Robert K. Winters - Mistake-Free Golf: First Aid for Your Golfing Brain

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book, publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the authors copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

CONTENTS

I dedicate this book to my former collegiate coach at Ball State University, the late Earl Yestingsmeier, and to my great friend Dr. Herbert Price of Logansport, Indiana. Both of these wonderful people believed in me and gave me a chance to know that by making a few mistakes along the way and learning from those failings helps create the pathways for future growth and success. I will always be grateful for the life lessons you helped me learn along the way.

FOREWORD

The great Bobby Jones famously once said, Competitive golf is played mainly on a five-and-a-half-inch coursethe space between your ears. Jones was both talented and wise. Its the head that matters most. Ive always been labeled a monumental head case going back to my days as a young golfer of mild promise at my fathers driving range in Pennsylvania. And to this day, Im often still too technical, too judgmental, and too unreasonable with my expectations.

Mistake-Free Golf is as essential to skillfully navigating those five and a half inches as Calamity Jane was to Joness unparalleled success in the 1920s. Ive known Dr. Bob Winters for better than a decade through my work at Golf Channel. More personally, hes been a fixture at an annual charity event organized by my family in Orlando.

Dr. Bob has spent a lifetime trying to unlock the answers to why we seem to limit ourselves with negative thinking. He delves into such areas as status anxiety, commitment, as well as indecision and doubt. And he shares his case studies with the likes of Hall of Fame great Nick Price and LPGA standout Suzann Pettersen. You might be surprised to learn that while their physical talents are otherworldly, the psychological challenges they face are not that much different from the ones facing golfers of every level.

What I love about Mistake-Free Golf is that its highly practical, easy to read and understand, and best of all you can take Dr. Bobs remedies right to the golf course.

Youll feel better about your game and better about yourself. And who among us hasnt linked those two areas, golf and life? Mark OMeara once joked with me that on his way to winning the 1998 Masters hed hit a poor iron shot and was really down, silently berating himself as not just a bad golfer but a bad human being.

If youve ever been there, and Lord knows I have, if youve ever wondered what its like to play this game with freedom and peace of mind, then I urge you to read the good doctors recommendations. Mistake-Free Golf may be the single best and most economically sensible investment youve ever made in your golfing life!

R ICH L ERNER,

Golf Channel

PROLOGUE

The Greatest Lesson Ever Learned

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.

A LBERT E INSTEIN

People who play golf often comment that a sport psychologist must have the best job in the world. That is, as a mental coach, you may spend a good deal of your time working and consulting with some of the best players and golf teachers on the planet. You may also get the chance now and then to play fabulous courses with great athletes who are always picking your brain to help them with theirs. What many of these folks (who, by the way, just happen to notice that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence) fail to realize is that it takes a great deal of time and personal investment to help harness change with another human being.

Consider yourself for a moment and stop and reflect about how you react to something new or different. Do you like it? Most people dont. People tend to resist change. If something is unfamiliar and feels uncomfortable, it is human nature to resist the implementation of change. Or, if a philosophy or a style of play that you learned from a young age is different from the one being presented, change becomes even harder. Now you are starting to understand the challenge a mental coach must deal with every day. Mental and emotional training is just as exhausting and frustrating to develop as it is to create and maintain a great swing. Perhaps the mental game is even harder because obtaining an EEG or MRI of a poor thought pattern is not as accessible as filming a golf swing! The quest to find the core answer with a golfer is a bit like being a detective. You have to uncover all of the clues in order to render a judgment and then prescribe an effective treatment.

This means that a careful analysis for each and every athlete is a crucial and delicate situation. (And make no mistake about it, if you are a golfer, you are an athlete.) The words that you use and the interventions that you provide must make sense and be simple for your athletes to implement. If I cannot communicate something correctly or if I dont make a connection with my athlete, then I am ineffective and I fail. Athletes rarely give a sport psychologist a second chance if he or she is not effective. Positive results for your athletes, not positive intent, are crucial to your success.

But people are absolutely right. A sport psychologist does have a great job, and I thank my lucky stars every day that I get the chance to listen to and interact with some of the best athletes in the world. The gratification that comes from watching your work turn into athletic reality in the achievement of personal goals and long-held dreams is quite special. Through my association with media outlets such as Golf Channel, ESPN, and CBS Sports, Golfweek and Golf Fitness Magazine , I have been able to spread my message of sport psychology to a great many people around the globe, for which I am extremely grateful.

Although I do much of my professional consulting as the resident sport psychologist for the Leadbetter Golf Academy World Headquarters at an exquisite resort known as ChampionsGate (which is just down the road from Disney World), I personally belong to a wonderful golf club in central Orlando known as Orange Tree Golf Club. Orange Tree is a haven for aspiring tour players and also possesses strong playing memberships in both the mens and womens golf associations. It is just a couple of blocks from Arnold Palmers Bay Hill Club and the Isleworth Club, which is the home of many PGA tour professionals and is perhaps best known as where Tiger Woods lived for many years before his infamous accident with a fire hydrant that created a media frenzy and a change in his personal and professional life.

Orange Tree Golf Club is widely known in the Orlando community as the tightest course in the area. Although it may not have the glamour or prestige of a Bay Hill or Isleworth, the Orange Tree layout tests your ability on every club in the bag, and if you can play Orange Tree, you can pretty much play anywhere in the world.

One of the unique features at Orange Tree is a seventy-eight-year-old member who can be found either on the driving range working on his game or sitting in the clubhouse dispensing his golfing wisdom. His name is Walter Zembriski, and he is a former PGA and Senior PGA Tour winner. He is perhaps the one player who truly fits the anythings possible PGA marketing tagline. Walter, or, as he is known to his friends, the Z Man, is a reflection of the players who never considered mental training a viable option because, in their time, they didnt have access to sport psychologists and focusing on the mental game wasnt considered part of golf. The great Ben Hogan had spoken of digging his secret out of the dirt, and the golfers of that era and the following twenty years pretty much adhered to that philosophy.