A while back, Dave recommended the book Paper Tiger: An Obsessed Golfer’s Quest to Play with the Pros. I just finished it and wanted to share my thoughts.

The book follows author Tom Coyne’s year-long journey from 14-handicapper to his ultimate goal of playing in the PGA Tour Q-School to see if he has what it takes to play with the best. He brings us along for all his trials and tribulations encountered on his quest for greatness.

Let’s jump right in, and below the normal good/bad/conclusion section, I want to talk a little about his quest. You should skip that section if you want to avoid spoilers and would prefer to let the book unfold.

The Good

• Coyne’s writing style is one of a kind. His humorous brand covers all parts of the spectrum. At the same time, he finds a way to switch gears when the topic turns a little more toward the serious or sentimental side. Then it’s right back to funny. He puts into print the kinds of things most would be perfectly happy leaving tucked away in their own minds. I found myself laughing out loud a few times. He has a unique way of sharing what’s going on in his mind.
• The story line is very interesting, not just because I have similar dreams. The story of a person who follows his dream and lays it all on the line to do so is compelling to me. I couldn’t wait for the story to unfold to find out what was next.
• Coyne’s journey is relevant outside of the world of golf. Obviously a golfer would identify best with this material, but I think the purpose, story, and style cross the boundary and a non-golfer would enjoy it.

The Bad

Whenever I do a review of some kind, I have a “Bad” section, because nothing is perfect, but I’m having trouble identifying anything that warrants a mention in the “Bad” section. It would have been nice if it was longer. Not because it was skimpy, but because I just wanted more. I guess that technically belongs in the “Good” section, but this is my blog and I’m not having an empty “Bad” section.

Conclusion

As you probably guessed already, this book gets a rousing endorsement from me. It was just a well told, interesting, fun ride around the world with a regular guy who dropped everything to live his dream. Maybe I like it so much because it hits so close to home, but I still think you’ll like it.

Extracurricular Analysis

Attention: Spoilers ahead. Don’t read any further if you don’t want to know anything about what happens. You should probably avoid the comments too.

I wanted to talk a little about Coyne’s journey. As you found out (or don’t mind finding out, if you’ve ignored the spoiler warning), he doesn’t succeed. In fact, he never even gets the chance to play in the PGA Tour Q-School, though he does play in a few others.

This review comes on the tail end of a lot of mental game material that I’ve been covering, so I want to talk about this story in that context. It’s not my intention to be critical of Coyne, but I really want to understand why he didn’t succeed. As I worked through the book and it became apparent that he wasn’t going to make it, I started thinking about it a lot in between reading sessions.

As regular visitors here know, I’m not a pro (yet), I’m not a sports psychologist, nor am I anything else that makes me qualified to say what makes a person tick. This is just me, Monday morning quarterbacking. Take my opinion for what it’s worth: not much.

That said, as I thought more and more about Coyne’s quest, I came up with three things that I feel contributed to his lack of success.

• First, he tried to go with a sort of Steinbrenner strategy: throw a lot of money at it. Don’t get me wrong: he put in a LOT of work. His dedication was impressive. I won’t criticize that. But trips to top teachers, top golf psychologists, top golf fitness trainers isn’t necessarily going to be enough. I sort of got the sense early on that he felt like he had to do that to make it. I’m not saying he didn’t succeed because he dumped money on his dream team, I’m saying that maybe he thought that if he dumped money on his dream team that would be enough to get him over the hump. These days, that seems to be the way of things, but many of the greatest players ever learned golf in their back yards, some even without golf clubs.
• He directed his entire goal at Q-School a year out from when he made his decision. I think that’s just not enough time to accomplish what he was trying to accomplish. He came so far, and it turned out to be a one shot deal. Many players have to go through Q-School several times before making it. It was a great ride, and in the end I think he gave up too soon. He had to do what he felt was right, but I think with more experience under his belt, it could have been a little different.
• Finally, his biggest reason for not making it, in my opinion, was a lack of confidence. Admittedly, it’s not easy to read a person’s psyche and state of mind from the pages of a book, especially without having the benefit of having been there or of even knowing him personally. It’s also hard to know how much of it is simple self-deprecating humor versus actual state of mind. But throughout the whole thing, I couldn’t help but notice a lack of confidence. He was fixated on the perceptions of others. He didn’t really seem to feel as if he belonged or that he was a good enough player. His handicap got as low as +0.4, and yet in tournament play he was throwing up rounds in the 90’s on occasion. Also, after having successes here or there he seemed to feel a surge of “Hey, I can do this!”, when he should have been feeling that the whole time.

As I said, I’m not really comfortable being critical of Coyne because he did something that the rest of us wish we could have the fortitude to try. He should be proud of himself and of the effort he put forth. If I seem critical it’s because as I was reading the book, I was pulling for him so hard. It was a genuine disappointment in the end to find that he didn’t make it and gave up. He clearly wanted it, but achieving something like that requires a different kind of desire than what most of us are accustomed to dealing with. He’d had enough and had to throw in the towel.

You may wonder whether Coyne’s story made me reconsider my own goals. Nope. If anything I want it more. Now I have the benefit of someone else’s thoughts and experiences to help guide me. Taking a look at his shortcomings gives me some insight into my own.

I don’t know that I’ll ever even try the PGA Tour Q-School, but I’ll play professionally somewhere at some point. That’s all that matters to me right now.

We spent a lot of time over the last week talking about the mental game and the psychology of golf. I went through what I felt were my biggest flaws in that area and laid out my plan for addressing them. Well, I had a chance to take what I’ve been working on to the course on Sunday for a nine hole round.

Before I went out, I had a specific plan that stated what I wanted to accomplish. Here are the basics:

• Play with discipline. The round was to be a scoring round, and I was planning on keeping stats. There would be no quitting or switching to practice mode.
• Live in each moment and play each shot without worrying about the previous shot.
• Do not fixate on the score.
• For each and every shot, devise a plan, absolutely commit to it, and execute.
• Resist the temptation to bring range-oriented swing thoughts to the course. No working on technical details. Keep the swing thoughts simple.

I have to say that being honest with myself and uncovering these problems, then devising a plan to fix them made a huge difference, both in my score and in my attitude.

I ended up shooting a 43 on a course that was slightly easier than my home course (that I’m very familiar with). I’m not happy that I shot a 43, but I feel like it was a good 43.

I had two double bogeys that resulted from minor misses. The first time, I had an 8-iron into a green over a bunker and missed my intended carry distance by about two yards, ending up right near the front face. I got the ball up and out, but just barely, and left myself with a really long putt on a tough green and three putted. The second time, I was laying up on a very short, uphill dog-leg left par four. I hit a 7-iron up the hill with a draw and it drew just a tiny bit much and took a big bounce of off some hard ground up there and rolled under an evergreen tree. I had to declare it unplayable and still didn’t have a shot at the green after my drop.

Now, I’m a believer in the fact that what you score is what you score and there’s no rationalizing a bad score by saying “well if this or that didn’t happen…”, but in this case, the score was a big improvement over what I’ve been doing lately. Also, even though I hit no greens in regulation, I was less than a pace off the putting surface on several. Consequently, I only had 14 putts, making three over 6 feet.

In general, my misses were manageable, instead of wet, lost, or embarrassing.

Most importantly, I had no blow-up holes. I had no give-up holes. I had a few shots that I didn’t pull off, but none that were total mental errors.

What that tells me is that I need to keep working on the range, but that I can make the changes in my frame of mind that I need to succeed.

For the entire nine holes, I felt like I had a mental clarity that I haven’t felt for a while. I had more confidence than I’ve had in who knows how long. At the end, I had a sense of accomplishment instead of a sense of failure. In fact, I never had a sense of failure during the round, even after I hit some bad shots. My normal pit of despair turned into a rally to get up to my ball and live in that new moment and do the best I could with that shot, without consideration for my overall score for the round or for the hole.

I know I have a long way to go, but I’m very encouraged at the results. I’d recommend that anyone looking to improve take a serious look at the mental aspects of the game to see if there are improvements that can be made that will improve scores (and fun) right off the bat and for the future.

This is another bit of wisdom from the Dave Pelz school of thought that I got to try first hand recently.

According to Pelz, the best way to control wedge distances within 100 yards is to groove a set of three pre-defined swing lengths: 7:30, 9:00, and 10:30, where you imagine swinging within the face of a giant imaginary clock and where the player’s left shoulder is at the center of the dial, and the position of the left arm at the end of the back swing gives the “time” reading (left arm parallel to the ground is 9:00).

Couple those three swings with four different wedges and you have 12 different shot lengths that are easily repeatable from around 100 yards down to about 30. This is the basis of his 3×4 system.

But what happens when you’re between wedges or within 30 yards?

One option is to “take a little off” of one of your standard distances by varying the back back swing length slightly. While this is doable, it’s a little more prone to error.

The other possibility is to choke down a little on the club to shorten the distance some. Because of the laws of physics, the same exact swing using a shorter club (the same club, gripped down) produces a shorter shot.

This is a much more consistent approach than trying to rely on feel to accomplish the shot. If you’re using the same swing you’ve practiced over and over and over, then your chance of success is much higher. The only thing you have to figure out is how much distance is affected by gripping down. You can easily find that out on the practice range.

Recently, I was faced with a 30 yard or so pitch from off a green, over a bunker, to a pin that was on the back tucked onto a tier. The ball was settled down in the rough some.

The swing required for a pitch shot from 30 yards and in is a little different than a swing for a 3×4 wedge shot, but the principle is the same. In this situation, I needed to fly the ball high and land it softly with no hope of getting any spin out of the rough. Unfortunately, it was a little shorter than my standard grooved pitch swing with my 60 degree wedge.

My solution was to grip down and take my normal swing. I knew that if I tried to take a little off by using feel, I was likely to have an inconsistent result because my confidence in that shot isn’t as high as I’d like it to be (yet). In that situation, the tendency is to either take too short a back swing and then compensate by getting handsy, or to take too long a back swing and compensate by not properly accelerating through the shot.

I gripped down almost to the end of the grip, took several preview swings to get the feel of bending over a little more. When it felt right, I stepped up and pulled the trigger. The result was a well-struck shot that flew the right distance, landed softly, and gave me a chance to make a putt. Because I used the same swing mechanics that I practice and only varied my setup, I was able to execute a swing that I was confident in.

Next time you practice your wedge game, get a feel for how gripping down can affect distance. I think you’ll find it to be a good way to make subtle changes to your standard distances that you can execute with confidence and reliability.

While we’re on the subject of the mental game, I encountered an interesting bit of information.

I hate bringing up things where I can’t cite a specific source, but I saw this recently, I think on Playing Lessons from the Pros on The Golf Channel.

The problem lies in the fact that for too many people, par is an impenetrable barrier. We look at par as the standard to be judged against. Like par is the goal, and anything better is gravy. When we look at things like that, we will tend to make sure (maybe subconsciously) that our outcome meets that expectation.

For Tour players, that’s the kind of thing that will end a career because except for the U.S. Open and sometimes The Masters, shooting par at the end of the day is not going to be good enough.

This idea got me thinking about myself, and I realized that I’m guilty of this kind of thinking. I plan my actions and judge my outcomes against par. For instance, if I make a fairway, I think, “OK, I’m in a good position for a par”. If my approach to a green is a little off and I have a lower percentage putt (say over 15 feet), I think, “well, I’m in a decent position to two-putt for my par”.

I think this is just a bad way to look at things. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t lay up, or take our medicine when we get in trouble, or be satisfied with a good lag putt, or be happy with a par (when warranted). But in general, we should be devising a plan for each shot that puts us in the best possible (realistic) position to score, committing to it, and executing it. Then we can hold ourselves accountable for each and every shot, as opposed to an overall score. Believe it or not, there is such a thing as a bad par. And there’s nothing wrong with expecting a birdie on a particular hole.

When I hit a nice drive into a fairway, that doesn’t do anything for my next shot. Yes, it put me in a better position for my next shot, but that’s not what I mean. When I get to the ball and plan my next shot, it doesn’t matter how I got there. The only thing that should matter is the shot I’m about to hit. I should be worried about making that shot the best that it can possibly be, not gearing it toward an overall score.

If I’m hitting a wedge from 50 yards, my plan should be to get close enough to make the first putt. That’s the whole purpose of the finesse wedge game. If I start to think, “All I need to do is get on the green and two-putt for par” then I’ve basically conceded defeat because my brain is going to find a way to make that happen. And if I fail to execute on that plan, then I’m looking at bogey. That means that my expectation should be for a birdie, not for a par. Otherwise I must not be confident that I’ll execute on my plan and once that happens, chances are that I won’t.

Along the lines of all this, I saw Craig Stadler (maybe it was he who talked about the stuff above) on Playing Lessons recently and he remarked that he sees guys start to go low sometimes, say 5-under, then for some reason, they start to play conservative trying to hang on to it. That’s when it starts to slip away. His feeling is that you need to stick with what got you there in the first place, not shrink up and go into a defensive mode.

Par is just a number. If you’re fixated on it, then you’re going to do what you can to shoot it, even if you can really do better. That’s all right if you’re normally shooting 100, but if you want to mix in some birdies, then you have to make sure you’re not creating a par-barrier for yourself. I’m guilty as charged. Forget about par and hit each shot like it was a game in and of itself. It’s one thing to expect a birdie and not succeed and have to live with par, but it’s entirely something else to view par as a fall back right off the bat, because more often than not, you will have eliminated any chance for birdie by guiding your play toward getting that par.

This is a change that I’m going to make in my own philosophy. To have a shot of going low during a round, we must be able to break through the par barrier and not look back.

In my recent post about what separates the best from the rest, HappyRock asked me what I’m doing to achieve my goals. I addressed it in a follow-up comment, but it really deserves a post of its own.

The stock answer is that I’m working on my fitness, weight loss, and practicing the various aspects of the game. But that’s not enough. If I lose all the weight I want to lose, get reasonably fit, and play to scratch, I’m still not going to be good enough.

My basic premise in what separates the best from the rest is that mental game is the biggest factor once a player gets to a certain point. I listed out a bunch of aspects of the mental game that I feel are factors. The question is, what am I doing to develop those things?

Right now, this blog is my biggest vessel for mental development. It sounds strange, but when you find a way to be totally honest with yourself and expose your deepest, darkest, inner flaws in front of the world, it’s an experience that starts to change you.

One of the biggest issues that many people, including myself, suffer from, is a lack of honesty with oneself regarding where we stand, whether it’s golf or anything else. It’s that lack of honesty that keeps us in the same ruts, doing the same things over and over. We can’t know how to improve our lives if our mental defense mechanisms hide our problems from us.

This blog lets me air out all my problems so that they’re right there in black and white, in my face. Then, I must deal with them if I want to achieve my goals.

I also have the benefit of people in my life who are very supportive, but don’t let me cop out. They’re family, friends, and co-workers. They’re also total strangers here whose input I value greatly. They help me to see things that I don’t (or won’t) see for myself.

But that’s only half the issue. Knowing what’s wrong is important, but having a specific plan to reach goals is just as important. A while back, I lamented that I lack discipline. That’s great, but if I don’t do anything about it, then I’ve accomplished nothing toward reaching my goals.

With all that in mind, here are some problem areas for me, and specific steps I’m performing to fix them.

• Discipline. As I said, this is a sore spot. In virtually every aspect of fitness, proper diet, and golf, I know what to do. I know how to get the job done. Working on discipline is the easiest, because it comes down to a simple choice. Am I going to eat fast food tonight? Am I going to be too lazy to line up an aim club at the driving range? Am I going to give up after a bad hole and call it a practice round? With each and every choice I make, I am striving to make what I feel are the best choices for achieving my goals. I know I don’t have all the answers, but too often I do and still make poor choices.
• Fear. Sometimes I fear failure. Also, while I’m not afraid to lose, sometimes I’m afraid of being a loser (if that makes sense). To deal with fear, I’m trying to evaluate everything that happens with a “so what?” attitude. Nothing I’m doing will ultimately have a negative effect on my life. So what if I don’t win a tournament, or play a bad round, or have atrocious stats, or top the ball in front of a bunch of strangers? In the end, these individual events won’t define success or failure for me. Part of the reason I stopped keeping stats as regularly was out of embarrassment because I felt like they were way worse than they should be. Why should that worry me? The problem is that the stats are where they should be. But I was worried about people’s perception of me. Why? I don’t know, but I’m getting over that.
• Pressure. In some aspects of my life, I deal with pressure well. At work, when there’s a crunch, I dig inside myself and excel. On the golf course, I’m not so good in that area, especially since I’ve never really faced any real pressure. What I need to do to deal with the pressure is break down each and every shot into a single, atomic action. It’s one shot. I need to form a plan, go through my routine, absolutely commit to the plan, and execute. I can’t worry about the big picture.

In addition to addressing those specific problems, there are some things I’m doing to improve every area of my life.

• Evaluate every action. I try to evaluate each and every thing I do to determine if I’m doing what I can to meet my goals. Whether it’s a decision to watch TV, a decision to eat something, a decision to stay up late, a decision to read a book, a decision to take a nap, I ask myself “how does this fit in with my goals?” If it doesn’t or if I feel a little twinge of guilt, I then have to decide, “is it worth it?” Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. The point isn’t to make sure every single detail of your life fits in with your goals, the point is to be sure that you’re making a conscious decision about every detail in your life.
• Do something each day. One of my main short-term goals is to do something every single day to further my overall goals. That doesn’t have to mean a round of golf or a driving range session. It can mean reading a book or doing some stretching, or making good eating choices or uncovering another truth about myself.
• Write a blog post each day. I really make an effort to make a post every day. I’ve probably missed 4 or 5 days in the last couple of months. On the surface, you might think, “how does that really help?” Well, in two ways. First, when I write technical articles, I go through a process where I lay out what I know. Then I do research to fill in the blanks and to fact-check myself. This is an amazing source of learning for me. While I might have 80 or 90% of an article coming out of my brain, there are still little details that I’ve forgotten or never knew in the first place. That fills in the gaps for me. Secondly, writing these posts is where I discover probably half of the shortcomings I’ve found out about myself. When I write an article saying that you should do this or that, sometimes I’ll think, “wait a second…” and realize that I need to improve in that area.
• Put time frames on goals wherever possible. HappyRock pointed out to me that when we don’t put time frames on goals, we give ourselves an out. When we give ourselves an out, we generally will take advantage of it and don’t attend to those goals in a timely fashion. Before we know it, years have passed and we’re still not able to reach specific goals.
• Gain knowledge. Practice on the range only takes a person so far. I feel that I need to absorb all the golf knowledge I can get my hands on. This includes reading books, talking to people, experimentation. I need to understand everything there is to understand about the game. I also need to absorb information about fitness, diet, etc.
• Develop confidence. My confidence is generally good when I’m in a comfort zone. Most people can say the same. The problem comes when I’m not hitting the ball well or when I’m faced with some adversity. When I get out of my comfort zone, I lose confidence and it affects what I’m trying accomplish. To gain more confidence, I need to make sure I’m properly prepared for the task at hand. If I never practice hitting a ball from a plugged lie in a bunker, how can I expect to be confident as I prepare for the shot on the course? Dealing with the items mentioned above (fear, pressure, discipline) will also help breed confidence.

Finally, in addition to those more general changes, I’m going to achieve the following specific goals in the time frames listed.

• Update my to-do list to include due dates where applicable. (June 18, 2007)
• Develop a detailed fitness plan. (July 1, 2007)
• Develop a detailed diet plan. (July 1, 2007)
• Develop a detailed practice plan. (July 1, 2007)
• On the first tee of every round, declare whether the round is going to be practice or for a score, then stick to it. This includes regular stat-keeping again. (Immediate)

That’s pretty much it. Once again, I’m lain bare before you. That’s OK, though. It’s what I need to do.

Maybe you can apply some of these things to your own goals and we can attack them at the same time.