AVOID THE KNOCKOUT BLOW

“Everyone has a plan,” said boxing legend Mike Tyson, “until they get punched in the face.” What’s yours?

Iron Mike may only have been trashing the claimed strategy of his next opponent, but he was in fact making a rather fine point. Indeed he was echoing the much quoted wisdom of “No plan survives the battlefield”, originally proffered by a 19th-century Prussian soldier. “Only the layman believes that in the course of a campaign, he sees the consistent implementation of an original thought that has been considered in advance in every detail and retained to the end.” Thank you, Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke.

Hopefully by now you’ll see where I am going with this… because in a golfing context, so many of us do a pretty good impression of that layman. We head out on to the first tee with a vague notion that whatever swing thought that seems to be working for us just now will carry us through 18 holes. Then bam! The golf course punches us in the face – perhaps a random pull hook off the 3rd tee, or a fatted approach on the 6th. Inevitably we ask ourselves: “What the (bleep) happened there?”… and start trying to work it out. With just one shot, our strategy is in tatters. This, emphatically, is a plan that will not survive the battlefield.

When we react like that, we are effectively showing a refusal to accept a poor shot. It must be remedied, the solution must be found. And inevitably, this leads us into the murky depths of technique. We start trying a different thought or move on each shot, praying that something clicks. No doubt you have played many holes in this twilight zone – half-playing, half-practising, and doing neither very effectively.

Bringing technique to the course is a mistake made by countless club golfers. But not by elite players. And to illustrate the point, let’s discuss the most ‘technical’ golfer we know of: Ben Hogan.

Hogan’s gorgeous move remains a benchmark for technique and tuition 70 years after The Hawk won three Majors in one year. His swing has been analysed to death. There is no question he worked incredibly hard to hone such magnificent motion, but did he bring that analytical, technical mindset to the first tee?

Let’s remind ourselves of some of his more famous quotes relating to playing and performance:

“A good round of golf is if you can hit about three shots that turn out exactly as you planned them.”

“Golf is not a game of good shots. It’s a game of bad shots.”

“You never fight your eye when you look at a hole. If it looks one way, play it that way.”

“Placing the ball in the right position for the next shot is 80 percent of winning golf.”

“I never played a round of golf where I didn’t learn something.”

We think of Hogan as the arch technophile… and to an extent he was. He would spend hours grooving moves in slow motion; he would spend still more hours in front of a mirror, aligning a feel to a movement.

But this was all away from the course. Once he entered the playing arena, his perfectionism vanished; he was no longer a pursuer of perfect swings but a player of shots, responding to the ever-changing pictures in front of him. Hogan’s one on-course key – balance – was more an overall sensation than an isolation of one part of his body or swing. He once revealed that when he was playing well, he felt his spikes went a foot into the ground.

By his own admission Hogan had to learn pragmatism, to shelve his instinct to master the game and to accept bad shots. In Tyson’s terms, he learned to roll with the punches. He became resilient, his round no longer at the mercy of any one, horrible misfire. It brought both men to the very pinnacle of their respective sports.

The learning here is clear:

1. Stop trying to correct yourself on the course, to rediscover an imagined ideal state. Grasp that your battlefield is dynamic, ever-changing, one that can be managed but never controlled. Go into every round ready to adapt and regroup. 2. Instead of playing in the hope of hitting good shots, play with the understanding you’ll hit some bad ones. That way, when they come along they no longer have the power to derail the round.

Above all, make a commitment to detaching technical work (range, swing) from performance (course, shots). Achieve this and you’ll give yourself your best chance of having a game plan that avoids turning one, regular punch into a knockout blow.