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One day last summer, a round at a dream golf course appeared to begin on a perfect note. I hit my first drive in the fairway, knocked my approach to 10 feet, and sunk the putt for birdie. Walking to the second tee, my host and I joked about the course record.
I only missed it by about 30 shots.
Of all the frustrating rounds we endure, most confounding are those that begin with a specter of promise. A birdie on the first hole. A crisp warm-up session. The moment we are seduced into thinking golf isn’t that complicated is precisely when the game feels compelled to respond. That we rarely see it coming is part of the problem.
The simple answer to the familiar golf riddle—“Why do I hit it great on the range then terrible on the course?”—can be found in the question. It’s because you hit it great on the range, or rather, because you’re thinking about how you hit it great on the range, that you’ve introduced a wrinkle. A first-hole birdie presents the same challenge, but at least there you’ve been spotted a head start under par.
When you think it will be easy, it won’t be
Both speak to the corrupting influence of “confidence,” which we’ve been led to believe is an asset, but can do more harm than good. As the sports psychologist Fran Pirozzolo explained for a Golf Digest feature a few years ago, what we really want is “competence,” which reflects a firm mastery of a skill. If confidence promotes the simple belief you can execute a shot, competence means you understand why.
“Confidence is a garbage term in that it induces illusions of competence,” Pirozzolo said. “What you really need is a passion to work hard to get the best answers about why things happen the way they do.”
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To be clear, there is no inherent harm in hitting it well on the range. The challenge arises when we walk to the first tee blindly believing it will continue. My colleague Luke Kerr-Dineen has outlined specific changes that occur between the two environments—our swings get shorter, for one—but the other problem is we’ve let our guard down without even knowing it.
“Certainly too much confidence, or overconfidence, leads to lazy shots. You just assume you’re going to play well all the time,” the former U.S. Open champion Geoff Ogilvy told me. “There are tons of stories of guys leading up to the Masters, and they can’t miss a shot, and their families come in, and all of a sudden they shoot five over on the front nine. It creates a lazy head space because you’re just sure good things are going to happen.”
When you think it will be hard, you might be surprised
Of course, golf is just stupid enough for the opposite to be true as well. You slap it around on the range, worry that you won’t break 100 and then play way better than you expected. This happened to Hideki Matsuyama once before a final round at Firestone, where he followed up his worst warm-up session of the year by shooting 61 and winning by five. How? Because he said the bad swings forced him into a problem-solving mode that extended throughout the round.
The moral is not to tank your warm-up sessions or panic if you’re hitting it too well. It’s simply to recognize that the range and the course present different tests. You can’t always count on your swing performing on cue. The best warm-up is to always prepare to work with what you have.
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
