I had this young man once I was working with who had this horrible temper
and was always throwing clubs, and so we worked really really hard on teaching
him some meditation skills, getting the parasympathetic nervous system a little bit more activated.
And he said, well, what do I do when I get angry
on the golf course? And I said, well, I'd rather you focus
on being calm on the golf course and just make a deal with yourself.
If you decide you want to throw a club when you're done with your round,
go out to the range and throw as many clubs as you want and
you'll just feel better. You say, I'll take care of this when I'm
on the range after the round, And he said, but I won't want
to do it then, And I was like, and your point, that
doesn't remind me of the chapter I have in zen Golf called the Angry Guy.
Yeah, and the zen master says, what do I do about my
temper? And the zen Master says, show me your temper If I'm not
mad right now, he said, well, then if you can't produce it,
then you're not an angry person. You just have a habit of getting
angry. Yes, and it's a matter of changing the habit. Hi right.
This is James Wilson from Richmond, Missouri, and I play at the
Shirkey Golf Club. This is Golf Smarter number nine zero five, The Grandson
and the Zen Doctor. The introduction of doctor Bob Jones, the fourth to
Doctor Joe Parron. This is Golf Smarter, sharing stories, tips and insights
from great golf minds to help you lower your score and raise your golf IQ.
Here's your host, Fred Green. Welcome back to the Golf Smarter Podcast,
Doctor Joe. Nice to be with you. Fred. It's this is
gonna be a fun one. I am so excited that you're here because I
also get to say welcome back to the Golf Smarter Podcast, Doctor Bob.
It's great to be with you, Fred. And now here you are with
a paradox not oh god. I was like, wait, oh, it
is a pair of docks. That's pretty good. This is what we're going
to be doing. Said, well, you know the thing that we get
accused of, daddy humor, Right, Daddy humor is nothing more than wordplay.
I think it's very clever. Let our kids roll their eyes, but
daddy humor is very clever, and you just proved it. I am working
on a book, a book of dad riddles. Are you really an animated
animal? It's gonna be, and all the pictures are gonna be drawn by
your sister. No, I have another another illustrator, and it's like,
it's like, what kind of animal will help you get across a river?
It's a giraft see exactly. Okay, I'm gonna just move forward here.
So the reason I have the two of you together is because the last time
Doctor Bob was on, and that was just the week of the Maths,
he and I were talking after a recording and I had mentioned to him about
my trip to Japan. And I've said this story many times on the podcast.
My trip to Japan. We meditated with a Zen Buddhist monk for an
hour and during the Zen Buddhist conversation, somebody asked him about moving meditation and
he brought up the book Zen Golf by doctor Joe Parent. I'm like,
wait a minute. He called it the Zen of Golf, and I went
Zen Golf by Joe Parent because yes, that's the book in Japan and Japanese
is being interpreted. And I was like Oh my god. So I was
telling Bob this story and he's like, oh, I love that book.
I've always loved that book. And I'm like, wait, have you ever
met doctor Joe? And he's like, no, I haven't. I said,
would you like to? And you, guys, I introduced the two
of you and you seem to hit it off. So tell me about your
first conversation together, and you guys can take it from here. Well,
know, Fred, when you mentioned about my getting together with doctor Joe,
we set up. We set up what I think was supposed to have been,
what about a fifteen minute phone call on Sunday. Oh I hate when
this happens. Unfortunately, the rest of this story was lost. Doctor Bob
fell off the call, obviously, but to paraphrase, he was saying that
how much of a fan he was of all the Zen Golf books, including
one that he couldn't remember the name of the book but commented on its beautiful
artwork. So we're going to pick it up. We did get back on
the call, and we're going to pick it up here with doctor Joe responding
to what Bob said before we realized that he wasn't being recorded, and then
from here on out the rest of the conversations. Intact, sorry about the
glitch. Thank you. It's called Golf The Art of the Mental Game,
and it is It is illustrated with drawings by Ravielli, and on the back
cover is a picture of your grandfather's follow through because and it's that was the
chapter get to the finish, So we used his finish as the as the
illustration for that one hundred illustrations and one hundred one page chapters. You know,
it's a funny thing about about Ravillium. He did a lot of the
illustrations for my grandfather's books, particularly Bobby Jones on Golf, and then later
I believe in sixty six or sixty seven, my grandfather asked him to do
a book called Bobby Jones on the Basic Golf Swing, which was CPIA drawings
by Ravilli. He was, without question my grandfather's go to artists. But
you know, the thing that really I thought was really interesting about our conversation
Joe was how in our work with athletes, how much we are working on
getting to the same place but with a slightly different approach. I was really
quite captivated by that. When we spoke, I talked about that. When
I did the introduction to zen Golf, I said, you know, sports
psychologists are trying to get everybody to the same place, to have a focused
mind, to be more in the present, to have positive self talk,
and a lot of other things. And what I tried to do in zen
Goolf to separate myself was to talk about the path to get there. I
remember when ones of my players said he'd worked with another sports psychologist and the
guy said, I get it, I get it. I'm being way too
hard on myself. What should I do? And he said the guy leaned
in and said to him, don't be And he said, what am I
supposed to do with that? Just don't So I want to give a path
from hard to yourself, a pathway from there too. Don't be that that
you can take the steps and train and find the way to get from where
you are to where you want to be. Right. And it's funny you
mentioned that, because you know, one of the things that I always like
to tell the clients that I work with is that the brain does not know
how to do a negative. So if you tell them, if you tell
somebody, don't do something, well, actually, the very thing you have
to do is you have to conceptualize in your mind what it is that you
don't want to do before you don't do it. And the problem is that
just puts you in this feedback loop that is just awful. I think I
don't know that. I don't know that if I've ever told anybody to not
do something, what I often try to get them to do is to figure
out what is it that you want and then kind of go from there.
And I think I think the Zen approach or the approach you take Joe just
is so so good at helping people get kind of a thirty thousand foot view
of what's what all is going on? You know, as I said,
I kind of come at this slightly differently. I mean, like I had
this young man once I was working with who had this horrible temper and was
always throwing clubs, and so we worked really really hard on teaching him some
meditation skills, getting the parasympathetic nervous system a little bit more activated. And
he said, well, what do I do when I get angry on the
golf course? And I said, well, I'd rather you focus on being
calm on the golf course and just make a deal with yourself. If you
decide you want to throw a club when you're done with your round, go
out to the range and throw as many clubs as you want and you'll just
feel better. You say, I'll take care of this when I'm on the
range after the round, and he said, but I won't want to do
it then, And I was like, and your point, that doesn't remind
me of the chapter I have in zen Golf called the Angry Guy, and
yeah, the zen Masters. He says, what do I do about my
temper? And the zen Master says, well, show me, show me
your temper. He said, I'm not mad right now. He said,
well, then if you can't produce it, then you're not an angry guy.
You're not an angry person. You just have a habit of getting angry,
and it's a matter of changing changing the habit. You know, when
you said that, you told them to do it afterwards. I use a
technique using the locker room where if somebody's got a lot on their mind from
that's outside of golf, and they say, well, how I'm playing in
a tournament, how do I what do I do? And I actually actually
gave this to Christy Kerr and a number of other golfers. I said,
get a little tupperware container, a little little storage container with a lid,
and before you go out, take whatever thoughts you have in mind that you
don't want to be thinking on the golf course and say, I'm putting you
in this container. Wait for me. You're not going to help me when
I'm on the golf course and I can't do anything about you when I'm on
the golf course. I promise I'll take care of you when I get done,
and you wait for me in the locker room and put the lid on
and put it in the locker or in your car if you don't have a
locker. And then if the thought shows up on the golf course to say
what are you doing here? I told you stay in the container. I
promise I'll take care of you. You're not going to help me out here,
and I can't do anything about you out here. I promise I'll take
care of you when I'm done. And then let it go, so it's
a it's an after the round promise that your your your suggestion reminded me of
well and Joe, I plan on stealing that without attribution, so that is
now in my Repertolcker. That's why I brought you guys together in the first
place. It's because I knew that you'd have a lot to share. This
was what our conversation was like, back and forth like this. So I
don't remember if I shared this with you, Bob. When I was working
on Zen golf and Zen putting, and I quoted your your grandfather from those
books that you mentioned, and I wanted to share a couple of them with
you. One is in a chapter called what is Your Target? And I'll
just read this little passage. The Great Champion Bobby Jones consider, Oh,
when our intention is to avoid embarrassment or protect against making mistakes, we make
what we think is a careful swing and try to guide the shot where we
wanted to go. This prevents us from making a free, full swing and
usually produces a poor shot. The Great Champion Bobby Jones considered this his most
serious weakness. He found that when he was comfortably ahead in a tournament,
he began to fear the embarrassment of not holding his lead. He would try
to control his swing to avoid making a mistake. Instead of picking a target,
he focused on avoiding hazards. He felt that he would have won far
more tournaments and finished more easily the ones he did when had he focused on
his targets as much when leading as when chasing m So that yeah, really,
and you can, I mean, you can see that any any tournament
that you that you watch, the other one is called beware of trying for
a few extra yards, And that comes right out of his quote. Bobby
Jones said, trying for a few extra yards at the last moment is the
cause of most of the mistakes that happened on the tea. Could well,
it's kind of it's kind of hard to disagree with a guy that won something
like that, either finished first or second in eighty percent of the tournaments that
he entered between nineteen twenty three and nineteen thirty. So, you know,
and it's funny you brought that up on that first point as we're recording this.
Just last weekend was the hundredth anniversary of my grandfather's first victory in the
United States Open, which was contested at Inwood Country Club outside of outside of
New York City, outside of Manhattan, and in that tournament, he finished
the last three holes bogey bogeye double bogie. Actually sees me bogee double bogie
bogie and blew the lead and tied Bobby Crookshank. And when people were still
congratulating him on winning the championship, he said, no, no, no,
I finished like a yellow dog. And the next day, in the
playoff, rather than guiding the shot, as you mentioned, he came to
the eighteenth hole and he put it into the right ruff. He had about
one hundred and ninety yards to the green in about a fifteen mile an hour
wind in his face. And he got over there and Crookshank had been in
the left ruff and had to lay up, and he's looking at this shot
in the right ruff and he's on hard pan. And the people who witnessed
it said he wasted no time, reached into his bag, got a two
iron, and just hit a tremendous shot, knocking at six feet from the
hole and winning his first open. And I find that really fascinating because in
that final round he finished terribly because he was trying to do he was trying
to protect something rather than continue to build it. And then in the playoff
when he had the opportunity, he acted quickly and decisively and hit a career
shot, which had he not made the shot, probably would have been the
end of his competitive career. So yeah, very very timely. So that
that's exactly That's exactly it. And I was thinking about that. Another quote
from him that I use, um called in telling people to focus on their
personal part to readjust party to their to their handicap and so um he's Bobby
Jones said he started winning his matches when he stopped playing against the other guy
and started playing against old man par correct. I vary that just a little
bit, Joe, And I'll tell you what I do. I always have
people play against their average score because a personal par is actually going to be
based if they base it off their handicap will be based at like ninety or
ninety five percent of the differentials of the best ten of twenty. So I
need to tell people, I said, take what your average score is and
set that as your target. I love it people, just it just makes
people really relax a lot more. Yeah, I've had this conversation recently talking
about how the handicap is really represents your potential, not what kind of golfer
you are. I mean, you've had some good rounds and it's going to
look at that, but when it comes to the gambling part, taking your
potential, it makes it a different beast. All right, we're going to
take a time out. We're gonna pick this up right after this, all
right, Joe, So what you know the personal par thing? I always
thought I made that up, but no, I was obviously quoting you.
But personal par Just play to that and stop beating yourself up because par is
fascist. But what well? I liked it. I liked what Bob said
about the handicap. And when people are frustrated about not playing to their handicap,
I explained to them that the way that it's set up is that because
it's a percentage of your lowest of the average of your lowest ten differentials,
so you even throw out your high scores on some of the holes, you're
only going to do that one out of four or five rounds. So I
say, you know, if I told you about this sport that I want
you to try, it costs a lot of money, it takes a lot
of time, and you're only going to enjoy it one out of every four
or five times you do it. Are you interested? They said, I
wouldn't do that, I said, but that's why. But if you if
you're measuring a good or an enjoyable round based on your handicap, so let
that go. And I do have people actually change their scorecard and if you
if your average score is ninety, then you don't have any part threes on
your scorecard. There are four is, fives and sixes, and for some
people with higher handicaps there you get a par seven on those. I had
one student and he had an okay drive and then kind of a mediocre second
shot and kind of topped his third one, and they said, oh,
that's too bad, you didn't get to the greener regulation. He said,
no, I have two more shots to get to the greener regulation. This
is a par seven for me. And he was just having the best time
compared to the usual beating himself up when he doesn't match the score of a
scratch golfer. Wonderful story. So as we are recording this, today is
day two of the twenty twenty three Open Championship at Royal Liverpool and yesterday,
at the end of round one, tied for the lead was an amateur from
South Africa, Christo Lamprecht, who was at minus five and ended up being
tied with Tommy Fleetwood for the round that day. He I've just looked up
during our last break. I just looked up. He's just finished his second
round and is at plus three. He dropped to tied for sixty eighth and
is on the cut line. Plus three is the cut line, so he
might make it. But it made me question and look up. When was
the last time an amateur won the Open Championship And it happened to be at
the same golf course, Royal Liverpool, nineteen thirty Bob, your grandfather,
Yep, that's correct. It was the second leg of the Grand Slam.
So please, that's right. To carry on from here, tell us history
stories. We've talked about the Masters. He talked about your grandfather the Masters.
Now to talk about the Open Championship. Well, you know, my
grand father's history in the Open, I think is a tremendous psychological study.
He won it three times and played in it four times. First time he
played in it, he was nineteen years old. It was nineteen twenty one
and it was at the Old Course in Saint Andrew's and after starting out reasonably
well in the first two rounds, he was convinced he had Saint Andrew's by
the tail. And then the wind changed off the North Sea, and he
went out and shot forty six on the front nine, double bogee number ten,
and then on number eleven hit it in the bunker, and four shots
later was still in the bunker. And at that point he put his ball
in his pocket and withdrew from the tournament. He continued to play in and
what he discovered was had he finished out the tournament, he would have tied
for third, even with a six on the eleventh hole. But he learned
from that, and so when he came back. When he came back,
he came back and wanted at Litham where a Litham and Saint Anne's in nineteen
twenty six, And I find it funny he went to lunch between the third
and fourth rounds. Back then they played both rounds on the last day,
and when he came back to the course to go in, he had forgotten
his contestants badge and he had to pay five pounds or two pounds to get
back into the golf course to go play his final round. Now, I
suspect that what happened was that the person at the gate knew exactly who he
was, but remembered nineteen twenty one and was going to just extract a pound
to flesh out of him before he got back in. But he won in
twenty six and then came back. Normally he would only go over when the
Walker Cup would be overseas because of the cost of playing and when he went
back over, and he went back over at his own expense in twenty seven
to win at Saint Andrew's, and by then all was forgiven, and the
San Andreans lifted him up on their shoulders to carry him off after he won
in the seventy second hole. By the time he came to Hoylake, it
was pretty much a foregone conclusion that he was probably going to take that tournament.
He had won the Amateur just weeks before at i think three weeks before
at Saint Andrew's, and so when he got the victory at Hoylake and he
returned back to New York, he received his second ticker tape parade, which
prompted Mayor Jimmy Walker to introduce him, as he said, never could it
be foreseen that this would bring together two total polar opposites, namely that the
world's greatest golfer would be introduced by the world's worst golfer. And that's that.
That was sort of the story of his British opens. He only got
back to Saint Andrew's again in nineteen thirty six, and that was when he
was on the way to the Olympics in Berlin, and he a round of
golf there, And when he showed up on the first tea, thinking it
was just going to be this anonymous game, there were like two hundred people
waiting on the first tea. By the time he got to the far end
of the golf course, all the shopkeepers had put signs in their windows that
said closed. Bobby's back, and the entire town finished the round with him.
He said he'd never he hadn't played around, like he hadn't played golf
in weeks. He shot thirty two going out and forty coming back for even
par seventy two. But you know, the emotion of that was such that
he was never really able to talk about it. He was never really able
to talk about it again. He said, the love that he felt from
that city, and I remember when I was first there in two thousand and
two thousand and two for his centennial of his birth. And I went to
a bookstore and I just had We were just talking and I picked out a
an old golf book that I'd always wanted, and the lady was saw my
credit card and she said, my gosh, you're Robert T. Jones the
fourth or you related to Bobby, And I said, this is my grandfather.
Somebody later said to me, they said, well, gosh, did
they give you the book for free? I said, no, she was
a Scott. Of course she took my money. Are you kidding me?
But it's a it's a it's a it's an amazing Um, it's an amazing
legacy that he still has um this many years and that far away. That's
remarkable. M. Yeah, that's truly remarkable. And um, so how
much of your vast historical knowledge is based on your research and how much of
it is family lore they is passed around from person to person. I'd say
about seventy thirty, okay, um, And the and the percentage of family
lure drops as time goes on, because what I'm finding out is that many
of the myths that are ascribed to my grandfather are just that they are myths,
and I think that when we focus on that myth us, we really
lose sight of who the man really was and what it was that he accomplished.
And you know, in a sense, that does two things. At
least, this is my thought. It deprives us of seeing who this man
really was. And the second thing it does is it kind of lets us
off the hook from doing what we can to be heroes in those areas of
life in which we find ourselves. And I think sometimes we like our heroes
to be four feet off the ground because then we have no responsibilities at least
to try to equal that. And I think that's I think that's an unfortunate
but necessary human tendency. So, oh, that was really well said.
I think that that's that's a great it's a great insight about how we are
and how we regard our heroes, um, you know, and and putting
them the word They came to my mind when you said four feet off the
ground was pedestal, and that's exactly it, and and that I really like
your insight about that. It separates us from taking responsibility. Now, the
interesting thing is, um, what some people do is they mistake emulate for
uh for and try to imitate, and so to try to imitate is really
an expression of false confidence. But to try to emulate is to try to
move from what I call conditional confidence to unconditional confidence and not get caught in
false confidence. So I think that that's a really something, really really profound
and helpful that you pointed out. Fred, Do you mind if I do
the interview for one second? No, not at all, You can't,
Joe, could you could you flesh that out just a little bit more?
That just I was so kind of taken by what you said that I just
I felt like there was even more to it. But I will be the
traffic cop and I will say we'll be back right after this, and Joe,
you can answer right after this. All right, Joe, I'm sorry
to interrupt. Let's get now, let's go to your answer. Well,
I think everybody knows and it's pretty clear what false confidence is, and that
absolutely doesn't hold up, and it's it becomes the you know, the emperor
without clothes. So the difference that you were talking about is between conditional and
unconditional confidence, and conditional confidence is believing in what you can do if you've
been successful recently, you know, and so well, I've been playing well
and I feel confident, but as soon as I have a bad hole,
I lose all my confidence. Well, if you lose it, then that
means it was conditional. It was confidence conditional on playing well, and as
soon as you stop playing well, you lose it. So that really is
sets you up for failure in a certain way. Unconditional confidence is that you
believe in yourself regardless of recent performances. So you hear players say you know
that, well, you know, I haven't made the cut the last two
tournaments, but I'm I'm really close. I'm really close. And they have
unconditional confidence in their ability to find their game again and come back to it.
And I actually even separate. Even have two aspects to unconditional confidence.
One is relative unconditional confidence, which is unconditional confidence in your abilities in a
certain field. Absolute unconditional confidence is believing in yourself no matter what it is
that you're doing. That doesn't mean that you can suddenly be an expert in
some other field, but that you believe in yourself in whatever you're engaged in,
and you have confidence that you will handle yourself the best you possibly can
in that situation. That's wow. Yeah. Well it's interesting because just tomorrow
as we're recording this, the Steph Curry documentary is coming out called Underrated,
And one of the things that he talked about, and here's somebody who's succeeded
just recently in golf, but has succeeded beyond all measure in the NBA,
and he talked about his supreme self confidence, the amount of confidence he has
in hisself knowing that he can achieve these things. He's talked about that openly.
So you know, it doesn't matter if he didn't have a good shooting
day one day the next, you know, and if he's not playing,
if he's not hitting his shots, he starts being the best assist person,
the best passer, and so finding a way to get the most out of
whatever you brought that day. And that's what I want golfers to do as
well. You know, sometimes you might be struggling a little with the driver,
so put the ball in play, which, by the way, if
we're talking about history, he was what they called the play the club you
used on the tea in the old days in golf, they didn't call it
a driver. They called it the play club because its job was to put
the ball in play and then find your way to get around the golf course.
And I want to make sure that we fit. In one story I
was on, I was at the pro am that's out in Lakinta in Palm
Desert, in that area. I don't remember the name that it's called now,
but I was working with Tim Petrovic, who was a winner on the
PGA Tour and now contends regularly on the Champions Tour. And he's a kind
of a history buff where he's getting ready for his round and we're on the
putting green. He says, what do you got for me? And he
was playing well, he just said what do you got for me? And
I I channeled your grandfather, a channel Bobby Jones, and I said,
well, I know your history book, because because Tim would like to say,
well, there's golf, and there's tournament, golf, Tuna, M
I nt tournament tournament, which is George and for tournament. And so I
said, well, I know you're a big fan of Bobby Jones, so
let me give you two of his putting advices. In putting one, he
said, taking more than ten seconds to read a putt is a waste of
time, and the other is borrow as much as you can, meaning play
as much break as you can, because as soon as the ball rolls below
that hole below, it just keeps going further and further from that precious cup.
And I remember that. So I watched. Now he was playing with
amateurs, so he got to see a lot and got some time to just
walk around the green. But when it came to time for his putt,
he stood behind it and lean back and said, yeah, I think I
got it. Walked up boom, twenty one puts, no chip, twenty
one puts for the round. Yeah. You know, I had an experience
personally similar to that. I used to be one of those that I would
take, especially on short shots. I would take practice stroke after practice stroke
after practice stroke. I was one of these guys. I mean it was
it was painful to watch. And I had this one little chip shot at
a golf course one time and I just thought, well, I'm going to
make sure I just get this just right. And I think I took like
six practice strokes and then I proceeded to jam it like three three inches fat
move the ball about an inch and a half and I thought I could have
just done that, just walking up to it and hitting it. So that's
what I decided to do. And do you know for the entire rest of
the day, where whenever I was just around the green, I would just
get up and hit it. I don't think I had any shot where I
missed a green where on a chip shot I wasn't like a foot and a
half from the hole. You know, you can get to a point,
or at least I can, and several of the folks I've worked with overtime
I have discovered this. You can get to a point where you overthink your
body's ability to really do something. And nowhere is that more obvious than when
you're on the green or around a green. That whole thing about ten seconds
is so right, because how many times have as any golfer on the planet
stood over a put and stood behind it and looked at it. And the
longer you take, the more you will see breaks that aren't even there.
They just aren't there, absolutely. And you know, I've actually been able
to tell my players. I said, I could tell um, based on
how long you took over the ball, how well the shot was going to
come out. And it's a pretty high correlation. So I wouldn't say this
with my students, but I say when I'm playing with my friends, when
they missed one like that, I said, you could have hit that bad
a shot in a lot less time, and I get a dirty look.
But I can't help on those. But I have a special technique for around
the greens that I developed in a similar way. I was just playing myself
on a course and I had about forty yards in and I made my nice
little practice swings and proceeded to blade it over the green with the actual shot,
and I said, if I had just hit that with my practice swing,
it would have been fine. So I dropped another ball and I said,
I'm going to pretend that there's no ball here, and I'm just going
to make a practice swing and put it to about three feet. I then
walked to the other side of the green where my ball was and it was
in a fluffy, downhill, tricky little lie to a downhill roll, and
I said, I'm going to do the same thing. And I did take
a couple of practice swings through that grass, and I said that's the one.
And then I walked up and I said, just one more practice swing
poomp rolled down to a foot. I said, okay, that's it.
So what I teach my golfers is find a patch of grass that's similar to
the lie that your ball is in, make a swing as if there is
a ball there, and hold your finish until you get to the one where
you say, ah, that's the one. Then walk up, then address
the ball. Now, pretend the ball is not there and it's invisible,
and just say one more, just like that through the grass. And you
can even say one more practice swing through the grass. And if they do
it really well, they're surprised that a ball took off, but it comes
out so much softer and so much better. So you're practice sing as if
there is a ball there. You're real swing as if there isn't a ball
there. Oh my god. And how many times. And I know that
every person who's listening to this podcast is saying, oh my god, that's
happened to me. On the golf course where it's either me or someone I've
played with, they're just so frustrated. They're like, Okay, I quit
right, I just don't. I'm just going to finish this and I got
to get out of here, you know, I hate this game. I'm
never going to play again and then have the best hole of their life because
they just kind of let it all go, or they make a fifty foot
putt after three putting seven times that round happens every time. We're going to
take one more break. And this leads into a topic that I'm really excited
about bringing up to both of you, and we'll do that right after this.
This week on golf Smart to Mulligan's is the first of two conversations with
Jeff Mangum of the Putting Zone dot Com. In the first episode, we
talk about a wide variety of topics relevant to putting, including getting started for
adults and even getting your kids into putting. One thing kids want to do
is they want to have turns competing, So you got to set up some
sort of goal for them. One of my favorites is to perch a golf
ball on the edge of a cup and then back off fifteen twenty thirty feet
and say, okay, here's three golf balls. You got three chances to
bump that golf ball over into the hole. That does a couple of things
brain wise, but fundamentally, what it does is it gives a kid a
non rule based game to play. They really get into that. They go
ahead and take their turn, and maybe they get close and miss and you
say, okay, my turn, and you push them out of the way
and you take your three balls and the second one you bump it over in
the hole and you laugh at them and say I got mine, and they'll
push you out of the way and say okay, my turn again, and
so they'll put three balls down. Then they'll do better, and so you
get going that way. You just make the green a playground where kids are
not penalized for any kind of misses or anything. They just get turned after
turn after turn and they have all the fun they want. That's Golf Smarter
Mulligan's episode two hundred twenty one featuring Jeff Mangum of the Putting Zone dot Com
in an episode we call great Putting is a Science and a Skill. Next
week we'll get another full hour with Jeff in part two. Please subscribe for
free to both of our golf podcasts, Golf Smarter on Tuesday and our Sisters
show that revisits the best of the Golf Smarter podcast that's just no longer available
that we call Golf Smarter Mulligans and it's released every Friday. From wherever you're
listening right now, you know what Fred was talking about. I haven't I
put in the book, and that is people try more and more different things,
and try lots of different things, and again and again, and finally
about the sixteenth hole they say, I give up. I don't I don't
care anywhere, and they just get up and whack it and then they had
a good shot. And I student the other day said I just struggle to
the tournament with my setup and this, that and the other thing. And
I said, um, what'd you do on this around the seventeenth hold?
He said, well, actually I just gave up trying on all that stuff,
and I walked striped one down the middle. I said, And now
I was I there. I don't think so how did I know? Oh?
Yeah, I hate this game. I hate this game. I hate
the game. And then that last show, well I love this game.
I can't wait to come back again. Yeah, I guess I have to
come back tomorrow. Yeah. Well, what I think I told you this,
Bob when we were when we were talking when students they get very technical,
and you were talking about overthinking, which I agree completely. And you
start thinking thinking this technique and then you you you, you do that,
and something else goes wrong, so you add another one on, and then
you keep adding more on, and you keep adding more on, and I
call that more on golf. I like I played that. I'm very I'm
very I'm a low handicapper in that game. Let's be nice, Okay.
So recently I came across a video on TikTok or something and a woman who's
who's in the LPGA Tour and I think she's trying to break into the LPGA
Tour or maybe she's just getting started, but she's a young woman. And
she had this quote that it just jumped out to me, and I've been
thinking about a lot, and I'm so excited to have the two of you
to throw this out too. Here's what she said, and I wrote this.
I wrote it down, and I'm going to paraphrase in a sense that
some of it is not there anyway. She said, the hardest thing about
golf for me is that you have to practice like it is the most important
thing in the world, and you have to play like you don't care at
all. You have to practice every single day and put one hundred percent in.
And you can't do that unless you really really care. But when you
tee it up on Thursday, you have to swing free. How do you
do that when you really care? Gentlemen, Well, the first thing that
pops into my head is something that my grandfather wrote about, and the Joe's
book I think gets books get right to the heart of and that is that
tension is the number one killer of the golf swing. So I don't know,
Joe, you may see it differently, but I would have to respectfully
disagree with her because here's the thing. When you are practicing, what you
are really rehearsing, is you are rehearsing what it is that you want to
be able to do on the golf course. And if you are rehearsing tension,
if you are rehearsing something of that level of intensity, I don't know
how you then go and just switch that off and just say, now you
know, I've been spending three hours on the range working like just working like
a dog. And I mean no offense to my dog who's right here at
my feet, but working like a dog. And now I'm going to go
out there and just be absolutely relaxed. The human body and the human mind
just don't work that way. And now if what she's saying is simply going
out and putting in time at the range and putting in time making the changes
she needs to make, well that's one thing. But I can only go
by the words that people use, and those words are words that say to
me, I feel this pressure, this tension, doing this, and now
I have to find a way to magically shut it off. You have to
practice what it is that you want to do, and that works just as
much for mindset as it does for physical activity. Well, um, I
agree with you about tension. And what I heard was she wants to she
does a lot of trying. Yeah, and if all she's practicing is trying,
then she's going to carry that over and do a lot of trying on
the golf course. And we don't want to be doing that. We want
to be trusting on the golf course, you know. And it's like I
tell that, you know, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesdays when you work and
Thursdays when you start to play, so and golf, A lot of golfers
do the opposite, and they get grim and intense on Thursday. I was
with Fred Funk at a tournament and he's he's the happy, go lucky to
do, always smiling and cheerful. And I remember on Thursday morning he was
following there were two pros and they were walking onto the pudding green and there
was a young lady there who was holding a rope to keep the public from
walking on into the putting green. And she let the rope down for the
two pros. And as Fred walked up to where she pulled the rope up
and he said, what are you doing. I'm one of the pros.
He said, Oh, I didn't think you were a pro. You seemed
happy, So that's yeah, right, So that's that's the grim the grimace,
you know. So that's one thing. The other is I do have
a Chaptern's end. Golf called to care or not to care, And I
was working with an instructor in a short game school and he said, I
tell people go ahead and you know, swing like you don't care. But
when I get out there, I do care. How do how do I
move to not caring? And I said, in the dictionary there are two
definitions of the word to care. One is to take a sincere interest in
and the other is to worry about. And this is in the book.
And I said, to tell me the difference in how you feel when I
say these two sentences. I'll do it with you, Fred Fred I care
about you, Fred, I worry about you. So if you if you're
turning that towards yourself and your game, you say, yeah, I care
about what happened, So I put the work in, but I'm not gonna
worry about how it turns out because that creates tension that interferes with my swing.
M exactly. Wow, it's like in the middle of that as I'm
concerned about you. I mean when when you said it, Joe, I
care about you, I worry about you. Almost to me came across is
the same thing. Well, most people here, I care about you.
That's a positive concern. Yes, I worry about you. Is I'm worried
about what could go wrong? Right? Right? Okay? Yes, I
get I normally get the second one. That's so I actually have implemented.
I have implemented for my students. I have them rate their shots after each
shot on a worry scale. How much were you worried about how it was
going to turn out. And working with Christie, I give her credit for
this acronym she developed wa R worry about results. When I worry about results,
I'm at war with myself. Yeah, And so so I have people
rate the rate their shot. Okay, on that shot, how much were
you worried about how it was going to turn out? And how much did
you just trust it and go and go for it? And zero on the
worry scale, no hold back, that's the only negative I ever, no
holding back. I like that. And on the five is I was totally
All I thought about was how it was going to turn out, and I
just couldn't let myself swing. There's the difference. Yeah. And there's also
a little physical trick that you can do. That you can do and it's
been done. In fact, the person who does is most known for it
is Aria Jutana Gard and that is she will smile before she executes a shot,
and that does two purposes. One of the things a smile will do
is it will release these muscles right around the mouth, and if tension is
going to enter the body anywhere, it's going to enter right there. And
from there it spreads to the neck, which spreads to the shoulders, which
spreads then through and once your neck and shoulders are tense, you are done
in the golf swing. The other thing that the smile does is it releases
a little oxytocin in the brain, which is like a little happy chemical,
and your brain really likes those. It's really hard to be tense when you've
got your own body's natural narcotic running through your brain. Right now, I'm
not saying you go around gased all the time, but what I am saying
is just just something that's simple, just keeps you in a much better physical
and mental state. I told that to somebody, and I made the mistake
of telling it early on in our hour together, and they said to me
at the end of the person said, wait a minute, wait, await,
you just told me that in the first ten minutes. Why am I
paying you for a full hour? So I I just smiled, smile and
let the oxytocin through. It's actually a teaching given by Ticknatan, one of
the most famous pastors, and it is and it is a practice to spend
as much of the day remembering to smile. Oh yeah. Strangely enough,
my grandmother, my ninety nine year old grandmother knew that. Wow, it's
the same wisdom, just different words. Yes it is, Yes, it
is well put well, you know it's I want to thank both of you
because recently Golf Smarter was named by two different websites is the best mental game
podcast. And it's because I quote both of you on a regular basis,
and you know and have people like you, but more importantly have you on
here. And interestingly, one of the things that I've repeated so many times,
doctor Bob, is you said to me once you can watch a golf
tournament on TV, you knew he was going to miss a putt because you
saw the tension in his face, absolutely and absolutely, and that for me,
it's like I realize at that point how much tension I have in my
jaw on my swing, and so I regularly try to mind myself to just
lose attention, breathe through it. I mean, and doctor Joe. Just
the other day, I was playing with somebody's a good golfer, a single
digit handicap golfer. He had a bad hole and I could see what we
were standing on the green. He was waiting for a fifty foot put you
know, for bogey, and I just said, you know, doctor Joe,
parents had told me this once and I love repeating it, and that
is pull out your etch a sketch, flip it over, shake it,
erase it, and let it go. And luckily he knew what an etch
a sketch us, although I did see one in a toy store recently and
it said Nope, batteries necessary. That's right. I'm gonna borrow that one
too, Joe. Well, gentlemen, this has been an absolute joy for
me just because I know that I got to introduce you to because you've both
been important people in the last twenty years of my life, and I just
am so grateful that you guys connected and that we got to share some of
that energy here today. Thank you so much. Thank you, Fred,
Thanks Fred, Joe. It's been great to be with you. You two.
Let's stay in touch. Definitely. Oh so much to report because I
played twice over the weekend as my wife was out of town. Maybe I
should have checked my horoscope that day because Friday was one of those days that
strange things happened one right after another. Check this one out. After I
recorded this conversation that you just heard, which clearly had issues in the beginning.
I headed out to be cock Gap for a ninety minute practice session,
and after working out on the range and a lot in the bunker, followed
by chipping and pitching, I went over to the putting area and I discovered
that I didn't have any balls in my bag, even though I knew I
had isolated nine clean balls before I left the house. So I checked everywhere
in my new bag, you know, the one that I'm still getting familiar
with, and checked my car. No balls. So I went into the
pro shop and the director of golf, who I've known for years, said,
hey, we have a bit of used balls here, buck apiece,
go for it. Great, thank you. So I grabbed four balls pulled
out of twenty and the guy behind the counter just winked me and said,
don't worry about it, go ahead, thank you. Then I get up
to the first tea I was informed that I was playing with a young couple
sitting off to the side in a cart. I introduced myself and asked if
they were familiar with the chorus. She responded sheepishly with I'm new to golf.
Have you ever played here before? No, have you ever played eighteen
holes before? No boy, but our partners said he plays a couple of
times a year, but isn't very good. I suggested that they both play
from the front tees, but they decline to say they'll join us on the
white Okay, fine, And just before we started, a fourth guy pulls
up in a cart and introduces himself. So the husband teas off by popping
his driver straight up for about seventy to eighty yards total. Then she walks
up to the tea box and he starts giving her a lesson on how to
hit the ball. The fourth, who will call Frank and I kind of
look at each other and then back over to the starter, who runs down
to them and says, sorry, folks, if you want a lesson,
you've got to go to the driving range. There's a long line of people
we have waiting to go, and we really don't have time for that now,
so they left. Now it's just me and Frank in between a couple
of foursomes, but the group in front of us also as a beginner who
clearly wasn't familiar with the etiquette of pace of play. When we arrived at
the turn, the group in front of us was now almost two holes behind
the group. In front of them a twosome and the tenth holes of part
three, So we ask, hey, is it okay if we just play
ahead of you? And they agreed, thank you, But Frank hits his
ball into the bunker. Duff's one then hits out, but in the process
he reaggravated his bad back, and it was so bad that after the hole
he apologizes and has to go home because the pain is too much to continue.
So now I'm all alone, and I don't like to play alone,
but there's a twosome in front of me, and I joined them and finish
a pretty good round with no other bizarre events, although I didn't lose any
balls, so the balls that the guy gave me I went back to the
pro shop and said, thank you very much, you can have the back.
He was very impressed. Thank you, he says. Well. I
played again the next day, but this time the July weather here in northern
California was brutal, with temperatures in the high nineties for the entire round,
and I'm walking, but it wiped me out, so that after a decent
nine holes of being four over, I joined my buddy John in his cart
and rode the back nine. It was so hot and I was so drained
from the heat that all I could think about was staying hydrated, and then
included soaking my hat with water and soaking a towel with cold water as well.
I wrapped a towel around my neck, and between that and my hat,
I was able to say somewhat cooler, but it's still in the upper
nineties. The punchline of this is that I was so distracted from my game
due to the heat that I didn't spend a lot of time worrying about my
mechanics, only what I needed to do to get my ball to the next
spot, and ended up shooting even par on the back nine. That's only
the third time I've ever done that. Back nine also included one hole where
my drive went far off to the right of the unto the next fairway and
someone picked up my ball and left me a crappy old one, and my
partners were generous enough to give me a free drop there, and so I
hit my next shot to the green, but it flew the green and it
looked like it went out of bounds, so we looked for a while and
finally found the ball. I was able to chip up onto the green it
rolled past the hole. But then I had an eighteen footer that I sunk
for par okay. Now next week you're gonna hear more about my putting that
round because I discussed it at length with our guests. And once again,
we're going to have two incredible guests on this show, and this time it's
gonna be Carl Morris and Gary Nicholl, and they returned for the first time
as a pair on Golf Smarter. I've had them on individually and they teach
together, but this time I'll have them on together to talk about their new
digital version of the very popular book, The Lost Art of Putting. I
want to thank this week's Golf Smarter Ambassador, James Wilson of Richmond, Missouri,
who chose to receive Tony Manzoni's video of the Lost Fundamental as his gift
for being a Golf Smarter Ambassador. And I'd like you to be one of
our ambassadors too, and I'll give you a free gift for the effort.
As a matter of fact, I'll give you a choice from three different gifts.
Now to receive that gift, all you have to do is either write
a review of the podcast from wherever you subscribe, or just introduce a new
episode by sharing where you're from and where you play, like James did.
James chose Tony Manzoni's video of the Lost Fundamental. Other gifts include a box
of oden X one balls with the Golf Smarter logo, or a glove and
gloves storage compartment red Rooster goolf dot com. Now, I'm going to leave
a link in today's show notes and on the blog post so that you can
learn more about these two fabulous partners and their products. So if you're interested
and want something from us for free, send an email and I'll get back
to you with some instructions of what to do and what to say. Just
write to golf Smarter podcast at gmail dot com or do me a favor.
Click on the Hey Fred button when you visit goolfsmarter dot com