Joaquin Niemann got hit with a two-stroke penalty for “serious misconduct” at the U.S. Open this year for throwing a club. The coverage treated it like a character revelation, that Niemann was hotheaded, immature and couldn’t handle the major stage. I’ve been looping on tour for a long time, and my reaction when I saw the clip? Hey, at least he got it out. After an opening 78, Niemann rebounded incredibly with a 65 in round 2 and ultimately finished T-7.
About five years back, my player was going through a rough stretch mentally. He had a lot of tight finishes that didn’t go his way, bad breaks, good putts that didn’t drop, the whole miserable cycle, and his sports psychologist gave him a technique. When the frustration was building and he needed to release it without an audience, he should step into a porta-potty and let it out—scream, whatever he needed. Then come back out and reset.
It worked mostly. A few tournaments in, it became part of his routine. I’d see him duck in somewhere, hear some muffled noise I chose not to think about too hard, and he’d come back out looking about 15 pounds lighter—fine by me. One afternoon, my guy goes to the porta-potty set down behind the tee box as usual. A minute later, a volunteer comes speed-walking up toward me with the expression of a man who has seen something he wasn’t prepared for and waves me over. This old-timer says my player needs me and to “bring a towel.” I walk back to find my player behind the porta-potty, khaki pants soaked from the waist down in blue-green sanitizing gel. He’d put his fist through the hand sanitizer dispenser mounted on the wall. We played the rest of the round not looking our best. That ended the bathroom breaks.
The main thing people get wrong about on-course anger is assuming it belongs to a certain type of player. Every player on tour loses it at some point. The difference is the TV coverage. When Scottie Scheffler mutters something under his breath or gestures wildly after a lipped-out putt, everybody sees it. Even in the smartphone era where anything can be captured at any second, the tour players who aren’t big stars, which is to say most, operate in darkness.
There’s an art to letting out frustration. Cursing is the most efficient tool in the bag. You hit a bad shot, you say something sharp, and you walk. It’s over. The words carry the heat out of your body in a way that silence never quite does. Thirty seconds later you’re standing over your next shot with a cleaner head than the guy who bit his lip and swallowed it. The best caddies learn to read the difference between the curse that ends something and the one that starts something. They sound almost identical, but they lead to very different next shots.
‘Blaming me was easier than confronting the doubt in his own swing. You absorb it, let it pass and get back to work.’
Another thing I’ve noticed over the years that doesn’t get talked about enough: The angriest moments on a golf course almost never follow bad golf but good. A player gets through 11 holes in six under. He’s in a rhythm, the ball is going where he’s aiming and something starts to harden in his chest—an assumption that this is just how today works. He’s been playing well, and he’ll keep playing well. The round has a momentum that feels like it belongs to him.
Then he pulls a 9-iron into the bunker on a hole that has birdie all over it.
His mind goes sideways, not because the shot was catastrophic, but because his expectations had quietly outrun reality. The hot-hand fallacy—the belief that playing well recently means you’ll keep playing well—is probably the single biggest source of on-course blow-ups. The player isn’t just reacting to a bad shot. He’s reacting to the gap between what he assumed was coming and what showed up. Late in a good round, that gap can be enormous.
Suppressed anger is more dangerous to a golf game than expressed anger. It carries the weight the original incident never deserved. I’ve watched players bogey four straight holes because they never properly processed the one bad break that started it. I know what that looks like from inside the ropes, the player who has mentally checked out of the round. When a bad shot is gone, the only thing left to decide is what you bring to the next one. Some players figure that out early, but some never do. That’s why I don’t think a golfer briefly making a fool of himself is a bad thing, especially if it saves the round.
As a caddie, sometimes the anger comes our way. You hand over the wrong club, or you misread a yardage, or the player just needs somewhere to put his pissed-off feeling, and you’re the closest thing available. A lot of times it’s completely unjust; the read was right, the yardage was right, he just hit a bad shot, and the emotion rolls downhill. You learn to take it, not because you’re a pushover, but because pushing back in the middle of a round helps exactly nobody. One year at Mayakoba, I got chewed out for not flagging the carry over a bunker before a tee shot. I didn’t mention it because, under any normal execution, we were covering it by 30 yards. We were only in that conversation because of an incredibly poor tee shot. He knew it, too, but blaming me was easier than confronting the doubt in his own swing. You absorb it, let it pass and get back to work. The caddies who can’t do that don’t last long out here.
None of this is an argument for chaos. There’s a line of behavior, and it matters. Your frustration cannot touch other players. If your temper is landing in the sightline of someone trying to hit on the next tee, you’ve gone too far. It can’t damage the course, and it absolutely cannot go anywhere near the gallery. What we’re talking about— the sharp word, the club that gets slammed into the turf, the controlled release—lives well inside those limits. Niemann’s throw was marginal. I’ve seen far worse go unpenalized. The line must exist, and I get why officials hold it. —With Joel Beall
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
