“If I am able to hit one perfect shot in a tournament that would be great. If I happen to hit two per tournament it is usually when I have won by big margins. This is a game of misses. Everyones good is good. But how good is your bad. Thats the difference.” Tiger Woods
“We are what we repeatedly do… therefore excellence is not an act, but a habit.” Aristotle
I have a friend who can hit the golf ball very well.
He drives the ball well over 300 yards with his driver, 250 yards with his 3-wood, and his stock 7-iron is around 170 yards.
These numbers are good enough to play on the European Tour/PGA Tour.
Now, here is the hard truth.
When we are at a bar or clubhouse, he claims he plays off a handicap of three.
When you see him warming up on the range, I would actually say he looks like a bandit off three.
He looks more like a scratch or plus-handicap golfer.
Yet despite the last 10 years of playing with him, I have never seen him play to this level.
Not once.
It is a sad state of affairs for someone to hit it that well and shoot the scores he does on the course.
The reason why he can’t break 80 the majority of the time and is so confused and frustrated with the game?
He makes the same silly mistakes time and time again.
It all comes down to this simple truth:
He thinks he can hit all the shots, yet he fails miserably when it matters on the course.
If you gave him a basket of balls on the range, he could hit a high draw, a low punchy fade, and straight knuckleballs. He’s got all the shots.
In fact, he takes great pride in being able to move the ball in different ways.
On the range, he has the confidence and courage for you to name his shots.
His favorite catchphrase on the range is:
“What shot do you want to see?”
“You want a high fade, high draw, just name it, I will hit it.”
I sometimes question what elixir of caffeine and LSD he had for breakfast.
Drawing shapes in the sky like Picasso with his ball flights.
On the range, he pulls them off!
Yet, when he is on the course with a scorecard in his hands and there are consequences—hazards, out of bounds, water, bunkers, and sucker pins—the course highlights his actual ability to hit a varied selection of shots at specific moments during his round.
A back-right flag becomes a high-sweeping draw.
An unthinkable sucker flag, front right over a bunker, becomes a hard power fade starting 10 yards left of the green with enough sidespin to rip the entire face off his brand new Pro V1.
When there is no discipline, the imagination and creativity of the right side of the brain can run wild.
When pulling these shots off on the range, it looks good because there are no consequences. There is no cost attached to the shot.
When we play in a tournament, the stakes and odds change, and we become accountable for the shots we play.
Trying to put a round together with this style of play and mindset shifts the odds dramatically against us.
Trying to play one shot well over and over again is hard enough. Trying to execute an Amazon catalog worth of shots sets us up for failure.
To further double down on this, when shots do not come off in correlation to the vivid imagination of your mind, the more frustrated and angry you get.
“Why are things not going to plan?”
“I can play so much better than this!”
“I know I can hit that shot.”
The expectations are set so high that the inevitable downward spiral of emotions and rage commences.
“I suck at this game.”
“Why do I bother?”
“You idiot!”
The range game now feels like a long-lost distant dream.
Putting a score together now becomes really hard work and an impossible task.
You now can’t wait for the round to be over, and all you are thinking about is that packet of crisps and the first sip of a cold one.
With this approach to the game of trying to move the ball around the course like a pro, the more time we spend out on the course, the more that will go wrong over time.
You are effectively trying to pull off shots like picking a winning lottery ticket, one ball, one shot at a time.
But here is the truth.
Here is how the best in the world play their games.
The Hardest Decision to Make: To Make a Decision
When Brooks Koepka started working with Claude Harmon, Brooks—albeit slightly better than my friend—was wrestling with the same emotion:
Brooks was getting tempted into hitting all the shots and shapes.
Claude Harmon reined Brooks in and got him hitting the same shot over and over again.
Brooks’s natural shot: the power draw.
“So many guys come out on tour trying to hit all the shots. They want to be diverse ball strikers. I see so many players trying to get good at 4-5 different shot types and they aren’t good at any of them. We worked on making Brooks’s golf swing as repeatable and one-dimensional as possible.” — Claude Harmon
The hard part of this is mastering the discipline of resisting the temptation to move the ball both ways. Like a dangling carrot in front of a donkey, the temptation to hit the shot the other way will always be there.
On every round, every hole, and every shot.
The hardest decision you have to make is to decide what shot you want to hit and stick to it.
Let’s talk about a player who liked to move the ball the other way.
With power fades off the tee and high soft fades into the greens, Martin Kaymer had built a game he knew and could rely on.
From 2008 to 2011, Kaymer finished inside the top 10 every year on the European Tour’s Race to Dubai. In 2010, he won four tournaments in the same year, a stat that many players would be happy to achieve in a lifetime.
In February 2011, he claimed the title of the best golfer in the world. He achieved all this by hitting the same shot over and over again.
However, he became convinced that he needed to do more.
Kaymer felt frustrated that he couldn’t draw the ball, especially for a course like Augusta National, where the preferred shot is a draw off six of the 18 holes.
Martin started the process of changing the way he saw the game.
Pounding balls every day on the range, grooving his new right-to-left shot shape.
In the 2011 Masters, Kaymer shot 78-72 to finish 82nd.
Several months later, in an interview after he missed the cut at Augusta, he admitted he made a mistake trying to change his swing.
“I hit draws on certain holes, low shots, high shots, try to place the ball always on the right side of the hole. It was just not me—it’s not the way I play. The second day I went out to just play my game. Play the way I want to play the golf course and not how the course wants to be played. So I did that and it was better. I need to play my game and it does not matter what course I play,” he continued. “Whether I play Augusta or Dusseldorf, it should never change my swing or my golf game or my strategy.“ Martin Kaymer
However, the cost of all this practice set him back a few years.
Muscle memory takes a long time to undo.
Martin’s temptation to try to move the ball both ways set him on an odyssey to completely losing his golf swing and his game.
After holding the No. 1 spot in the world for eight weeks, he fell down the world rankings. In 2012, he quickly found himself dropping to No. 30 in the world.
Giving up on the swing changes and going back to his old comfortable fade gave him back his confidence on the golf course.
Knowing what it took to be the best player in the world, Kaymer spent the next few years re-grooving what he did. Hitting his one stock shot over and over again. The temptation of hitting a draw took him three years to fix.
In 2014, Martin Kaymer showed up to the U.S. Open at Pinehurst and came out guns firing. He shot the lowest 36-hole score in U.S. Open history. Martin kept it simple and stayed away from trouble. He hit fade after fade and went on to win by 8 shots, becoming the first person to win THE PLAYERS Championship and the U.S. Open in the same season.
Even other players marveled at his success.
“I’m wondering how he did it,” McIlroy said. “Obviously, if you limit the mistakes, you might end up a couple under for the week. But to do what he’s doing … I think it’s nearly more impressive than what I did at Congressional.”
The secret?
He eliminated one side of the course and made a decision and stuck to it.
For every round, every hole, and every shot.
Hitting the same shot over and over again.
To really drive home the mentality of how the best players in the world own their game…
Augusta National Driving Range
Sir Nick Faldo is standing behind Dustin Johnson, watching him go through his entire bag.
From wedge to driver, DJ hit the same shot: a soft, buttery cut.
“How many times a year do you try and hit a draw?”
Dustin Johnson didn’t hesitate:
“Never!”
Faldo: “Never? Not even once?”
DJ:“I used to draw it all the time, but about six years ago, I had a stretch where I couldn’t keep the ball on the planet. So one day I said, ‘I’m only playing a cut today’—and I shot 61. Next day, hit a cut, shot 62. Next day I shoot another 61 or 62. I was like, OK, I’m always playing a fade. I found that my misses got tighter and I wasn’t losing any distance.”
For DJ, who can hit all nine shots on demand if he wanted…
The Double Cross: The Most Destructive Shot in Golf
The double-cross is what makes shot patterns become exponentially larger.
That’s just reality.
How does a double cross happen?
Let’s say you are a drawer of the ball.
You keep the laws above and every shot you aim slightly down the right and bring it back.
But then, about halfway through your round, you get suckered into hitting a fade.
A front-right pin just suits your eye for a towering left-to-right shot flight that lands on the green like a butterfly with sore feet and spins to the right, ever getting closer to the hole.
You aim at the far left edge of the green and attempt the fade.
But your clubface comes down on the normal draw path and now you hit it 20 yards left of your target line.
What should have been your stock shot, 15/20 feet left of the sucker flag, now leaves you with a 40-yard chip.
Not all pin positions are going to suit your game.
Not all tee shots are going to suit your game.
Not all golf courses are going to suit your game.
Some days you could play a competition where 80% of the holes and pin positions are against how you see the shot.
And you know what? That is okay.
That is a part of the game.
Your job is to be aware of when these sucker pin positions and tee shots present themselves.
Repeat And Perfect A Motion
Bryson was asked after he won his second US Open at Pinehurst..
“How much do you vary your ball flight?”
His response..
“I try not to. I want to be a master of one.
As long as I got one shot shape I can rely on. It’s about having a shot you are super comfortable with that you can do time and time again.
I focus on trying to repeat motion, more consistently than anything else. If i can do it again and again with the same shot shape that is literally all that matters to me.
All I do after that, is take one shot at a time and just play that shot as best as I possible can.”
The Nail in the Coffin: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
Nicklaus described his shot pattern better than anyone else.
“When I’m driving the golf ball, I never try to hit a straight shot,” Jack Nicklaus.
He saw a line down the middle of the fairway.
He would hit it as hard as he could down the left side of that line, knowing it would always come back toward the center line.
Nicklaus never wanted the ball to cross that center line but to act as a wall he knew it would never cross. He hit the same shot time and time again off the tee.
“A perfectly straight shot with a big club is a fluke.“ Jack Nicklaus
Sometimes in life, you do not need to reinvent the wheel.
You just need to listen closely to the giants who came before you.
We have been gifted with these clues and insights of the game from the best in the world.
But we amateurs love to overcomplicate things.
We believe there has to be another way.
Sometimes our own ego gets in the way, and we think we can play this game better than the best in the world.
One of my favourite quotes..
“The guy who misses the best is going to win.“ Ben Hogan
We all know this game is about keeping it down the middle and on the short stuff.
Imagine if you were a betting man.
You had to put your life savings on a golfer to find a fairway.
Would you want to bet on the player who practices all the shots or the golfer who has practiced the same stock shot for the last 10 years?
The more you practice hitting the same shot, the better you will become at it.
Reaching your full potential will come down to making the choice of what shot you are going to play and mastering it.
“We are what we repeatedly do… therefore excellence is not an act, but a habit.” — Aristotle
When you have mastered the art of standing on every tee shot and looking down the hole with the simplicity of:
“I will hit it down the right with a little draw.”
“I’ll hit it down the left with a little fade.”
There are no decisons that needed to be made.
The mind should be that quiet and simple.
The technique and swing movements should be so automatic and grooved in that it will be like riding a bike.
And the only way you will be able to repetitively execute shot after shot, finding the fairway time and time again, is to make the decision of defining your shot for life.
“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.” Bruce Lee
The Most Beautiful Game 