learned from Paul Runyan

  Appendix: Rotella’s Rules

  Foreword

  By Tom Kite

  THROUGHOUT THE YEARS, THERE HAS BEEN A GREAT DEAL OF DISCUSSION about the game of golf and about improving scores. Invariably, the discussion turns into a debate on exactly how much of the game is physical and how much is mental. Generally, the better a player is, the higher the percentage he will attribute to the mental side. That’s reasonable. A beginner, who has very little control over his swing, can’t be expected to understand that the game is 80 percent or 90 percent mental. But on the PGA Tour, where all the players can hit quality shots, the mental side is at least 90 percent of the margin between winners and losers. Percentages aside, no matter what a player’s handicap, the scores will always be lower if the golfer thinks well.

  There have been untold thousands of instruction books written on golf. Most have chapters on the grip, the stance, posture, swing plane, alignment, and the rest of the game’s mechanics. But, given the mental side of the game’s importance, far too little has been written on it. There must be reasons for this. Maybe it’s because it’s impossible to see what a person is thinking. Many times I have had fans tell me how cool I looked on the course, when all I could remember was how scared or nervous I had been. Or, possibly, it’s because the top players, those who have found an effective way to think on the course, are very protective of any thoughts that might aid an opponent. Or maybe it’s because few people have studied the mental side of golf compared with the vast number who have studied the swing. But for whatever reason, accurate information on the mental side of the game is long overdue. Bob Rotella’s book—this book—is it.

  I met Doc in 1984 at the Doral Open in
Miami. I was in one of those phases where I just couldn’t seem to do anything right on the course, and my scores showed it. I hadn’t had a top finish for months, and winning a tournament seemed as far away as the moon. But after a couple of meetings early in the week, when Doc did no more than refresh my memory of those great thoughts I usually have when I am playing my best, I went out and actually won the tournament, beating none other than Jack Nicklaus down the stretch. My swing hadn’t changed at all in the couple of days since the last event. But I was like a new person. All of a sudden, I could hit shots that I could not even imagine the week before. My patience level increased dramatically. Even my walk was confident. I had a new best friend, and it was me!

  In the first twelve years of my life on the PGA Tour, I had established myself as a pretty decent player but had only won five official tournaments. In the ten years since meeting Doc, I have won fourteen tournaments, played on the Ryder Cup team, and won my first major, the U.S. Open. To say that I think Doc has helped make me a better player would be an understatement. I now realize that I must spend as much time working on a good mental approach as I do hitting balls on the practice tee.

  But don’t let the idea of yet another task scare you! This won’t require much hard work on your part. After all, we all have thoughts running through our minds all the time. What Doc can do is show you what thoughts are advantageous and what thoughts are destructive. And one of the really neat things that comes along when you try this approach is that not only do you become a better golfer, athlete, or sales executive, but you learn more about yourself and become a more fulfilled person.

  Who says we can’t have it all?

  1.

  On My Interpretation of Dreams

  I HAVE TWO things in common with Sigmund Freud. I have a couch in my consulting room. And I ask people to tell me about their dreams. But there the resemblance ends.

  The couch is in my basement rec room, near the Grounds of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. The picture frames above it hold not the psychoanalyst’s carefully neutral art but a print of a golfer swinging a mid-iron and a flag from the 18th hole at Pebble Beach, signed by Jack Nicklaus, Tom Watson and Tom Kite. A four-and-one-quarter-inch putting cup, sunk into the floor, and a universal gym complete the decor. And no one lies on my couch. They sit, and we talk face to face.

  Freud believed dreams were a window into the subconscious mind. From them, he spun a web of theory that, too often, boils down to a belief that people are the victims of circumstances beyond their control—of childhood traumas, parental mistakes, and instinctive impulses.

  But the dreams I ask about are not the ones that crept from the unconscious the night before. They are the goals and aspirations a golfer has been carrying around in his or her conscious mind.

  The dreams I want to hear of excite some fortunate people from the time they wake up each morning until they fall asleep at night. They are the stuff of passion and tenacity. They might be defined as goals, but goals so bright that no one need write them down to remember them. In fact, the hard task for the professionals I work with is not recalling their dreams, but occasionally putting them out of their minds and taking some time off from their pursuit of them. The dreams I want to hear about are the emotional fuel that helps people take control of their lives and be what they want to be. Time and again, I have heard stories of dreams that are intimately connected to the ability to play great golf. In fact, this is the first mental principle a golfer must learn:

  A person with great dreams can achieve great things.

  A person with small dreams, or a person without the confidence to pursue his or her dreams, has consigned himself or herself to a life of frustration and mediocrity.

  PAT BRADLEY HAD some of the most exciting dreams I have ever heard. When I first met her, in the early 1980s, she had won a number of tournaments, but she wasn’t convinced she knew how to win. She wasn’t even sure she was innately gifted at golf. As a kid, she had concentrated most of her attention on skiing. She hadn’t won many important amateur events, and she hadn’t attended a college with a great women’s golf team. She was a good player who just slowly and gradually got better, until she was making a good living as a professional.

  She sat on my couch and said, “I’m past thirty. I want to win more. I want to win majors. I want to be Player of the Year at least once. And I want to be in the LPGA Hall of Fame.”

  At that point, I didn’t even know what it took to get into the LPGA Hall of Fame. I quickly learned that, in all of sports, it’s the hardest Hall of Fame to enter. A golfer has to win thirty tournaments, at least one of them a major. Very few make it.

  I said to myself, “Wow. This woman has a great head.”

  Just talking with her exhilarated me. She was so intense and so excited. She had a quest.

  We worked for two days on how she could learn to see herself as a winner, to think effectively, to play one shot at a time, to believe in her putting and herself. We talked periodically thereafter, and still do.

  The first year after our visit, she won five tournaments, three of them majors. She nearly won the Grand Slam of women’s golf. I attended the one major she lost that year, the U.S. Women’s Open in Dayton, Ohio. She lipped out putts on two of the last three holes and lost by a shot or two.

  Afterward, we talked, and I told her I was glad I hadn’t been carrying a million dollars with me, because I would have bet it all on her to win the Open. That was how impressive her attitude and confidence were that year.

  Pat continued to win, and in 1991, with her fourth victory that year, she qualified for the LPGA Hall of Fame. The induction ceremony was at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston, and Pat invited my wife, Darlene, and me. We came into the lobby and saw Pat and her mother, Kathleen. We exchanged hugs.

  “Hey, before you leave, we have to talk,” she said.

  “What do we need to talk about?” I asked.

  She looked at me and said, “Where do we go from here? Bob, we’ve got to find a new dream. What’s next?”

  Pat is still trying to figure out what comes next. For a while, she thought that the 1996 Olympics would include golf and be played at Augusta National. She had always dreamed of playing at Augusta, and she had always dreamed of being an Olympian. The prospect of doing both fired her up, until the International Olympic Committee dropped the idea.

  Now she’s searching for a new dream. And she hasn’t won since 1991. I know that when she seizes on a new dream, she will win again. Her dreams propel her.

  I HEARD SOMETHING similar from Byron Nelson recently. Tom Kite and I were giving a clinic at Las Colinas Country Club, outside of Dallas, and we were flattered that Byron and his wife, Peggy, showed up to listen to what we had to say.

  After our presentation, during the question period, Byron raised his hand.

  “People have often asked me where my mind was the year I won eleven tournaments in a row,” he said. “I’ve never had a good answer, until now, when I listened to what you and Tom were saying about going after your dreams.

  “When I was a young player, my dream was to own a ranch. Golf was the only way I was going to get that ranch. And every tournament I played in, I was going after a piece of it. First I had to buy some property. Then I had to fence it. Then I had to build a house for it. Then furnish the house. Then I had to build barns and corrals. Then animals. Then I had to hire someone to look after it while I was touring. Then I had to put enough money aside to take care of it forever.

  “That was what I won tournaments for. It’s amazing, but once I got that ranch all paid for, I pretty much stopped playing. I was all but done as a competitive player.”

  TOM KITE is a great example of a person who dreamed huge dreams, and kept dreaming them in the face of all kinds of supposed evidence that they were foolish.

  A few years ago I was down at the Austin Country Club working with Tom the week before the Tournament of Champions. He had to go inside to take a phone call, and while I waite
d for him to return, a tall, athletic-looking man walked up to me and introduced myself.

  “You’re Bob Rotella, aren’t you?” he asked. “What are you talking to Kite about? You know, he really thinks you’re helping him.”

  We shook hands, and he identified himself as an old friend and competitor of Tom’s from boyhood days.

  “I went to high school with Tom and played golf with him,” the man said. “Ben Crenshaw was right behind us. Ben won the state championship twice. I won it once. Tom never won it. I thought I was way better than him. He seemed to be always shooting three over par. How did he get so good?”

  There was a long answer and a short answer to that question.

  The short answer was that Tom had a dream and he never stopped chasing it.

  As a boy, he was small, needed glasses, and wasn’t even the best junior golfer at his club. His dream seemed so unlikely that when he was fourteen or fifteen, his parents took him to see Lionel and Jay Hebert, the former touring pros. Tom’s father wanted the Hebert brothers to tell Tom something discouraging, to tell him how high the odds were against him.

  The Heberts, fortunately, demurred. “He’ll find out soon enough how hard it is,” they said. “Let him go after it.”

  When Tom and I first met, dreams still motivated him. He wanted to win more tournaments, including majors. He wanted to be player of the year. He wanted to be the leading money winner.

  He has fulfilled those dreams. Now he has new ones. Two days after he won the U.S. Open for the first time, he called me up. He knew what would happen when he returned to the Tour. Everyone he met would want to congratulate him. Reporters would want to interview him about the Open. Fans would mob him. Faced with those distractions, a lot of new Open champions have suffered letdowns. Tom was determined not to be one of them. He wanted to test his self-discipline. He wanted to be a player who used the Open as a springboard to even better performance. And he did.