Introduction
The undeniable connection between the physical side of golf and the inner landscape of the practitioner is not a new topic, even for those ordinarily repelled by all things esoteric. For golf is such a beguiling pastime that anyone drawn under its spell will try anything to get a hold of their game.
We addicts search high and low for a fleeting glimpse of that elusive feeling that the ball is perhaps, temporarily, under some degree of control. And so we read books like “Zen Golf”, and “Golf in the Kingdom”, and “Breathe Golf”, and enjoy and seek to absorb the mysterious language. Within such teachings lie a promise of some illuminated state where we can not only transcend the self, and reach a sublime acceptance of the mysterious nature of being, but also get among the prizes in the monthly Stableford, and drive it a full fifteen yards past Jake, time and again, ad infinitum. There is a lot at stake here, and Jake will be searching for his own clues, too.
All this is well and good, and keeps the bookshops ticking over, but the theory of such profound texts seems to drift in one ear and out the other, just in time to address that ridiculous dimpled sphere, which just sits there smirking up at us, patiently waiting to disobey its owner like a belligerent, headstrong puppy.
I’ve had a couple of terriers, and the feeling I get when a drive flies off-line is not unlike that which occurs when they go sprinting off in the wrong direction, often into the same sort of undergrowth that my ball seeks. It’s a form of helpless misery specific to the handicap golfer.
We are trained in logic, so the issue is not in the intellectual understanding of the words on the page, but language can only go so far towards transmission of such fundamental, spiritual teachings, which lie outside this realm of rational thought. To absorb and apply the wisdom of ancient philosophy in approaching the weekend roll-up requires a paradigm shift that our eager, foolish enthusiasm hasn’t time for.
Plus there is the issue of discipline - where else in our pampered, modern, Western lives are we forced to exert such focused self-control and single-minded attention? We are used to things being easy, automatic, obvious, but this Quixotic dream of mastering the behaviour of a golf ball requires a lot more than this.It requires hard work, in spades.
The musings of a few ancient philosophers, known as the Stoics, has found a resurgence in interest in recent years, and after yet another humiliating interaction with the game, it occurred to me that, alongside this more “Zen” approach to the mental game, there might be something of value in Stoic writing, given that it is often centred in the developmental opportunities that both encountering difficulty and exerting discipline offer, and that this game almost seems to be grounded in suffering.
Lesson one - intention
“If a man knows not which port he sails, no wind is favorable.” – Seneca
Jack Nicklaus, winner of 18 major championships, and perhaps more staggeringly runner up a further 19 times, used to imagine every shot before stepping up to address the ball. He called it “going to the movies”, and decades later as the rewards in sport became astronomical, his successors at the helm of the professional game routinely deploy such positive visualisation as part of an all-round performance package, which includes physical training, massage, and a number of other practices that would have been considered alien, and possibly deviant, to the touring pros of the 20th century.
Much of Jack’s incredible success and longevity must be attributed to his early concentration on the mental side of golf. He hit the ball incredibly well, regularly breaking the inserts on his MacGregor persimmon drivers, but also rarely made mistakes in his course or self-management, so his insistence on deciding what the desired outcome of each shot is seems a good place to start.
How often do you stand above the ball without having made some sort of mental assessment of your desired result? For some shots, it is obvious - you would like to hole the short putt, of course - but for others, it can be less so. Faced with the lush abundance of a wide fairway, do you ever think about which side will favour the next stroke, or aim at a tree in the distance to at least give some focus to your execution?
If you are anything like me, you will sometimes hit shots without any specific intention in mind, and this vagueness often ends in trouble. It is undecisive, sloppy thinking, and the universe will conspire to put that ball anywhere but where you would place it if you’d bothered to think about it. I’ll return to Jack for the last word on lesson one: “I never hit a shot, even in practice, without having a very sharp, in focus picture of it in my head”.
Lesson two - practice
“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity” - Seneca
Jack’s assertion that he “never hit a shot” without a clear aim in mind would be barely credible if uttered by any other person, dead or alive, but the next three words are perhaps even more staggering. “Even in practice”, he said, and these guys practice a lot. But for most of us, practice is about the longest four letter word around. The grass practice ground at my local club is more frequently used as a place to smoke by truant schoolchildren than for golf practice, and on the odd occasion I spot a golfer up there (normally the same person, searching high and low for the ghost of that knack that they last saw in the mid ‘90’s), they form a forlorn silhouette.
But mastery of any form of worthwhile endeavour does require dedication to thoughtful practice, and I think this is part of what Seneca is getting at when he speaks of “preparation”. To excel you must be moving towards the “10,000 hour” maxim that pervades the modern vernacular, or to use another popular framework, gradually moving your game away from “unconscious incompetence” (is this also how to describe the performance in the post-prandial foursomes?).
The obvious quote to accompany this comes from one of Jack’s great friends and rivals, Gary Player, who used to splash so many Dunlop 65’s out of bunker sand that he regularly wore the manufacturer’s branded soleplates to smooth metal. “The more I practice, the luckier I get”, he said, but there is some science behind this. By putting himself in a position where he was so comfortable recovering from such danger, he took some pressure and fear out of his long game, permitting a more positive, abundant approach. With every practice shot, he was increasing his chance of recovery from the next sandy lie, and reducing the likelihood of landing there.
Luck is an obvious and charming element of the game, and no amount of focus on fairness and consistency - in turf conditioning, in the increasingly bewildering calculation of handicaps, or in the figures of the latest shiny driver emerging from a launch monitor - should or will take this element out of the game. But work hard on your game, and prepare like Seneca would have for the Annual Scratch Medal, and you might just find that next time Jake’s ball is the recipient of a calamitous ricochet rather than yours, and you can be the one to say “tough break”.
Lesson three - focus
“…focus your mind attentively…on the performance of the task in hand…and leave aside all other thoughts…perform each action as if it were your last“ - Marcus Aurelius
So you have dedicated yourself to practice, and will decide on your intention before each and every shot. But our minds are often untethered, drifting around for new stimuli, and when golfing this can be anything from fear of the gaping bunker that lurks short-right of the green, or some distant sound that distracts you from “the task in hand”.
I am reminded of Brian Eno, who when on stage with Roxy Music at the height of their touring success, suddenly realised he was thinking about his laundry instead of being mentally present to play the instrument in his hands. He resigned from the band shortly afterwards, embarking instead of a far more fascinating inward journey. But this elusive tool of focus is a learnable trait. Through the journals that became, long after his death and unintentionally, “Meditations - Marcus Aurelius”, we find that even a Roman Emperor grappled with staying present over two millennia ago, despite the notable absence of a never-ending stream of update notifications.
We see this single-pointedness in much of elite sport, but we’ve all also had, in this strange game, glimpses of effortless attention and performance. They flow by too fast for our liking, but the fact you will normally hit at least one personal miracle in even the most abject round of golf brings you back again, searching, hopeful despite all the evidence to the contrary.
This particular quote has a deeper profundity to it, though. At the core of Stoic philosophy is this recurrent theme of not forgetting our own mortality. Memento mori translates from the Latin as “remember that you must die”, and this notion, of keeping that fundamental truth front and centre, appears throughout myriad belief systems.
To “perform each action as if it were your last” at first glance could look like a terribly dark lens through which to peer, but in the mind of the Stoics, this is simply the key to living the life that is here with you now, instead of frittering your time away on the past or the future. It is an invitation to lightness, to not caring so much about the outcome itself, but instead going “all in” in everything you do. Giving it everything, as if this is your last chance. For you could keel over on the golf course, a la Bing Crosby, or at any other moment, so treat each shot as if it could be the last thing you do.
Lesson four - acceptance
“To bear trials with a calm mind robs misfortune of its strength and burden” - Seneca
In a game where the elements play such an important role, and where luck can swing a shot or a match one way or the other in a single bounce, it is important to be able do distance ourselves from the outcome. We address the shot, swing the club, and from the point of impact we lose complete control of the ball until the next time, but we can keep control of our mind, and our reaction to what unfolds.
I heard that Tiger Woods, their natural heir of both Jack’s status as an all-time great ball-striker, but also as a master of the mental game, unflinching in his discipline to use all available tools in pursuit of excellence, had a habit for coping with disappointing swings or results. After an outcome that didn’t reach his extraordinary expectations, he would imagine a line a few paces in front of him, and take whatever time he needed to reach that threshold, beyond which he would leave that previous stroke behind, and emerge towards the next shot fresh, renewed, positive.
This ability to renew his intention has brought wild success, but even in the twilight years of a glittering career, his steely strength of mind is still evident. In November last year, in the final round of his Covid-postponed defence of the 2019 Masters title, Tiger took 10 strokes on the par-3 12th, a humiliation that the rest of the world watched in some considerable discomfort.
Yet somewhere between the 12th green and the 13th tee, Tiger must have drawn that metaphorical line in the sand again, and decided to rob that very public “misfortune of its strength and burden”. For he birdied five of the last six holes, where almost any other warrior would have crumbled into their shell, gutted. Despite all the emotions that must have been present since he finally picked the ball from that 12th hole, he found a way to stay calm and fight back.
I think the last words on acceptance - on how we can learn to detach from the result - should be from Rudyard Kipling’s famous “If-”, a rousing couplet which the elite tennis players can glance at before emerging on to the pristine turf of Centre Court at the All England Club, as if the modern equivalents of the gladiators that Marcus himself would have watched:
“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same”
So now you know what to do, stick a tee in the ground and get on with it. Carpe diem!