Thought for the Day
Show a man death and he’ll be content with fever
Turkish proverb
We all need our heads examined
Rory McIlroy has generated a few column inches after admitting that he needed a break from the game for his mental health, and there can be few golfers around the world who would not sympathise. It is, after all, the most frustratingly masochistic activity in which to become involved. I have, over the years, played many sports, such as tennis, squash, badminton and cricket. But in none of these did I one day discover a complete inability to hit a ball with a racquet or bat. Yet in golf I am still capable of making an air shot, or series of shanks, or screaming in frustration (inwardly, you understand) because in attempting a putt I hit the ground before the ball.
The truth, as has been suggested before, is that golf is 90% mental and the other 10% is between the ears. As one of my favourite golf journalists, Thomas Boswell, once wrote: ‘As every golfer knows, no-one ever lost his mind over one shot. It is rather the gradual process of watching your score go to tatters shot after shot. It isn’t even the big mistakes that eat at the soul. It is the great recovery shot that is undone by three putts. It is somehow playing five straight holes decently, but knowing that you have found a different way to bogey each one.’
Is there a golfer alive who doesn’t know exactly what he means? The unending frustration is caused by the knowledge that we can do it, but so rarely do. Every one of us has hit a straight drive a decent distance, or caught an iron so perfectly that we hold the follow-through, posing for invisible photographers and waiting for applause from a non-existent gallery. We have all sunk outrageous, double-breaking putts and holed out miraculously from a greenside bunker. Okay, that last one is more imagined than remembered but you get the gist. We know we can hit those shots but what we cannot do is hit them with any consistency.
Only yesterday I remarked to my playing companion that one of the eternal frustrations of golf is our inability to achieve competence in all facets of the game on the same day. For example, I was driving the ball unusually straight and long but my iron play was rubbish. But even if I had been hitting crisp shots into the green, I know my putting would have been woeful, or I’d be unable to get the ball out of a bunker, or chip from off the green. Like millions around the world, I continue to play because once, perhaps twice a season, I will be reasonably proficient in all these areas – not outstandingly good, you understand, but not woeful either.
This led me to reflect on the best scores I have made down the years and, pretty much without exception, they have been accumulated not through a succession of wonderful strokes but by an absence of the truly bad. It can be paraphrased as: ‘Cut out the crap.’ Sadly, for the great majority of us, ‘crap’ is an inherent, virulent and sadly permanent facet of our golfing lives.
But imagine if, like Rory, golf was not something you did socially or recreationally, for camaraderie or exercise or just because of the challenge, but your livelihood. The game is something at which he has excelled from a very young age and at his best he is the best. Yet at his level, one stroke a round – that’s one missed 10-foot putt – can be the difference between success and failure. Imagine if you, no matter what your occupation, had to compete every week against 155 of the best in the world at what you do. I know how knee-knockingly, buttock-clenchingly anxious I get over a six-footer to win a pound and therefore do not want to even contemplate what I would feel like if it was to win the Masters, which Rory wants to do so desperately that even with all his experience, his rational brain goes walkabout as he drives up Magnolia Avenue.
An American pro named Joe Inman once said: ‘I have only one goal in golf – to leave it with my sanity.’ I have been compiling a book on golf quotations and one of the biggest chapters by far is the one headed: ‘The Mind Game,’ but there are others, such as: ‘Pain, Anguish and Obsession,’ and ‘Ethics, Morality and Character,’ that also relate to the fortitude and resilience needed by any of us who pick up a golf bag and sally forth with renewed optimism, despite the knowledge that golf is so much more a sport of ambition than achievement.
Rory McIlroy’s admission that: ‘For my mental and emotional well-being, I needed to be at home for those few weeks,’ will come as no surprise to anyone with any experience of golf. The only disbelief is that he, or any other tour pro, doesn’t need such time-outs more often. I know that for me, certainly, a complete break from the game would probably do me the world of good but it happens that I’ve got a tee time booked for tomorrow. Fancy a game?
Quote of the Week
Hitting a golf ball is an act so precise that there is unlimited room for error. That error begins in the mind and finds expression in the swing
Lorne Rubenstein