No matter what you say to him, he won't take your word for it, you are his beloved wife, not his golf coach. He needs a mental game lesson with a professional golfer. I am not a pro, but I'll share with you why you are wasting your breath, and paying for a mental game lesson is worth the money.
I TOTALLY understand.
I was that person. The harder I tried, the worse it got. The fact that I could play well sometimes, just made the bad rounds that much worse.
I would just about kill to go back 20 years and have someone I trusted tell me what turned me around recently.
Anger kills your body's ability to hit the ball. Trying too hard does the exact same thing: forcing your body to do what it could do on it's own if you let it. Yes, sometimes when angry you can hit a good shot--which produces more anger because you know you were capable of it all those times before that good shot, and you did not do it.
And now comes the really bitter medicine.
Your breathing and your heart rate are the controls. He is probably right--he just cannot control his emotions over it. Been there, done that, thank you very much
. But he can learn to control his breathing and his heart rate, which will force him into a passive anger that he can manage.
It sounds backwards, I know. It should be "let go of your anger and your breathing, heart, and muscles will do their job." But in hotheads like me, it was the other way around, because letting go of my unquenchable fire to play well was impossible.
When he's not playing well, he cannot will himself to play better. I tried for 30 years. But when he's playing less than well, he can get better by getting his head right, which is attached to his lungs and his heart.
I came to this revelation when I finally admitted to myself that many of my better, not best, but better rounds were on courses I'd never seen before, or when I'd been laying off awhile and had not played. Why?
Because I walked on the course expecting nothing of myself. I put no pressure on myself to play well because I had a reason to give myself a break: new course, or no practice. When a shot went awry, I did not get angry because of one of those two reasons, and I was able to put it behind me.
One of the best rounds of my life I barely remember because I was focused on helping my wife, who was just learning the game. I finished plus four that day, the only shot I remember to this day was the one that took me from even to plus two.
The last three times I played new courses, I shot my handicap or near it on every one. Because I let myself.
I don't know if I would have been able to accept this twenty years ago. But I know it now.
July 7th, 2007, 01:27 AM
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