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Mental Concentration, Golf, and You
Jarrod Cash and Michael Black
All players, when they are concentrating on a stroke, are
in some respects mad; for a second they become monomaniac;
you are possessed with an idea that is fixed in your mind;
your singleness of purpose is absolute if you really are concentrating.
And I cannot imagine how anything can disturb them unless
they allow it to. If this does happen, then, in my opinion,
you cannot be giving your whole mind to the stroke, you aren't
concentrating.
When you are out on the course there are many minor distractions
that you may encounter, from coughing or sneezing, all the
way up to load and obnoxious crowds or players. But once a
player gets into the habit of being put off their game by
these little worries, you are unlikely to make any progress
in the game, and you run the risk of wandering around the
course looking for things at which to be annoyed, actually
seeking them. Few golfers realize that their game cannot stand
still, whether their handicap is scratch, eight, or eighteen;
their standard of play must progress or retrogress, improve
or deteriorate, according to the amount they play or practice.
In connection with this notion, a friend of mine suggests
the obliteration from the mind of a bunker that is directly
in the line of play. I might say (but I have not any intention
of doing so) that my friend has chosen the wrong word. My
argument is this: Was the player who landed in the bunker
thinking of the bunker when he played his stroke, or was the
golfer imagining that it was quite likely that the ball would
land in the bunker?
By a law to which there are no exceptions, the will yields
to the imagination. As an illustration of this, any one can
walk along a plank a foot in width when it is lying on solid
earth; but place that plank across the two trestles of a bridge,
twenty feet up in the air, and not one person in twenty will
walk calmly across it, because they imagine that they are
likely to fall off! Undoubtedly this player in the aforementioned
match actually imagined the ball hopping into the bunker,
and that was the last conscious act before making the fatal
stroke.
Can there be any other meaning to the word concentration,
in a mental sense, than a focusing of the attention? And further,
can you focus your attention on such a thing as a golf ball?
I answer these questions with another question: Doesn't the
golfer focus his attention, not on the ball itself, but on
some action connected with the ball? I grant you that you
can concentrate on a golf ball, on the size of it, on its
marking, or on the dents you may have made in it, but no player
wishes to do this in the middle of a close match. So that
when a golfer is "concentrating on the ball," he or she is
in reality concentrating on the stroke they are about to make.
The golfer is focusing their attention on the desire to put
the ball as near the hole as possible; and can it be doubted
that the average golfer starts concentrating on the second
shot long before he or she reaches the ball? This appears
to me to be a fatal policy. It is well enough for a golfer
to plan the method of play for the whole of any particular
hole when they are on the tee, and yet I do not think that
even this is a good plan. You may hit your tee shot, "as per
schedule," only to find that your ball is reposing in an old
divot mark and that it is thus quite impossible to use a the
proper club for your second shot. So the whole of your concentration
is wasted.
The ideal method of playing golf is not to use your mind until
you have to. When you reach your ball, concentrate as hard
as you can, for upon your powers of concentration your next
stroke depends. I have said, in common with every other writer
on the game that hesitation is fatal, but it seems to me desirable
that I should now amplify that statement. "Those who hesitate
are lost," because they aren't concentrating. If you concentrate
hard enough you cannot hesitate, provided you are clear about
what you are concentrating on.
© 2005 BlackCash Enterprises, LLC
- All Rights Reserved
Jarrod Cash and Michael Black have created "The Lost
Golf Secrets Collection" available at: http://www.LostGolfSecrets.com
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