Why Is It So Hard To Win?

On Sunday night the PGA Tours Florida swing ended in dramatic fashion. It was an ending in keeping with the other three events that make up the tours annual trip around the Sunshine State. The Florida Swing is a particularly tough stretch of events, a world away from some of the birdie fest events such as Phoenix and the Humana Challenge. The Florida Swing is characterised by demanding courses and top class fields, however the defining feature of this years Florida Swing has been of players struggling to get themselves across the finishing line.

This started at the Honda Classic where 4 men were engaged in a battle to hand each other the top prize, you might expect relative novices such as the Russell’s Henley and Knox to get tight but not a regular winner like Mcilroy or an experience old head like Ryan Palmer. The theme continued at the Blue Monster where Patrick Reed (A man you could hardly say was lacking in confidence) held a 4 shot lead early in the 4th round eventually sneaking past the winners post by a single shot. John Senden, a noted ball striker fought off a series of quick hooks and bailed himself out with his supposedly weaker putting before a chip in birdie where bogey looked more likely was enough for him to secure victory.

Sunday night was however the most dramatic example of players struggling to play good golf with the victory in sight. Adam Scott held an 8 shot lead near the end of the second round and a three shot lead heading into the final round. He has a good track record of finishing the deal when in a winning position and showed at last year Masters that he is capable of playing golf of the highest quality in pressure situations. Yet on Sunday under the pressure of leading a tournament he struggled on the greens with nervy putt after nervy putt (Anyone who thinks the long putter gives an advantage under pressure only need watch Scott’s Sunday putting performance).

What is it that is causing players, who are playing so well to stutter so badly. They are playing in field consisting of the very best players in the world, to do so you must be hitting the ball crisply and precisely with your long game and seeing the hole as a bucket once you get onto the greens. Come the back 9 on Sunday how does all this great golf suddenly disintegrate.

There is of course the easy answer, they choke. I however think this is a cheap and lazy jibe. Almost always used as an insult, after all you would almost never hear a fan say “I was really rooting for [Adam Scott, Rory Mcilroy, etc] but he just choked”. Neither would you be likely to hear a commentator or pundit use such terminology, especially those who have played, they know just how tough winning can be. Essentially in the words of Al Murray “Its much more complicated than that”

So lets start with the obvious, winning is so difficult because only 1 person can do it, at any given event there are upto and often even more than 150 exceptionally talented individuals, to win an event you have to beat each and every one of them. Viewed in those terms winning any event is a great accomplishment, to do so you must play your very best golf, and playing your very best golf is where it gets difficult.

At this stage it might be useful to consult with an expert. Dr Bob Rotella is a highly respected voice in the field of golf psychology whose methods have helped the likes of Darren Clarke, Keegan Bradley and Padraig Harrington to major championship glory. Rotella contends that the only way to play your very best golf is to “concentrate on the process and not the result”. If you keep going through the correct process, be it your positive thoughts, pre-shot routine and trust the swing you have honed for hours then the good shots will take care of themselves. Easy on a Thursday Friday or even a Saturday, so much more difficult to not concentrate on the result when one mistake can end your championship, that much easier to think of the potential negative outcomes when one shot into the water ends your championship.

This process driven approach to golf is much harder to achieve on the exacting tests provided by the Florida Swing, 3 weeks out of the 4 it was a case of water water everywhere, always the most daunting of hazards it acts as a golf ball magnet for anyone losing confidence.

What is so surprising is that these ailments can afflict the very best. I personally believe that Scott and Mcilroy are the best two swingers of the golf club in the world right now, but in the process of doing a bit of research for this piece I came upon an image that showed me that perhaps that isn’t quite as important as you might think.

More than one way to swing golf club!

As you can see from the above picture of 4 great golfers and regular winners there are many ways to play golf successfully, down the stretch Mcliroy and Scott’s picture perfect swings don’t count for much. When I found it the picture had the caption “Swings don’t win golf tournaments, people do!”

But then Mcilroy and Scott are people who do win golf tournaments, and lots of them, whilst Matt Every, Russell Henley and John Senden are people who don’t, so what does that tell us? Well I don’t know, it probably tells us that for all our opinions, theories and expert analysis into how to play great, or how to win, the bottom line is that golf is difficult, and its unpredictable, and sometimes, it just doesn’t go your way. Of course its possible that its much more complicated than that.