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Rusty Cage

Paul Vilips isn’t the sort of person you actually interview. Rather, you make the suggestion of a question and you brace yourself for whatever direction his precise memory and unrelenting candor might lead you. The father of Karl Vilips, arguably the best 15-year-old golfer in the nation according to both Golfweek and the World Amateur Golf Ranking, can talk about his son at length, and he isn’t shy about poking holes into the sophisticated and sometimes over-coached world of junior golf he’s witnessed first hand.

Although the American Junior Golfing Association was conceived in the mid-1970s and the first credible golfing academies were erected a decade later from an idea championed by David Leadbetter, there were actually very few organized initiatives around 10 years ago when Paul was first showing 4 ½ year-old Karl how to hold a golf club.

“Nowadays, things are much more detailed and outlined for parents,” says James Hong, director of junior golf programs at Harbor Links Golf Course in Port Washington, N.Y. “There’s a lot more information that’s available. We hear all about these advancements in golf instruction over the last 10 years. But in my opinion, the biggest advancements I’ve noticed have all happened in junior golf. If you were trying to raise a junior 10 years ago, or even five years ago, you were stepping around land mines, hoping you were making educated decisions.”

Back then, U.S. Kids Golf was barely in its infancy. The organization most directly associated with helping families introduce young kids into golf ran its first tournament only a handful of years before Karl hit his first golf shot. As for Perth, Australia, where Karl was raised, hardly any thought at all was given to the notion of growing the game.

That was just one of many complications Paul had to be concerned about, but it was the least distressing. By the time Karl Vilips was born, Paul’s father had passed and his mother was suffering from dementia. As for Karl’s mother, she returned to her home in Indonesia after a custody battle when Karl was just 15 months old, leaving Paul to raise an infant alone with only the help of a popular parenting book to guide him.

The difficulties Paul faced as a single dad living off a very modest disability pension have been written about before by journalists who can’t help but be interested in a life marred by financial hardships. Paul had been in the workforce 25 years as an overseas migration agent and was briefly imprisoned in Zimbabwe while protecting his clients. The experience left him emotionally shaken and ultimately led to his decision to close down his business in 2001.

To his credit, Paul doesn’t mind being repeatedly asked to describe the hard times we went through, but I think he was genuinely glad to move off the topic of his past and discuss the complicated choices all parents face when encouraging their kids to pursue their dreams as golfers.

Our conversation, which lasted nearly two hours, appears virtually in it’s entirety but has been lightly edited for clarity. I also spoke to Karl separately and have included some of his remarks, along with other sources of information that I think adds valuable insight into Karl’s young, but promising career in the game.

How the environment of junior golf has evolved over the last decade

Paul Vilips: It’s become absolutely massive. If you’re from the U.S. you’re more aware of how big junior golf is because of U.S. Kids Golf. And generally, there’s a lot more opportunities in the U.S. for young kids to play because of the hard work that U.S. Kids Golf have done. But they were in their relative infancy when Karl was six. No one here [in Australia] even knew of them. Back here we didn’t even know that six year olds could have full sets of 14 clubs. We didn’t know that parents of children that age would be taking it so seriously and getting their kids professional coaching.

What the situation was like in Australia when Karl began showing an interest in the game

Paul: When he was five years old, the golf club that I was a member of didn’t welcome children. Under no circumstances were children allowed to play. So Karl would sit beside me in the golf cart while I played. And every time he’d be busting my balls about wanting to have a few hits. On one occasion when we were out playing at dusk we literally had the entire course to ourselves. So there we are at dusk and we’re at one of the particular holes. Karl is begging me to have a hit and I said, ‘No, mate, you can’t. Besides, my clubs are too long for you.’ And he says, ‘but, Dad, I snuck my clubs into your bag. They easily slide down the bottom.’ At that point, what do you do? He’s going to hit one off a tee so it’s not like he’s going to damage anything. Plus, there’s nobody out there. So I told him to have a go.

That week I was scheduled to play in the semifinals of the club match play championship. After I won my match the club manager finds me and says, ‘I snuck out there under the suspicion that you might let your boy have a hit. So when your membership comes up for renewal, I’m not going to let you renew.’

Wow, talk about a bit rough. You know, kids are supposed to be encouraged to play the game and everybody’s complaining about how golf’s dying – what’s the harm? So I ended up missing out on playing the final of the club championship and we had to find a new course to play from. Fortunately, the new club we joined did allow junior memberships.

Teaching Karl Vilips to appreciate his first set of clubs

Paul: Karl started off playing with a basic half set that he had to save up for. He originally had these little clubs you buy individually. They usually come with a yellow shaft and retail for only $25 a club at the pro shops. I had gotten Karl three of these little clubs – a putter, a wood and a 7-iron when he was four and a half.

When it was time to get him full set of clubs we couldn’t just buy them. For one thing, we weren’t rolling in money. At the pro shop, there was huge bin of second hand balls so obviously they had to get their stock from someone. So we ended up figuring out how much they would give us for any found balls and factor that against the cost of the clubs. So one club is $25 and they were giving Karl a dollar for three balls. So that’s 75 balls. Well, that’s no problem. We went into the rough at The Cut Golf Club south of Perth – one of Australia’s toughest courses cause it literally abuts the Indian Ocean coastline, much like Pebble Beach does with the Pacific. On this course, the wind would come off the ocean every afternoon. With nine blind holes, the novices would typically lose a dozen balls to the right; the better golfers, the ones that tend to hook, would lose some to the left. So we’d just go into the rough on the first and tenth tees and come out with however many balls we needed. This ended up being a pretty good gig. Within a short period of time Karl was able to buy a half set of clubs for $200 dollars, and that took only about a week of scavenging to round up 600 balls.

Karl Vilips

Paul begins to take Karl out to the course to play regularly

Paul: Karl started playing in the under eights competition in Perth when he was six years old and would typically shoot 45 for nine holes. Over in Perth, the six year olds were playing off the ladies tees which is over 5,000 yards on average. I read somewhere that the winner of the U.S. Kids Golf World Championships that year shot an average score of 36 per nine holes. I was wondering why these kids were so good, but what I hadn’t realized was that these youngsters participating at U.S. Kids events would play courses that only measure 1,000 yards for nine holes.

I had to find out for myself what Karl was actually capable of. So I went to their website, looked at their scorecards and the courses they were holding for tournaments, replicated those yardages onto our course, and said to Karl, ‘let’s see what you can shoot.’

I figured if Karl could shoot the same scores or better than the previous year’s champion, we’d see if we could raise the money to send him to the championships. I wasn’t going to make any ambitious plans for Karl’s game and have others fund those dreams based on a parent’s over-inflated opinion of their son’s game. There are simply too many families around the world who believe their youngsters are the second coming of Tiger Woods.

Time after time it would take him about a half hour to play our shortened nine-hole course and he would shoot the same scores (give or take a couple of shots) as the winner of the previous year. So we raised the money and went there. He was impeccable from tee to green, but he putted like crap and came in seventh at the 2008 U.S. Kids World Championship at Pinehurst. Still, he had the lowest score in one of the rounds he played, so we found out he really can shoot under par. Coincidentally, we also found out he was the only kid there amongst the leaders who had a half set [of clubs].

Before we returned the next year, we made it a point to get Karl a full set of clubs. Getting specially-designed clubs from U.S. Kids Golf shipped to Australia was prohibitively expensive, so I set out to make a custom set which would fit Karl’s height and be the perfect shaft flex for a kid of his strength.

For the irons, we got the TaylorMade Burner Plus. They came with steel shafts so we ripped those out and put in a set of Roger Maltbie Lite Ladies shafts that I bought online for $15 each and shortened them accordingly.

As far as woods were concerned, I saw some ladies Wilson woods that came with a really firm ladies flex in the clearance bin. So I thought to myself, I’ll cut these down. It took a lot of guesswork, but I got it right – Karl was just smashing them. When we went back to Pinehurst the next year, Karl won the competition by three shots.

How the environment for junior golf in Australia lagged behind the United States

Paul: When Karl first started playing golf, the clubs in Perth were having him and kids his age playing off the ladies tees, as I mentioned earlier. The organizers just couldn’t come to grips with the fact that they needed to change. Unfortunately, change doesn’t come easy and I alienated myself with a few junior golf administrators when I tried to make them understand what the U.S. was doing with their juniors so that they can experience the joy of making par, or heaven forbid, a birdie.

At eight years old, Karl got his first official handicap which was 26. When we moved to Sydney, they deemed him too good to play kids his own age, so they insisted that he play with the big boys and that he play off the back tees. Now Karl was a good player at eight, and even shot 81 off the back tees in one tournament, but it doesn’t change the fact that he’s a child. When you watch him walking down the fairway, the sixteen and eighteen year olds are 100 yards ahead of him because they have nothing in common with him to talk about. To my way of thinking, this was unacceptable.

Karl Vilips

If Paul ever regrets not being able to give Karl a more traditional childhood

Paul: You can’t change what’s happened. I always try to accept the notion that if you’re given a bad hand, you try to make the best you can off it. I would gladly swap all the fame he has now for him to have had a normal childhood. Believe me, I was never interested in pursuing fame. The problem that I had was that I bred an incredibly competitive kid. Right from the get go, no matter what he did, he needed to finish first and to be the best at it – whether it was tennis, tee ball, cricket or football.

I didn’t have to encourage it, but I had to accommodate it. So Karl spent his early years playing tee ball and tennis, and the competitive golf actually followed the other sports he was involved in. He was so hooked on golf after playing in the evenings with me for a year or two that I had to find out where I can get him playing competitively. Turned out that Perth had a 9-hole competition that catered to kids aged six to eight every couple of months. And it was just amazing watching him competing against guys like Min Woo Lee and Fred Lee at that age. Even then, Karl would get angry if he hit a bad shot. It would be so funny to see me telling a six year old to cool his heels, but it was necessary. I’m thinking how does this predisposition to having to be the best – how does it work? It’s not something you plan for, but regardless of what it was, he had to be the best. At school, the teachers would always say to me that Karl thinks that by finishing first on an exam, that he’s the best. But you have to tell him to get the answers right. The fact is, everything had to be a competition for him.

Looking back on it now, golf was something that we were able to do together and we did. We’d be finishing our rounds as the sun set over the Indian Ocean, long before he began to play competitively. It was a magical time when things were so simple and we didn’t need to worry ourselves with what the future might bring for a kid of his potential.

∾

Seeing as how Karl Vilips grew up as an only child in a single parent home, it was only natural that his interest in golf would emerge from the bond he had with his dad. Specifically, Karl told me, “Ever since I had picked up a golf club at the age of five I had fallen in love with the game. Going out on the course with my dad at a young age taught me the basics and I just loved doing it. The critical thinking, and the fact that there was room to improve made me dedicate myself. Doing something on my own also meant a lot.”

∾

How involved Paul is with Karl’s coaching

Paul: I’m still over-seeing Karl’s game now, even from 15,000 miles away. Before Karl started at Saddlebrook Prep last year, we all agreed that I continue to have input into Karl’s swing because, as his father, the buck stops with me. We work as a team and if I see something happening with his swing which has perhaps gone unnoticed, I discuss things with his coach at the academy.

There are horror stories having to do with good juniors losing their game at academies. I can remember this one junior at an academy that Karl used to belong to. Initially, this Japanese kid was kicking Karl’s ass in the tournaments that were being played there. This kid had the best proximity to the hole from 100 yards out that I’ve ever seen and he was routinely shooting 66 off the white tees in the under 14 age group. Meanwhile Karl was shooting around par, or a couple under.

Then a coach who worked there started messing with that kids natural swing. I had to come back to the states seven months later because Karl was suddenly starting to shoot in the 80s (as was this other kid). In what was a very generous arrangement, the academy allowed me to take over Karl’s coaching whilst he finished out that school year and he was back to shooting 65s within a few months again. As for this other kid, two years later he was struggling to break 80 and it’s only this year that he’s starting to shoot around par again.

Karl Vilips

Advice for parents trying to find adequate coaching

Paul: As a father of a prodigy, there are two choices. If you want the world to love you, say yes to everybody. Everyone is all smiles and happy, and they can all pretend that everything’s alright. But it’s a shame if they mess up your kid’s game like they did with that junior who might not never get a full ride to a top college now cause he can never get back his natural swing.

Then you have a situation like I have with Karl. If Karl doesn’t make it, our family doesn’t have money. He can’t get a job at his daddy’s law firm if he doesn’t pan out as a golfer. There’s a chance that he doesn’t get a full ride to college and that he’ll end up stacking shelves at Target. So I have to protect the integrity of Karl’s game. That is why Karl is considered the number one 15 year old on the planet, and it’s due to the fact that I was prepared to step up and take full responsibility for his coaching. I didn’t want to find myself in a situation 15 years from now where I look back in regret, wishing that I had spoken up and made myself unpopular.

If I had the means, I would’ve had Karl work with a private coach from the get-go. There’s a huge difference between the coaches at golf academies and private coaches. With a private coach – you are choosing that individual. At a golf academy you don’t choose the coach; instead, you’re simply choosing the reputation of the academy. Karl’s lucky that he’s at a top-notch academy now, but getting to this point has been hit and miss.

Why private coaching would’ve been better for Karl

Paul: I would have had Karl with the best coach available and he would’ve been a lot better, a lot younger, but then possibly he wouldn’t have had the “hunger” if things had been better financially speaking.

A lot of Karl’s friends do come from very good families, and a lot of them do employ coaches like a Cameron McCormick or a Butch Harmon, and those kids play golf at a really good level. But therein comes another question. Are these kids playing at their absolute maximum ability because their parents have had the financial wherewithal to get them the best of everything – to get them playing at the best tournaments, to get them the best coaching. Will they plateau or keep getting better? Whereas I know with Karl, because he’s had my unqualified coaching, he hasn’t begun to touch his absolute best abilities yet.

∾

In the next phase of Karl’s development as a golfer, he’ll begin working directly with McCormick, Jordan Spieth’s longtime coach, in April, as part of a new relationship with Golf Australia. McCormick will oversee Karl’s game through monthly visits while Karl’s coach at Saddlebrook will work with him directly on whatever changes are being recommended.

∾

Becoming a world class amateur golfer and maintaining that edge requires quite a lot of sacrifice. Karl’s daily routine, as you can surmise for yourself, is a grind. Discounting all the times during the year that he’s traveling to tournament sites and competing for two days, he’s usually working on his game from 12:30 to 5:00 pm. That’s followed by three to four hours of homework. “It’s very tough but I want to go to an academically strong college or university,” he says. “Sometimes it is a challenge but I’ve accepted it, with the understanding that I have a bigger outcome in mind, and that the goals I want to achieve will be worth the hard work.”

∾

How Karl organizes his practice sessions to work on different parts of his game

Paul: When he’s with me, he’ll spend half an hour on the range hitting balls. Then we’ll spend at least an hour on the short game. That’s what I focus on – the short game. It doesn’t put stress on the major muscle groups and it’s very light in regards to being load baring and, obviously, it makes the biggest difference in your score. Afterwards we’ll go out and play for nine holes.

When Karl was here for a couple of months before he left for the U.S. to start his 2016 season, our pattern was to go down [to the facility] for 4 or 5 hours a day, do an hour or so on the technical side of things, but always go out and play a minimum of nine holes. When Karl was halfway through his nine, he would let me know if he was going to play nine more or whether he wanted to be picked up. The whole point of this process is designed to give Karl immediate results from his practice.

Now at Saddlebrook, the elite group, which consists of the five best players there, spends a half hour on the range and then they go out and play nine or 18 holes, depending on the time of the year. So, again, they’re spending less time on the actual technical side of things in an effort to get the boys out there playing, to experience real conditions cause you know, you don’t always have perfectly flat lies when you’re actually playing.

Developing actual playing skills on the course was something we have always focused on going back to when Karl was six or seven. If he mishit a ball, we’d drop another and figure out how to play it properly. But the rule we had between us is that we’d always go into the rough and play the original ball. What I saw from a lot of the juniors was that if a ball went into the rough, a lot of them would just throw it back out into the fairway and say to themselves that in a competition, I’m never going to hit it in the rough. So people sometimes wonder why Karl can seem to play these backhanded shots and other things of that sort, it’s due to the fact that he had to learn how to get a ball out of every conceivable situation in the rough right from the get go.

Karl Vilips

I asked Paul if the situation with overbearing parents was as bad as it was depicted in the Netflix documentary, The Short Game

Paul: Because golf isn’t a team sport, there was no manual showing us parents how to deal with kids who showed potential, let alone any support from the golfing fraternity itself. It’s been a learn-as-you-go journey these past 10 years, and after having watched that movie, it’s apparent that some parents are actually getting worse rather than better at dealing with it all.

Sure, I’ve seen loads of ugly stuff on the course including seeing a dad whack his seven-year-old son behind the legs while walking off the green when he didn’t think anyone was looking. Watching a different father bring his son to tears because he couldn’t get out of a bunker. To be fair, U.S. Kids Golf is very proactive in this area and deals with these cases accordingly.

Still, I remember a particularly bad episode in 2011 at the U.S. Kids World’s in Pinehurst [which Karl won with rounds of 73, 70, 67 in the boys 9-year-old division]. Karl had a practice round in the morning and disappeared at about 11 am, having finished his preparation. Both us came back at dusk to work on his putting in the cool of the evening. And there was a Korean boy that had been there from the morning. His dad asked us where we had been all this time and Karl said, ‘we had lunch with my friends and then we swam in the pool. Afterwards we watched some TV and played some Xbox. And now we figured we would come down and do some putting cause it’s not as hot right now.’ This kid’s father said, ‘yeah right. You’ve been practicing somewhere. There’s no way you can be playing as well as you do unless you’re practicing 10 to 12 hours a day.’ That boy’s mother and father were Olympic athletes for Korea and they had this mentality – if you’re going to play golf, or any other sport, you’re going to have to practice it religiously so that everything becomes a reflex. Now that kid’s dad was a total maniac. Two years later they were playing a tournament on the west coast. It turned out the boy was cheating and they caught him miscounting his scores. Anyway, the boy got a one year ban for that and his dad received a longer ban. Frankly, it’s just an example of disgraceful behavior by a dad who is over-the-top, and who was killing his kid with practice.

However, bad behavior doesn’t just come from the parents. I’ve always been somewhat of a maverick and have been willing to try different things with Karl, and have been prepared to see him lose tournaments at a young age if it meant learning a lesson. Methods have included confiscating a club whenever he disrespected it. Of course that became somewhat of a moot point during one memorable round, with me holding three of his clubs including his putter. It didn’t prevent him from dropping 15-foot bombs using the leading edge of his wedge and breaking 80 from the men’s tees as an 11-year-old.

∾

Not long ago I began reading about how some of the more celebrated golfing academies in the U.S. were structured. In doing so I was actually appalled at how much time junior golfers were encouraged to spend on the range working on chasing the perfect swing. After speaking to James Hong who teaches a variety of young golfers, including those just starting out, I began to realize just how broad a problem this continues to be.

“When I’m traveling I do see instances where the kids are on the range and all they’re doing is working on their swing. And it’s true, they’re not on the golf course enough, they’re not developing the playing skills,” says James. “You wouldn’t see that in almost any other sport. Kids would be on the field of play right away.”

“I had this happen to me recently,” he goes on to say, “where a couple of kids I teach kept looking at the screen because they want to see the numbers on Foresight, they want to see the ball tracer. It’s instant feedback. Even as they’re coming in and warming up for their lesson they’re waiting for the thing to reset before hitting their next shot instead of loosening up and getting a feel for their swing. So I just shut everything off. And I asked them to hit a ball and to tell me if they thought it was a good shot. And during the first five minutes, they were literally lost because they were so reliant on the monitor grading the quality of their strike. But it was equally amazing how quickly they were able to get over that and their learning just jumped to another level once their intuition kicked in.”

On this topic, Paul is of the same mind as James. When asked to identify what skill is most lacking in juniors, he said, without hesitation, it’s the short game. “They spend all their time on the range, and the range is not where you learn the short game,” he says. “Having a great short game is critical because when you’re playing at this level that Karl plays, the courses are so long that you’re using a lot more club into the greens and, consequently, your greens in regulation go down and your scrambling abilities get put to the test.”

∾

By and large, Karl Vilips spent a significant portion of his time facing older competition any time he teed the ball up in Australia. The junior golfing body in Sydney, for instance, insisted that he play more experienced golfers, a point of contention for Paul, who wanted Karl to learn how to compete against kids his own age and beat them by big margins. “So when people assume that Karl must’ve had hundreds of wins,” he says, “it’s not as many as you would think.”

Still, the experience helped to harden Karl as a competitor. In addition to the 38 Australian tournaments he won before the age of 12, Karl won four Junior World Championships in the United States.

“As a young golfer I understood quickly what it took to win against the best of my age group,” says Karl. “As I stepped onto the AJGA circuit I began to realize that it would be a challenge and had to take a reality check. These players were good and I had to get stronger, not only physically but also mentally. I had to dedicate more time to specific parts of my game to play against these top level juniors. As I did so, me game drastically improved, my misses became smaller and my expectations grew. I would say that the predominant reason for my improving my game was playing against players that were a lot better than me.”

Karl has racked up four wins since moving on to the AJGA. This past Summer, he decided to enter a Florida qualifier for the U.S. Amateur. He ended up shooting a two round total of 135 and earned a spot in the elite USGA event that was held at historic Oakland Hills Country Club. At 14 years old he was the youngest competitor in the field.

∾

About that surprising performance that earned him a trip to the U.S. Amateur

Paul: Last year I said to Karl that our goal is to get you into the U.S. Junior Am. He just missed out on qualifying for it after being crook as a dog with the flu, so he just had to wear that one on the chin.

Without asking me, he registered himself into a U.S. Am qualifier in Orange County and there were guys like Andy Zhang (who qualified for the U.S. Open at age 14) in the field. Well, Karl shot rounds of 67 and 68, and during the last few holes he was hitting and running because there was a thunderstorm bearing down on them and he didn’t want to have to wait it out. He even said to me that he could’ve birdied the last couple of holes had he not been just running up to the ball and hitting the shot without using the range finder. And sure enough, the guys who didn’t finish had to wait five hours before they could get back out again.

When he got to the site of the U.S. Amateur, he didn’t set any expectations for himself. He putted poorly in the first round and shot 74 I think. As for the second round which was on the tougher South course, he matched Curtis Luck’s 71. As for the experience itself, he absolutely loved it.

What people sometimes don’t realize is that Karl is actually pushing himself and he’s telling me the tournaments he wants to compete in (or not). He wants to play the Western Am and the U.S. Am again. This year he’s also going to play a qualifier for the U.S. Open for the first time. If a miracle happens and he does qualify, it also gets him invitations to other elite amateur tournaments irrespective of his current ranking.

∾

I asked Karl Vilips if he preferred playing prestigious events like the Jones Cup where even par is considered an excellent score, or going to tournaments that require him to make a ton of birdies. He says, “I enjoy playing a mix of both tournaments. Sometimes I enjoy pushing myself and testing my game against elite college players and high level juniors. But occasionally I also like to go low and compete against the players around my level like the AJGA invitationals. The high level amateur events are fun, don’t get me wrong, but sometimes you need to go back to your level so you can get that winning feeling.”

The next three years are going to be a grind for Karl. He’s very much aware of how talented he is and he wants his junior amateur record to reflect his potential. “By the time I turn 18 years old, I want to have won multiple AJGA invitationals and at least one [USGA] amateur event,” he says. “Hopefully I would have signed to my intended college and plan to attend in 2020. I would also like to have accomplished becoming the AJGA player of the year and a Junior Presidents Cup member.”

For now, Karl Vilips is simply doing his best to juggle the demands of being a world-class amateur golfer with just being a seemingly normal teenager. Like almost all kids his age, he’s very active on social media. It’s just that this particular teen has over 40,000 followers on Instagram and YouTube combined. He says the most common question he gets asked is how he’s able to hit it so far. And given his stated goal of playing on the PGA Tour, his list of followers, and the questions they have about his extraordinary talent, is only going to grow.

About The Author

Rusty Cage is an avid golfer and freelance writer from Long Island. He has written extensively for some of golf’s leading online publications including GolfWRX and AmateurGolf.com.

His articles have covered a broad spectrum of topics – equipment and apparel reviews, interviews with industry leaders, analysis of the pro game, and everything in between. When he’s not writing or reading about the mental side of the game, he’s spending time outdoors golfing or at the dog park with his wife and two Labradors.

To read more articles visit his website – http://citizencage.com

You can find Rusty on Twitter here – http://twitter.com/citizencage

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This is a guest post by Rusty Cage

Multiple surveys have revealed that fewer than 30 percent of all adult golfers are breaking 90. For players on the wrong side of that ledger, discussions about achieving that milestone or going beyond it must sound like a good case of wishful thinking.

But believe me, as a frustrated beginner who contemplated giving up, it’s entirely possible to turn around an average golf game – and you don’t have to be exceptionally talented to do it. Naturally, having the ability to hit the ball far is a huge advantage, but driving distance isn’t the only way to measure someone’s scoring potential. I’ve played with some guys, and you probably have as well, who can carve up a golf course without smashing it off the tee, proving unequivocally, that there are many ways to shoot a low score.

Learning how to save strokes with chipping and putting, plotting your way around a course and controlling your emotional state when the pressure is on – these are skills anyone can master with some hard work and discipline.

They all fall under the heading of course management, a broad subject that’s pivotal to your success as a golfer. But for the purposes of this article, I want to share my own unique insights and playing strategies that have helped me shoot lower scores. Breaking 90 isn’t as formidable a challenge as most struggling golfers make it out to be. Here’s how an average player like myself learned to do it.

Mental resiliency

Whether you’re a scratch golfer or a high-handicapper, you have to accept the fact that bad shots are going to happen during a round of golf. It’s as inevitable as the sun rising in the East.

The better players are able to react to bad break with perspective, even detachment, and view the next shot as an opportunity to right the ship. Speaking from experience, I can tell you that putting this kind of objective thinking into practice is much harder than it seems.

As someone who came into golf with a patchwork swing, no swag and a short temper, I used to fall apart at the first sign of trouble and then spend the rest of my round contemplating why I sucked. I didn’t have the resolve or the technical skill to bounce back, or so I told myself.

Looking back, I realize how much of that negative self-talk was simply a cop out; it’s something golfers lacking confidence frequently tell themselves to rationalize their bad play. Worst still, this negative perception of myself as a golfer hung over my head like a cloud even after I began to improve.

I suppose for some people, confidence might come naturally. But most of us have to work at it. I wish I could give you a bulletproof piece of advice, but the cultivation of self-assurance is a deeply personal thing. For what it’s worth, I found the book, Every Shot Must Have a Purpose, co-written by Pia Nilsson, Lynn Marriott and Ron Sirak to be really helpful. Of the many things that stood out from reading it is the notion that you can’t control the outcome of your golf shots; all you can do focus on the process. I think if you learn to channel your anxiety into a positive frame of mind (even if you have to fake it till you make it), you can really improve the quality of your golf game, even if your technical proficiency is lacking.

Don’t self-destruct your round

Recreational golfers, as a whole, have little appreciation for how hard the act of putting actually is. The best golfers on the planet sink a little more than half the putts they attempt from five to 10 feet; an 18-handicap golfer is damn lucky if he or she makes even a third of them.

I used to get bent out of shape when I failed to hole a putt from what I imagined was a makable distance. As for lag putts, don’t even get me started. I used to leave them well short or race them by the hole; either way, I was recording way too many 3-putts. Ideally, you’d like to have none. Learn to be ultra-protective of your scorecard when you’re on the green and treat every situation where you take three putts as an unforced error.

Breaking 90

Speaking of inflicting self-induced harm, do yourself a favor and ditch your fairway wood, especially off the deck. Back when I was feeling heroic, and by heroic I mean dumb and stubborn, I used to pull my 3-wood out for a long approach shot, and every once in a while the gambit would pay off. But after I started crunching the numbers over an entire golfing season, I began to realize what an awful, low-percentage play that was. Anytime I miss-struck it, I was escalating the odds of making a double bogey or worse.

These days, I use my 3-hybrid exclusively for long approach shots. The shorter shaft and compact head shape makes it easier to swing the it like an iron and find the back of the ball. It’s a high-percentage choice that gives me an outside chance to make par on tougher holes; and if I do make bogey, it’s not the end of the world.

Getting out of jail

As a bogey-golfer, you’re going to find yourself in the rough quite a lot during play. Your first priority, as the traditional school-of-thought wisely suggests, is to limit the damage. The safe pitch out back into the fairway gives you a chance to salvage the hole; otherwise you run the risk of compounding your mistake.

However, if you’re going to start shooting in the 80s regularly, you’re going to need to develop a punch shot with a long iron. In the right situations, this type of golf shot can be an invaluable asset that lets you play offense instead of defense when you find yourself out of position.

For example, during a recent round of golf my tee shot landed into the left-hand rough. Walking up to my ball, I was fortunate to find it sitting up on a bed of pine straw. Despite being in a heavily-wooded area, there was a decent-sized opening in the general direction of the green. With about 130 yards to the front edge, I pulled out my 5-iron, aimed directly at the right-hand bunker and hit a low bullet that trundled up the putting surface.

Breaking 90

It was a hell of a shot with a better-than-expected outcome, but it wasn’t an outright surprise. I let the conditions of the course and my frame of mind dictate the strategy. At that particular moment I was feeling pretty good about my game, and my chances of miss-striking a ball off a clean lie were reasonably low. If I had found the ball sitting down in the rough or surrounded by debris that could’ve interfered with contact, I would have chosen to lay up instead.

If you want to learn how to play this shot, here’s a few keys:

  • Select a long iron that lets you hit the ball low underneath a canopy of trees.
  • Grip down for better control and make a three-quarter swing.
  • Resist the urge to play the ball too far back in your stance – let the loft of the club control the trajectory.
  • Most importantly: maintain your focus through the downswing to ensure a clean hit on the ball; the desire to see where your ball ends up a split second too soon can result in poor execution.

Make the most of your opportunities

As with the case with putting, recreational players have an unrealistic expectation when it comes to scoring. Contrary to how easy the Tour Pros make golf out to be, making a par is tough work. The fact is, bogey is a perfectly acceptable score where two better-than-average swings are needed to get on the green in regulation.

This took a long while to sink in and I can recall sabotaging many promising rounds by placing too much pressure on myself to rise to the level of a single digit handicapper. Perhaps not surprisingly, I began to play much better overall when I stopped seeking perfection on every shot.

Still, I had to learn to take advantage of certain opportunities on the course. A golfer isn’t going to be breaking 90 through the steady accumulation of bogies and doubles. When I catalogued my scoring stats into two groups (rounds where I broke 90 versus those that I didn’t) a clear pattern emerged: I gained a half stroke on the par threes and the par fives any time I shot a round in the 80s. Below is a snapshot of my season-long stats.

Par three scoring performance:

Breaking 90

I scored almost half a stroke better (0.45) when I was breaking 90.

Par five scoring performance:

Breaking 90

I played even better on the par fives when breaking 90, gaining 0.53 strokes against my average performance scoring in the 90s.

Par four scoring performance:

Breaking 90

I also performed better on the par fours, but my scoring differential (0.42) was smaller.

If you want to learn how to shoot lower scores, my advice is pretty simple: improve the quality of your misses. To do that, you need to think conservatively and play aggressively.

  • Treat your greens in regulation as a bonus. Instead of going flag hunting, identify a target to the safe side of the green allowing you to chip or putt your way for a potential up and down.
  • Know when to lay up. Sometimes you’ll come across a dog-leg that doesn’t suit your shot shape, or perhaps the reward for carrying a cross bunker isn’t enough to mitigate the risk. Don’t let ego force your hand and sabotage your golf score!
  • Lastly, never second-guess yourself. Once you’ve identified your target and picked a club, swing freely and decisively.

Final thoughts on breaking 90

I hope my strategy for breaking 90 inspires you to develop your own roadmap for shooting lower scores. The ability to challenge yourself and grow as a player is one of the many reasons why the game of golf is so enthralling. At the same time, it can also be a great source of frustration for all golfers, especially for those starting out.

Still, golf doesn’t have to be grind; all you need to is develop some emotional resiliency, demonstrate good judgement, and play within yourself. And of course, remember to have fun. To paraphrase the legendary golf coach, Harvey Penick, golf is a game anyone can enjoy, not just the talented few.

About The Author

Rusty Cage is an avid golfer and freelance writer from Long Island. He has written extensively for some of golf’s leading online publications including GolfWRX and AmateurGolf.com.

His articles have covered a broad spectrum of topics – equipment and apparel reviews, interviews with industry leaders, analysis of the pro game, and everything in between. When he’s not writing or reading about the mental side of the game, he’s spending time outdoors golfing or at the dog park with his wife and two Labradors.

To read more articles visit his website – http://citizencage.com

You can find Rusty on Twitter here – http://twitter.com/citizencage

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This is a guest post by Rusty Cage

Lee Trevino, whose talent for turning a phrase was nearly on par with his ability to hit a golf ball, had famously suggested that “a good golf lesson is worth 1,000 range balls.”

That’s a pretty telling statement coming from a man like Trevino, who along with Bubba Watson, are but a few self-taught golfing savants who can just show up and play. You and I – we’re not anything like Watson or Trevino. Even for many elite players, golf is a counterintuitive activity that leaves us dangling on the precipice of failure (even on those days when things appear to be clicking). So consider Trevino’s full-throated endorsement for coaching a pretty good piece of advice, unlike that free tip you got from your buddy to keep your head still and your elbow tucked in.

Recreational golfers, as you might suspect, tend to spend an inordinate amount of time digging it out on their own like its some kind of badge of honor. They are also far more likely to seek out a random tip than a qualified instructor. The National Golf Foundation estimated that only 11 percent of all golfers took lessons, according to a report they published in 2011. I would say that’s pretty astonishing given how much time and money is sacrificed annually by weekend warriors playing the game or trying to get better at it, whether that takes the form of scraping balls at the range, reading Golf Digest or buying a new driver.

So if none of those things are working (reinforced by the fact that the average male handicap has hardly budged after so many decades) why aren’t more golfers taking lessons?

What I’ve gleamed from speaking with other golfers, while by no means a large sample size, is that lessons are expensive. And it takes a lot of time and dedication to get better. And you need to work with a world-class instructor. And most of those guys have academies at warm-weather destinations like Orlando and Scottsdale. And of course that’s nowhere near where most of us live and play.

Sarcasm aside, golfers have a ton of reasons why they can’t make golf instruction work for them. But the underlying concern is the most obvious one: becoming a better player is the goal, but it’s hardly a given. So let’s talk about how to make instruction less of a gamble and more of a sure thing.

[easy-tweet tweet=”“a good golf lesson is worth 1,000 range balls.” – Lee Trevino” user=”practicalgolf” usehashtags=”no”]

Sweating the Right Details

When it comes to finding and evaluating an instructor, golfers tend to ascribe too much value to the following criteria: cost, convenience and stature. Undoubtedly, these things do matter to an extent. And it’s up to the individual to determine how much of their discretionary budget to set aside for lessons, or how far they’re willing to travel to see an instructor.

That being said, you don’t have to work with the likes of a Butch Harmon or a Dave Stockton to have a meaningful impact on your game. There are many qualified individuals in your own backyard. The key is finding someone you can build trust and rapport with. So what it really boils down to is communication.

“You need a connection with your teacher,” Dana Rader, a Charlotte-based instructor told the New York Times in 2010. “The teacher needs to make the student comfortable. And the teacher needs to adjust to the student; it’s certainly not the other way around. Students should make sure that is the kind of teacher they are getting.”

That connection, Rader alludes to, can’t be overstated. Phil Mickelson’s decision to hire Andrew Getson after so many years with Harmon said more about Phil’s desire to hear ideas delivered from a fresh perspective than it did about Butch’s ability to teach the swing.

Far too often, instructors are graded on the basis of style over substance. And from a player’s perspective, you’re often left wondering (that is to say debating) if a certain swing method is better than another one. Yet you can take any two instructors like Sean Foley and Jimmy Ballard with completely different perspectives on the golf swing and make a case for or against them. And in the process, you’d miss the most important point entirely. The quality of instruction is only as good as the teacher’s ability to effectively communicate ideas to his or her students. That, and you have to tailor your communication style to the golfer, since no two are identical.

Cultivating a Relationship

When we think of the iconic partnerships between coaches and golfers – Nicklaus and Grout, Crenshaw and Penick, Faldo and Leadbetter, Stenson and Cowen – it becomes clear that it’s never been about validating one coaching style over another; rather, it’s about working with the right person at the right time.

As for my own experience with taking lessons, there were a few bumps in the road early on.

The first person I saw was obsessed with video. My second instructor didn’t rely on any technology at all. Both of them had ingrained beliefs about what a good golf swing should look like, and in both cases, I felt like they were trying to mold me into this narrow, but ideal model they had success teaching. Needless to say, I did not respond well to that type of coaching. But I did learn that you have to hold yourself at least partially accountable for how things turn out.

By the time I began working with Kirk Oguri, a well-deserved MET PGA Teacher of the Year recipient, I had a much better idea of my limitations as a golfer. I also realized, after much stubbornness, that improvement takes time, and that setbacks are not uncommon. I began to get a lot more out of my lessons with just that little change in perspective.

Working with Kirk over the past two years, we’ve analyzed my swing on a Foresight GC 2 launch monitor and have made some slight adjustments to improve my impact conditions. We’ve also been out to the course to hit full shots, to talk about strategy and improve all facets of my short game. I also took advantage of his expertise as a club fitter at Pete’s Golf Shop to evaluate the equipment I was playing.

Knowing my predisposition for being overly analytical, Kirk has always encouraged me to develop the ability to self-diagnose my mistakes. He’s a big believer in helping golfers help themselves. To date I’ve knocked 10 strokes off my average score and more importantly, I’ve become a happier, more confident player.

So when it comes to finding your own golf Svengali, do your homework. Create a short list of potential instructors within a reasonable travel distance and book a time to meet them. Come armed with questions and be prepared to answer a few of theirs. If the instructor doesn’t ask you about your immediate and long-term goals, or is looking to cut your visit short, consider that a red flag. A quality instructor might naturally suggest that you observe them giving a lesson. If they don’t, bring it up. Watching someone at their job is always going to be more revealing than anything you can take away from a typical sit-down.

If the coaches you initially interview don’t tick the boxes that matter the most, consider expanding your budget or going farther out of your way to get a lesson. You may have to make some tough choices in regards to your golfing priorities – perhaps a few less rounds a year. Or maybe it means spacing out your lessons. Just keep in mind, quality always trumps quantity when it comes to all things golf.

Final Thoughts

The process for selecting an instructor is at best, an inexact science. Finding an experienced professional with a proven track record can go a long way, but in the end it really does come down to chemistry. One resource you should check out to find instructors in your area is PlayYourCourse.

Here’s a few other things to consider:

  • Think outside the box – if your putting is holding you back, consider finding a coach who specializes in that area. Take a chance on an AimPoint Express class or book a session at a SAM PuttLab facility – it might make all the difference to a critical part of your golf game.
  • The fastest way to lowering your score is to make a glaring weakness into a strength. Make sure you and your instructor are on the same page spending time on the things that really matter. Track all your statistics with a product like GameGolf to find out where you are losing the most strokes relative to your handicap.
  • Make a commitment and stick with it. Learning new skills or refining existing ones is a time consuming process that will test your resolve. Having unreasonable goals, or expecting immediate gains without putting in the work is a sure fire way to sabotage your coaching relationship.
  • Last but not least, have fun. If you’re going into a lesson with a lot of pent-up frustration because you’re fighting a hook or a slice, don’t take it out on your instructor. In fact, do the opposite and maintain a positive attitude. Not only does it do wonders for your long-term relationship with that person, but it’s arguably the most crucial component for playing better golf.

About The Author

Rusty Cage is an avid golfer and freelance writer from Long Island. He has written extensively for some of golf’s leading online publications including GolfWRX and AmateurGolf.com.

His articles have covered a broad spectrum of topics – equipment and apparel reviews, interviews with industry leaders, analysis of the pro game, and everything in between. When he’s not writing or reading about the mental side of the game, he’s spending time outdoors golfing or at the dog park with his wife and two Labradors.

To read more articles visit his website – http://citizencage.com

You can find Rusty on Twitter here – http://twitter.com/citizencage

Want to Get Exclusive Discounts on Some of the Top Golf Products?

Check out our deals for Practical Golf readers!

SEE THE DEALS

Rusty Cage is an avid golfer and freelance writer from Long Island. He has written extensively for some of golf’s leading online publications including GolfWRX and AmateurGolf.com.

His articles have covered a broad spectrum of topics – equipment and apparel reviews, interviews with industry leaders, analysis of the pro game, and everything in between. When he’s not writing or reading about the mental side of the game, he’s spending time outdoors golfing or at the dog park with his wife and two Labradors.

To read more articles visit his website – http://citizencage.com

You can find Rusty on Twitter here – http://twitter.com/citizencage

Want to Get Exclusive Discounts on Some of the Top Golf Products?

Check out our deals for Practical Golf readers!

SEE THE DEALS

Long Island’s Montauk Downs is often overshadowed by the sterner, more esteemed Black Course at Bethpage, but the locals all know – this Robert Trent Jones masterpiece has teeth. If you’re ever in the area, I highly recommend spending a long weekend at this far-flung seaside town; if not for the golf alone, at least for the fresh clams and lobster rolls.

If you want to see how your game stacks up under adverse conditions, play Montauk Downs from the tips when the wind is up. Even on a calm day, the course has a distinct set of challenges on every hole and part of the fun is figuring out the right club to pull and the best place to land your ball.

Even a seemingly benign hole like the 370-yard par-4 sixth, sandwiched between a pair of risky, but drivable par fives, can be played in a variety of ways. Big hitters can choose to lay up short of a steep hillside flanking the right side of the fairway setting up a longer approach, or they can try to draw the ball over a set of mature trees that overhang the left side. On the other hand, if you don’t have better-than-average length, your option is to hit anything from fairway wood to driver from the tips, or if you’re teeing it forward, to attack the hole with a long iron or hybrid.

The bottom line is this: there’s no right way or wrong way to play this hole, but the golfer who thinks before he or she swings tends to do better than the player who flails away at the ball without any strategy at all.

When it comes to playing well, course management is a cornerstone. Yet when it comes to analyzing the traits all good golfers possess, there’s a disproportionate emphasis placed on how much club head speed they’re able to generate. While it can’t be disputed that hitting the ball long and accurately helps, there’s a lot more that goes into playing well and enjoying the game.

So what do all great players do, that the average club golfer doesn’t? Quite a bit, actually. Here’s a few things I’ve noticed over the years that every single golfer can learn from.

The Game Before the Game

If you ever watch prizefighters warm up, they build up a sweat long before stepping into the ring or the octagon. A similar set of preparations occur in every other sport including basketball (shoot around) and baseball (batting practice). This makes practical sense – you’re waking up your muscles and rehearsing the motor skills you’ll be executing during the actual game.

In golf, however, a lot of players seem to think that warming up is something you do before you go out for a run. We’ve all been in situations where we’ve gone from parking lot to pro shop to first tee without hitting a single warm up ball. Usually, the results are not pretty and it can take someone a few holes just to settle into a round.

Then again, there’s a whole segment of golfers who warm up religiously at the range hoping to find golfing nirvana minutes before their tee time. This is the very definition of a bad strategy.

How you perform at the range has absolutely no baring on how well or poorly you’ll play that day. This is one of the most important lessons all good players realize and it underscores just how different their approach is when compared to ours. Instead of blasting through a bucket of balls haphazardly or using their warm up to tinker with their golf swing, better players use their range time to loosen up, find their rhythm and dial in their scoring clubs. If they duff a shot as all players might, they don’t overreact. They just move on.

Time and again I’ve heard golfers say they’ve played great after an abysmal warm up. Sometimes it works the other way. Either way, they maintain their routine, tapping into a ritualistic process that all athletes adhere to and believe in, even if it crosses over into superstition.

George Gmelch, a professor of anthropology at the University of San Francisco who studied superstitious rituals in sports, concluded that ritualistic commitment is greater when uncertainty is high and where the importance of the outcome is paramount. Sounds a lot like Golf to me. Is it any wonder that some golfers mark their ball with a lucky coin, or always stash their tees in a certain pocket?

Before we get too ahead of ourselves, we can all pretty much agree that jangling a bunch of quarters before stroking a putt isn’t going to help us save par, at least not directly. The real point here is that while any control we think we feel is illusory, the conviction we have in our beliefs has a real influence on our confidence. Gmelch also goes on to say that superstitious behavior serves a definite practical purpose.

“For some superstitious rituals, it is easy to see that they have no function in useful preparation, but most superstitions are difficult to distinguish from preparing for performance,” Gmelch wrote in his study. “A function of rituals might be preparing mentally for each performance. In this sense, rituals seem to serve a rational and useful purpose.”

When I mentally review my own preparations before going out to play, there’s probably a dozen or more things I’ve conditioned myself to do subconsciously, reinforced over time by any successes I’ve had on the golf course. I know they’re completely ridiculous but they put me in the right frame of mind. You could say it’s part of my warm up, no less critical than hitting a bucket of balls. And with golf being as challenging as it is, we could all use advantages where we can get them, including those that are purely psychological.

Respect Your Limits

If you can’t hit a 7-iron into some par 4s, you’re playing the wrong tees. When you think about it, the only one who cares that you’re playing a shorter course is you.

      –   Judy Rankin, LPGA legend; World Golf Hall of Fame member

Let’s get something straight right away: almost everyone should play from a shorter set of tees. As Judy Rankin clearly points out, all you’re really doing is letting your ego get the best of you which in turn makes a challenging game even harder than it already is.

Almost all golfers, but especially men, get sucked into this vortex called the distance chase which has been perpetuated and encouraged by equipment companies, along with our own preoccupation with admiring the phenomenal displays of raw power on the PGA Tour. It also doesn’t help that many of us who get paired with single-digit handicappers see a distance gap between our games and theirs. Our competitive nature kicks in and the more we try to “man up” the worse we seem to play.

I think we’ve also been led to believe that great golf shots are a necessity for shooting low scores. That, however, is an absolute fallacy. The average player that consistently breaks 80 finds the green in regulation only half the time (52%) according to the hundreds of thousands of shots compiled by GAME GOLF. So your friend who stripes the ball – yes, they hit a lot of good golf shots, but they are not Iron-Byron.

When they do miss the green, they tend to miss small. By that I mean they pick conservative targets, taking the obvious hazards out of play. And by minimizing their chances of making a big mistake, they can actually play more confidently.

Bad golfers, by way of comparison, are like riverboat gamblers. They almost always go for broke, basing their golf club selection on a “career shot” they hit way back when at a charity scramble.

An ill-advised shot can happen with any club, but for average golfers, it seems to happen far more often with a longer iron or a wood than with a wedge. Usually, we’re trying to get a little more out of those clubs than what we’re capable of.

Better players always have a smoothness to their swing. Some players have a little faster motion than others, but they also swing in tempo, which is something we can all get better at, irrespective of our mechanics.

The other thing I’ve seen all good golfers do is maintain a consistent pre-shot routine. The importance of having one can’t be stressed enough, but at minimum it encourages you to have a set process for picking a target, stepping into your shot and pulling the trigger. Players who have a pre-shot routine that stays the same during a round of golf tend to be more decisive which is at least half the puzzle to hitting good golf shots.

I know this doesn’t sound as sexy as revealing some sort of magic move that can help you hit the ball 20 yards longer, but a consistent pre-shot routine and good tempo are but a few tried and true fundamentals that every great player has built their game around.

Resiliency

I’m feeling more comfortable taking it to the next level. I can look back and remember the moments to draw upon. 

           – Rickie Fowler, 2015 Players Champion

Every article I’ve read about Rickie Fowler’s string of recent successes has focused almost exclusively on the swing changes he and Butch Harmon have worked on. To take nothing away from the hours Fowler has spent at the range, I’d bet the farm that most of the progress Rickie has made in the last year has been above the neck.

Golf is a game of confidence. It’s an expression most of us have heard of, and it’s so important that Dr. Bob Rotella wrote a best-selling book about it.

Unfortunately, too many aspiring players don’t really know how to put themselves into a position where they have any. Some people believe (wrongly) that confidence is a byproduct of playing great golf (as in – it’s easy to be confident when you’re hitting great shots and shooting low scores). The carefully scripted golf we see on television only reinforces the illusion that the guys on Tour are always on top of their game, as golf coach Adam Young recently blogged about.

Take a look at the so-called “machine-like” Jordan Spieth at East Lake where he won the Tour Championship and the FedEx Cup:

Is that one of the best players in the world or an 18-handicapper we’re watching? The point is, golf is hard even for the game’s top players. But whether you call it resiliency, bounce-back or grit, Spieth and other players of his caliber, are able to shake off a mistake and make up for it on the next shot or next hole.

So how well do you have control over your own mind?

Do you allow a hole that you’ve previously struggled with to dictate how you perform the next time you face it? Do you quit on a round of golf after a couple of early failures?

Back when I struggled to break 100 regularly, I would come home and whine about all the lousy shots I hit while I was playing. I would go on and on about one missed opportunity after another until my wife, exhausted from listening to my excuses, would ask me if I hit any good shots. Well, of course I would say. But for the life of me I couldn’t remember them in any kind of vivid detail.

Reflecting back on that period of my life and my relationship with the game, I’m occasionally surprised that I didn’t quit. For one thing, I wasn’t enjoying myself and I couldn’t understand why success on the course didn’t come as easily to me as most things did off the course. Sound familiar?

“Perfectionists have a tendency to stay objective when they do things well because that’s what they expect out of themselves, and then if anything is less than perfect, they always react like, oh darn it, oh it wasn’t solid. They always have some kind of internal or external reaction to it,” coaches Lynn Marriott and Pia Nilsson of Vision 54 have said in an interview. “So that means everybody’s brain stores negative events stronger and faster than positive events. That negativity bias really eats away at a person’s confidence and then ultimately their competence on the golf course.”

Generally speaking, club golfers have some crazy expectations about how well they think they should do at this game. Whether it’s how long we should be hitting the ball or how many putts we should sink, it’s completely out of whack with reality. Think of it this way – if professional golfers are getting up and down only 60 percent of the time, why are we getting so bent out of shape over a bogey?

Playing Better Is a Choice

There’s a pretty famous anecdote about Ben Hogan that goes something like this. Back when he was still learning how to win on tour, he was telling his wife, Valerie, that he wasn’t making enough long putts, to which she replied, why don’t you just hit it closer to the hole?

Sometimes we just make things too complicated.

Imagine how much more fun this game would be if we all lightened up a little and played more within ourselves? Of course we all pine for the ability to hit a ball like Hogan, or any other tour pro for that matter. But our ability to play well doesn’t hinge exclusively on our talent level with a five iron. There are so many simple things we can do to get us playing at a level we aspire to. The best part is, you don’t have to be a great golfer to get started.

About The Author

Rusty Cage is an avid golfer and freelance writer from Long Island. He has written extensively for some of golf’s leading online publications including GolfWRX and AmateurGolf.com.

His articles have covered a broad spectrum of topics – equipment and apparel reviews, interviews with industry leaders, analysis of the pro game, and everything in between. When he’s not writing or reading about the mental side of the game, he’s spending time outdoors golfing or at the dog park with his wife and two Labradors.

To read more articles visit his website – http://citizencage.com

You can find Rusty on Twitter here – http://twitter.com/citizencage

Want to Get Exclusive Discounts on Some of the Top Golf Products?

Check out our deals for Practical Golf readers!

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