Mind over Matter

So this past Saturday, at 7AM, I added three hours of practice to my original amount of 300. 

As the potential hurricane rain made shot-shaping more difficult, I bought one jumbo bucket of balls and got one free.  It would mark the most time I'd ever spent hitting balls, and boy, by the next morning did my body feel it.

It started off extremely fuzzy.  As always, I began the session with a pitching wedge and swiftly hit a few twenty-five, fifty and one hundred yard shots. 

But this session didn't begin in the usual fashion.  

Dovetailing off my last range visit when I experienced a few shanks with my 3-iron, one of the more harder clubs to hit, my psyche appeared to be infiltrated with doubt, still. 

(For those not familiar with the term, a shank implies just about completely missing the ball upon impact and hitting it about thirty degrees off your body.  If your body is facing the ball, a straight line from your belly button through it would represent the zero degree line and the target would be ninety.)

This time, though, the shanks were occurring with the easiest club in hand.  If I couldn't warm up with a handful of accurate wedge shots, I was doomed.  

I now faced a choice: I could mentally fold and succumb to shank city.  Or I could face this challenge head on and learn something.

I chose the latter.

In the process of working through my struggles, I thought once more how mentally tough golf is.  You see, it wasn't that I had lost my ability to hit straight shots.  It was, rather, that I began thinking I could do it every time.  I was becoming overconfident. 

The golf gods had other ideas.

Golf requires not only physical expertise, but mental toughness as well.  Upon every approach, your mind must be present one hundred percent in order to play the best shot you have available.  And for a second, because I began having success at this game, my mind got lazy.

And in turn, my shoulders and hands followed suit.  I suddenly found that my top wrist wasn't turning over on impact leaving the clubface exposed, basically slicing the ball (a shank). 

As I began comprehending this minor imbalance, I found myself almost back to square one.  Once again, I had to learn how to commit to each shot and mend my body and mind in unison. 

On my downswing, I had to hurry the top hand through to ensure smooth contact.  Little by little, as some decent shots were mounting, the frustrations were alleviating. 

I was back to the drawing board and that was okay. 

Considering I now only have 303 hours of practice under my belt, the lesson for the day outweighed any good shots I managed.

That lesson was: unless the mind is present at every moment, one hundred percent, there's no chance of playing this game successfully on a consistent level. 

And that's what makes golf so great!   

Comments

[Kevin G]

Glad to read that you learned a lesson that can't be measured by hours.

The ability to recognize and correct your swing is invaluable.

There have been countless times that I have been playing and have "lost" my swing.

Every golfer losses his swing but the good ones know it can't be found by just repetition.

The pros are so in tune with there swings that most are able to correct things that to the average golfer go unnoticed.

Ironically the more you stray from your swing the better you will get at recognizing how to correct it, which can mean the difference from one bad drive or one bad hole to an entire round.

Knowing why you hit a bad shot both mentally and physically is more important than the score it produces.