A couple of days ago, I mentioned an episode of Playing Lessons from the Pros on The Golf Channel. In general, I think this program is of great value for most golfers. These thoughts are kind of feeding from my previous post about discipline.

I’ve watched this show for a long time, and it has always impressed me. For those who have never seen it, the basic premise is simple: we get to spend half an hour on the course with a player from the PGA, Champions, LPGA, or Nationwide tours. Some current players, some former players. Many of the all time greats have been featured.

Over the course of the program, they play a round of golf surrounded by cameramen. They talk about all kinds of things like preparation, course management, recovery, shot techniques. Basically anything and everything about the game of golf.

The reason I’m so high on this show is that we get to do something that most people never get to experience. We get inside the mind of a professional golfer of the highest caliber.

While I always enjoy the little swing tips, I think the most value comes from seeing how a pro manages the course and how he/she mentally prepares for and plays a round of golf. We get a look at their confidence, positive attitude, and mental focus. We get a look at how the course is played. How shots are planned out and executed. How mistakes happen and how they recover. How they plan shots to minimize negative outcomes while giving the best chance for a positive outcome.

Getting inside the head of a pro can really show the rest of us where we lack. Even if we don’t have textbook swings, we are most certainly giving up some strokes to our (lack of) mental game. Regardless of skill level, the mental game is something that can be worked on.

Check out the show and you’ll see what I mean.

To be successful in my journey, I need to be able to do more than hit a driver 300 yards or be a decent lag putter. I need to mentally groom myself for success. That includes every facet of my life.

Recently, I was talking to my friend, The Happy Rock about goals. He remarked that my to-do list should really have some time frames attached. Goals without target dates can be dangerous because they leave us an out. We tend to put things off and not maximize our time because we don’t have deadlines staring us in the face. Pretty soon time passes and we’re still at square one.

I’ve said in the past that I’m not putting a deadline on my overall goals, but there’s no reason that I can’t come up with some target dates for the individual steps.

I thought about it for a while and started to think about the things I’m doing to accomplish my goals and I came to the conclusion that I have a discipline problem.

It’s not that I’m not putting effort in to meet my goals. I’m doing that. Rarely a day goes by where I’m not hitting range balls or exercising or trying to eat right or stretching or reading. The problem is that I’m going about those things in an undisciplined manner.

Here’s an example: Wednesday I took a vacation day and headed out to the course around 10:30 to play nine before running some errands. My plan was to play a serious round to finally get some scores in, so you guys don’t think I’m messing around here. Well, on the first hole I had a terrible tee shot. My second shot was perfectly executed, but poorly planned and left me in some hideous rough. After hacking out of that and finally getting on the green, a three putt left me with a terrible score. As each successive shot piled up, I started to get more and more lax in my effort.

At that point, I thought, “well, my score is blown so I’ll just practice.” That was a horrendous display of quitting if I ever saw one. What am I going to do when I hit a bad shot under pressure? Withdraw? Yet, here I am training my mind that if I start to blow it, I’ll just call it a practice round. That stops now. Planned practice rounds are fine, but there’s no excuse for what I did. It’s not even an issue of keeping it fun. I’m never at risk of not having fun on the course, no matter how bad I’m playing.

Another example: since I’ve reworked my fitness routine, I’ve been very enthused about it. Granted, I’d like to make it more of a rigid schedule, but I’m OK with fitting it in between range time and rounds, so it’s not like I’m not exercising. I have a series of exercises that I’ve gathered from various sources. I use things like dumbbells, a medicine ball, an exercise ball, a foam roller, etc. I’m targeting my weak spots and am really starting to feel good.

The problem comes as I start to do some of the exercises. I find that when an exercise is difficult, I start to think, “I’ll work up to that” and just breeze through with hardly any effort. Or with other ones, I start to do it and I think “Man, that feels great!” and breeze through it so I can move on. One time, I had done that and caught myself: I only did three reps. Three. Essentially I accomplished nothing.

My practice is another problem. Especially when I’m hitting the ball well. I catch myself starting to forget about keeping a strict routine and going through the formalities like using an aim club and and taking enough time to visualize and think about the next shot. What’s happening is that I’m making great strides on the range, but I’m not building the mental confidence to do it on the golf course. I’m not correctly grooving techniques that should become automatic on the course. Sometimes I catch myself not doing the things I share here with you. I get angry with myself because I feel like here I am sitting here telling you that certain things are good practices and I catch myself not doing them.

Fortunately, half the battle is identifying the problem. How am I going to fix it? Basically, if I’m totally honest with myself, I know what I’m doing wrong. It took some guidance from a friend and some real thought, but I think I’ve woken myself up.

I’m going to make it a point to bring more discipline to my life in the following ways:

• If I’m playing a round to score, then I’m going to give the proper attention to every single shot, whether I’m one-under or 20-over. No more slouching, and no more quitting on a shot or on a round.
• When I exercise, I’m going to assign a number of sets/reps or a time to every exercise and I’m going to perform it to completion, every time. No more short cuts.
• When I practice, I’m going to be more careful that I’m accomplishing what I need to accomplish to take my range-game out to the course. I’ll be certain that I’m using an aim club, going through a proper routine, visualizing shots correctly, and the like.
• In general, I’m going to try to stop cutting corners and taking the easy path in life when that’s not going to give me the most benefit.

In reality, I could probably continue what I’m doing and improve a great deal. I’d get back to where I was and then some. But at some point, I’ll start hitting a wall. As you compare golfers of higher and higher skill, they are separated less and less by physical abilities and skills as they are by mental discipline and proper preparation. If I ever want to get anywhere, I must improve in these areas.

As I tuned into the final round of the Memorial tournament on Sunday, I noticed something as I watched the commercials in between play: the scientific engineer buzzwords and acronyms are becoming more and more mainstream. In one commercial, they actually explicitly called out the club’s M.O.I. How many people even know what that is?

I thought I’d lay out a couple of the technical buzzwords so when you tune in, it’ll be familiar territory.

MOI, or Moment of Inertia is a fancy way of describing how a club torques or twists both in the downswing and at the moment of impact. The club head is affixed to the shaft at a single point. The MOI is really a measure of how the club resists torquing. If you hold your driver by the grip in one hand and grab the head in the other hand and give it a twist, you’ll notice that the head turns a little. At the moment of impact, the force on the club is tremendous.

The center of gravity of the club helps to define the sweet spot, or the spot where there is little or no twisting force applied to the club at impact. Off-center hits cause that twisting action that robs distance and affects direction. Companies expend a lot of research and development effort reducing the twisting effect that results from off center hits.

COR, also known as Coefficient of Restitution was in the news several years back as the manufacturers were on a mission to make drivers hotter and hotter. It’s nothing more than the measure of the energy preserved when two objects collide. Perfect energy transfer would be a COR of 1.0. It’s easy to see why this is an issue. As club makers were finding ways to get this closer to 1.0, distance off the tee was increasing. If you consider two drivers, identical in all ways except COR, the driver with the higher COR will drive the ball further when both are swung exactly the same. To stop this trend, the USGA stepped in and mandated a maximum COR of .83.

Those are a couple to get you started. If you want more info about MOI or COR, or information about other technical club specifications and concepts, check out this golf club FAQ over at About.com.

I saw an episode of Playing Lessons from the Pros featuring Bruce Fleisher on The Golf Channel recently, and he talked about a fun thing he does during practice rounds to make it interesting and competitive.

What he does is, on an approach shot, he’ll intentionally miss a green to a certain spot. This allows him to put himself in different random up and down situations, even when he’s playing well. If he’s playing well and not missing too many greens, then his short game isn’t getting worked too much. This is a way to do that.

On top of that, if he’s playing practice rounds with others, they can make a game of it: calling their miss and trying to get up and down. It would be easy to devise a point system where a player is docked a point for missing his miss and hitting the green.  That would keep it interesting.

I like this little game for several reasons:

• It’s a fun way to make practice interesting.
• It’s a good way to have a competition with your playing partners that has a different flair to it.
• When you’re hitting the ball well, it gives you a chance to work your short game. It might be great to hit 15 greens in regulation in a practice round, but that also means your short game and recovery skills aren’t getting much work.
• It’s a way to sharpen your target awareness. At first thought, you might think it’s dangerous to train yourself to miss greens, but I disagree. Every shot in golf is to a target of some kind. It doesn’t matter if your target happens to contain a fiberglass pole with a piece of rectangular nylon fabric at the top, or if it’s somewhere else. If you’ve got good target awareness and are pulling off the shots you want to hit, then it’s a positive.

I don’t know that I’d do this for every practice round, but I bet it can be a lot of fun. I’m going to give it a try. Try it yourself and let me know what you think.

You may have wondered: where do the Rules of Golf come from? Who has the authority to shape the game of golf?

There are two primary organizations that are charged with maintaining the Rules of Golf: The United States Golf Association (USGA) and The Royal & Ancient Golf Club (R&A), St. Andrews, Scotland. The USGA governs golf in the United States, it’s territories, and Mexico. The R&A governs golf pretty much everywhere else.

Since 1952, the USGA and R&A have come together periodically (currently every four years) to jointly issue the Rules of Golf. The two bodies review, refine, and clarify the rules. No change is made without acceptance from both bodies. This allows for uniformity in the rules all over the world.

It might seem like there wouldn’t be a whole lot to do with less than 40 rules on the books. On the contrary. There are hundreds of decisions on the rules. Situations arise on the course all the time that stress the wording and intent of the rules, so the governing bodies release decisions to guide players through unusual situations.

Also, as technology changes, the governing bodies have to address things like maximum club head size and other things that affect how the game is played. One of the more recent examples of this was the allowance of the establishment of a local rule permitting artificial distance measuring devices. It also seems likely that the ball may get some attention in the future. As driving distances continue to increase, there is a big push to start limiting ball characteristics to keep that trend in check.