Mental Mondays: Control Your Anger

Getting angry at the game, your clubs, the ball, your partners, or the guys in front of you does absolutely no good. Anger leads to tension, and tension will cost you strokes. Anger causes loss of focus, and loss of focus will cost you strokes.

Tommy Bolt, who was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2002, was famous for his outbursts of anger, which often resulted in clubs soaring through the sky. “Always throw clubs ahead of you,” he quipped. “That way you won’t waste any energy going back to pick them up.” He also advised players “Never break your driver and your putter in the same round.”

Terrible Tommy won fifteen times on the PGA Tour, but Ben Hogan said: “If we could’ve screwed another head on his shoulders, Tommy Bolt could have been the greatest who ever played.”

Anger issues in golf generally stem from making bad shots—or even a series of them. The general advice on dealing with anger is to count to ten, or to take long, deep breaths. I had a hippie teacher who once told the class that to get rid of our anger we should imagine blowing our troubles into a balloon and then letting it drift upward into a cloudless sky.

But here’s some more golf-specific advice:

If you’re in a cart, get out and walk. Take a likely club with you and swing it to let out some tension. Along the way, avoid dwelling on the previous bad shot by thinking obsessively about the next. As you approach the ball, speculate on the next target, the distance, the lie, the wind and the club you’ll need. Play out several next shot scenarios in your head. That sort of cold analysis will help you to quickly get over the emotions associated with the last shot. 

This tip is an excerpt from The Five Inch Course: Thinking Your Way To Better Golf. The complete book is available in Kindle format at Amazon.com.