The Psychology of Golf in Championship Matches

Nerves and the Mental Attitude Are Strong Factors in Winning or Losing a National Championship

ROBERT T. JONES, JR.

EDITOR'S NOTE:—The following article, by the National Amateur and Open Champion is published by permission of the Bell Syndicate Inc.

SUCCESS, in any important golf championship, depends a great deal upon nerves and psychology.

In order fully to appreciate what one sees from the gallery at an important championship one must try to gain an idea of what is going on in the players' minds as they are compiling their varying scores. It is difficult to guess the players' nervous and emotional upheavals which, in every tournament, really determine the result of championships. How a successful golfer, with apparent command of every shot, can suddenly break from a stride of perfect golf into a gait that just keeps step with the ladies' bogey for the course, is a wholly inexplicable matter to the onlookers.

How, for example, can anyone who has not played in an open championship find a satisfactory explanation of what happened to me at Olympia Fields, or, still worse, to Roland Hancock in the same championship? I had scored 73-71-73 for the first three rounds and was leading the field by three strokes. Beginning the last round, I had made the first five holes in one stroke under par. The course at Olympia is difficult at the start and at the finish, but fairly simple in between. So, when I holed a birdie three on the fifth green I was in a particularly happy frame of mind, for I considered my troubles were over—or at least until the fourteenth hole. But, suddenly, everything which had been going so smoothly began to go quite the other way. A five on the par three sixth hole was followed, at the seventh, by a badly hooked drive which came to rest immediately behind an evil looking tree. I am sure no one in the crowd could to any extent appreciate my feelings as I looked at that ball. To those who had played enough golf to understand the possibilities of the situation it must have appeared that I had only a chip to safety, an iron to the green and two putts for a five. That, with the five on the preceding hole, would wipe out the lead which I had held at the beginning of the round; but, unless some other player became inspired, there was still no chance of my being worse than even with my closest pursuer.

BUT one loses all sense of proportion in these golf tournaments. For the moment the whole world seems to hold together only upon the hope of winning the championship. I saw, instead of the five which should have been quite attainable, all the terrible things which might happen to me. I felt as though the bottom had dropped out of everything and that there was no need to struggle on. As a result of that attitude of mind, my prospective five turned into a six and, at each of the next three holes I tossed away another stroke before I could recover any semblance of balance.

Senseless though it may be, this panic or despondency plays a most important part in tournament golf. No player ever collapses because he forgets—all of a sudden—how to use his clubs. Sometimes the untoward incident which kindles the fire is trivial enough, but, when aided by a vivid imagination, it quickly gains sufficient proportions to stampede the already overwrought nerves. To crack under the stress of such a situation is always humiliating.

So, any man who aspires to win a golf championship (when confronted by competition as keen as it is today) must look to it that he has the ability to play under heavy tension. There are few strains in sport so wearing as the three day grind of an open golf championship—it proved a four day event this year at Winged Foot—and he who would win one must make up his mind that he must take many jolts and suffer many bitter disappointments without losing his heart or his head.

ALL of which leads up to this: What is the ingredient that makes one man succeed in championships, where another, apparently as well equipped, must fail? Walter Hagen's tremendous competitive success has been generally attributed to an ability to remain perfectly relaxed in situations which rend the nerves of others. I believe that to be true in Hagen's case, but Hagen is a wholly unique player. In the first place he is a whole lot better shot maker than persons of the outside believe him to be. Some people would have you believe that he habitually plays all over the golf course, saving himself, in the end, by a brilliant recovery shot or a long putt. They have heard so much about this kind of thing that they think it is all that the man does. But any of the pros, or the amateurs who have played with him, will tell you a totally different story. They will tell you that there are few men who understand the golf stroke so well, or who can so exactly appraise the possibilities—and the dangers—of a particular shot. In other words he can not only play the shots but he can keep a marvelously level head while playing them. He is the kind of man who can play the game thoughtfully and carefully and at the same time play it with spirit. He can afford to be perfectly relaxed where others cannot.

But, Hagen to the contrary, by far the greater number of the competitors in a championship will be found to be nervous rather than phlegmatic individuals. The difference between those that succeed and those that fail is only in the manner in which their nervousness affects them. The question is, is it the nervousness which keys one up to the pitch of inspiration, or is it the shattering kind known as "buck ague"? In either case the man with the sounder swing, well-grooved by habit, has a tremendous advantage. If his nerves happen to key him up, his concentration improves to such an extent that he can play golf quite beyond what is apparently his ability. But the fellow with the fast backswing or other radically wrong idiosyncrasy had best look out, for his is a method which wants constant watching. For him there is always danger, when the nerves are tense, for a slight relaxation of vigilance may be all that is needed to precipitate disaster.

I have noted an odd thing about my own tournament game which has been particularly noticeable during the past several years. When I first began to play tournament golf it didn't bother me, for then I didn't think very much about how I played the various shots. In the manner of youth I simply hit the ball and hoped for the best. But, of late years, like so many other golfers, I have been continually tinkering with my game during the off season. Each week, or month, or year, I think I have discovered just why my irons or my pitches or my whatnots have been going so badly. And usually, in practice, I find that the new idea works fairly well. But in championships, as soon as the going becomes hard, and when I am a stroke or two behind, I forget my new found theories and go right back into my old and long tried method.

I seem unable to perform the new trick so well that it takes the place of the old habit.

When issues become important, there appears nothing so safe as a well tried horse.

A championship of any kind is about as uncertain a thing as any mortal event can be, but the most startling phase of tournament play is certainly the match play side of it.

A MEDAL play competition is not quite so bad, for there the few favorites are rarely upset by an outsider. But at match play anything can happen—and usually does. On hne particular day, for one particular round, there are dozens of men in any field capable of upsetting the best man in the lot. Once any good player is put "on the run" the chances are that he will not be able to recover before it is too late.

There is an old saying that the man two down with three to play always wins the match. That "always" is the only catch to the adage, for in many matches, the man who is three down with three to play also wins the match. Roland MacKenzie at Merion in 1924 (eight down with fourteen to play) was an historic figure when he overcame a lead of just that much against George Von Elm.

That contest has always stood out in my mind as a notable illustration of what can happen in a golf match. Von Elm, in that tournament, was playing the best golf he had shown up to that time and he started off as though he would eat MacKenzie alive. Roland was very young then and not as well known as he is today. So, when the match passed the twenty-second hole with Von Elm eight up, no one could be blamed for counting MacKenzie definitely out of it. But something happened about that time that built a fire under Roland and George came perilously close to being singed. Holes began to slip away from George a good bit faster than he had accumulated them and he was certainly a very worried young man when I joined the match going to the fourteenth hole.

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At that point Roland was only four down with five holes left. He was walking like a race horse and scarcely pausing in his stride when he played a shot. George was doing the best he could but it appeared that he was doomed to take an extra stroke on each hole. It didn't seem to matter what Roland did, he always holed out at least a stroke to the good.

The eighteenth hole was a fair sample of the match. George had contrived to halve one hole of the last four and so stand on the eighteenth tee one up. It is not hard to imagine how he felt after watching a lead of eight holes slip away from him. Roland drove first and he missed his drive almost completely, the ball barely scrambling across the quarry in front of the tee. George had a good drive down the centre of the fairway.

This left Roland in a fairly uncomfortable predicament. He was fully 300 yards from the green whereas George was no more than 150, and the hole, for Roland, had to be won. MacKenzie's second shot was, I think, the greatest effort I have ever seen. Played with a slight hook, the ball struck a slope twenty yards short of the green and rolled to the edge of the putting surface. Von Elm played onto the green. MacKenzie putted close and went down in four —and Von Elm took three putts. The match was square. That George Von Elm won the thirty-seventh hole after all that had happened to him was indeed remarkable. No one could have blamed him if he had lost it.

I have myself been "on the run" a good many times, and I can say quite frankly that there is no more uncomfortable feeling than that of seeing a big lead slip away, hole by hole. The horror of the thing is that it seems inevitable. You feel absolutely powerless to do anything about it. How helpful it would be, in golf, if one could call "time-out" as they do in football.

In 1926, George Von Elm beat me in the final of the amateur championship. The match ended on the thirtyfifth green and was fairly close all the way. There were many times when I had opportunities which I could not grasp—points which might have been considered as determining the match. But I have always looked upon that match as one which was mainly decided by the fact that, early in the game, through slack play, I surrendered a tremendous psychological advantage which I had undoubtedly held as we went to the first tee.

I had met George twice before in national championships and each time I had beaten him rather badly. As we greeted each other on the first tee at Baltusrol that day, I felt that Geonge was remembering the past two matches and that all I had to do was to get an early lead. On the first hole he was a bit shaky and I won it with a four. That was exactly what I wanted and I began to feel that I was going to see a repetition of our last two meetings.

The second hole at Baltusrol is not a hard hole. Indeed it is a very easy one. Yet I have never been able to doubt that it cost me that match. After good drives and two shaky pitch shots, we were left wuth George on the edge of the green and my ball just short of it. And it was then that I made a weak chip, stopping six or eight feet short of the hole, and that George made an almost equally bad putt, running four or five feet past the hole. But he holed his putt after I had missed mine and my hopes of a big lead early in the game received a rude shock. That hole could do nothing but encourage him. From that point on we were playing on even terms and his play proved a little the better of the two.

In a medal-play championship it is almost impossible to measure the force with which the consciousness of a good score weighs down upon the performer. The nearer he approaches his goal the harder each shot becomes until the meanest obstacles appear almost insurmountable. There is really less nervous strain involved in overcoming the effects of a bad start than in maintaining the standard set by a well made beginning.

That very mental pressure is responsible, more .than anything else, for the fact that the third round leader rarely finishes in front of an open championship field. The thing that presses him down is not the fear that he has "shot his bolt" as the saying is, for if the fourth round were a separate affair with everyone starting even, he could probably do as well as anyone. But the thought of the few strokes lead which he must protect makes him over-fearful and over-cautious. The man drawing up from the rear on the other hand, finds himself in an aggressive frame of mind with nothing to think about except playing golf. Very often he can play himself into a winning position before he has time to appreciate the import of what he is doing.

The shopworn admonition to forget the last shot and play the one in hand, was meant to apply as much to the good ones as to the bad. It is just as important to forget the threes as the sixes. I have never forgotten the comment made to me several years ago by a well-known professional. We had just heard, at the clubhouse, that Walter Hagen had run into a phenomenal string of sub-par holes. "You know, Bobby," said the pro, "the greatest thing about Hagen is that after he makes a few birdies, he thinks he can keep on doing it, while you and I begin to wonder if it isn't too good to be true. We begin to be suspicious and expect a six or a seven to jump out at us any minute."

One may say that it is easy to understand why there should be a considerable mental strain in a big tournament, but the same conditions do not bear upon a friendly Saturday afternoon of golf, at our own club, and yet the mental strain is still there. It is there in a different degree, of course, but every amateur golfer knows what it means to beat his best score over his home course. The putt which betters his record seems fully as momentous as was Johnny Farrell's putt on the last hole at Olympia Fields.

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In 1916 my "best score" at East Lake was 74; not in competition of course. And like any one else, every time I went out to play a round I tried to beat my record. I tried all that summer and all the next year without success. I remember at least four occasions when I stood on the seventeenth tee needing only two pars, (a four and a three) not merely to beat 74 but to beat seventy. Each time I arrived at that point I began to think of what I was about to do and each time I would use up just enough strokes to bring my total up to seventy-four. It was two full years before I could break through the barrier raised by that seventy-four. If I could have refrained from thinking about it I should have probably beaten it in a month.

So the average player's difficulty in breaking ninety, or eighty-five, is exactly of the same nature as the expert's difficulty when he is trying to win a championship. When I hear a man censured for collapsing in the last round of a competition, when he apparently had it won I always want to ask the critic if he has ever had three fives to beat his own best score, and still managed to get them. Whether the score be seventy or a hundred is a matter of little moment. It's all a question of what the nerves will do to us.

In match play, where the man beside you is the only one necessary to beat, the most difficult part of the game is the iron play—the second shots to the green, particularly if you are habitually hitting the longer tee shot. The temptation at all times to attempt to match the opponent, shot for shot, is a very hard thing to resist. No one can fail to be affected by the sight of the hostile ball reposing on the green in the neighborhood of the flag. The natural thing to do is to concentrate everything upon placing your ball closer to the hole than the ball you see on the green. And to think of anything except the actual execution of the stroke is a dangerous thing.

In stroke competition, although the man beside you may be one of your closest rivals, it is easy to go your way and permit him to go his. Both of you must play the full round of eighteen holes. Over a seventy-two hole stroke competition there is the feeling that the competition is by rounds rather than by holes. In that way there is little concern about losing this hole or that. The good has to be taken with the bad and when all is over it is usually found that a score close to par figures is not far behind the winner.

So you don't have to worry about your opponent's shots or about those of anyone else. When there is an iron shot to be played, it must be played, that is all, and played as well as possible. There is nothing but the shot to think about. If your immediate adversary seems likely to get a three, it is not hard to reflect that he might take five somewhere else.

The really hard part of medal play comes on, and around, the greens. It is there that the possibility of losing or gaining a stroke finally bears down upon the player's consciousness. With a long and difficult approach putt to lay dead or a tricky six-footer to hole, the situation for the first time appears serious. No one ever turns up his nose at par figures, and a second shot onto the green is good enough for that— unless there are going to be three putts. But the likelihood of taking three putts does not become a menace until at least one of the three has been made.

It is a fact that bad play around the hole gives the first indication that a man is losing his grip. True, the effect of a few important strokes lost in the putting may demoralize the competitor's entire game, but that is because he distrusts his putter and becomes too anxious to make his work with it less difficult. After taking an (Continued from page 122)

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extra putt two or three times, he begins to tighten his iron play trying to get close enough to make the putting easier—a good way to jump from the frying-pan into the fire.

Seldom in any form of golf competition is bad driving caused by nerves. Although the tee shot as important, it does not somehow induce the strain which attaches to the rest of the game. Possibly that is because no restraint is necessary. The winning margin of strokes is nearly always built up by superior play within two hundred yards of the hole.

And now a word about luck.

The first championship I won resulted from the fact that my ball took a bound toward this hole, instead of away from it, as it might well have done. In playing the sixteenth hole at Inwood, in the last round of the championship of 1923, I was in the lead but every stroke was quite precious. After a good drive, I decided to play a number three iron to the green which was protected by bunkers and mounds on either side, leaving a narrow opening in front. I must have felt the strain for I wheeled the shdt off to the left of the green, (barely missing the bunker on that side) and watched my ball scamper into the roadway, out of bounds. That meant the loss of stroke and distance, so I was playing four from the fairway.

Severely shaken by the mishap I came very near to duplicating, on the next shot, the mistake which had cost me so dear on the last. I remember wondering, as I watched the ball in the air, what I should do if that one too should go out of bounds. The ball came down on the side of the mound at the front of the green and, bounding almost at right angles, came to rest ten feet from the hole. I made the putt and so escaped with a five on a hole that should have been at least a seven. When I took a six at the last hole I was even more grateful for that lucky bound at the sixteenth which had enabled me to tie Cruickshank and still remain, thanks to the bounce, with a chance for the championship.

So it may truly be said that, whatever may be a player's skill, he must still have luck to win a championship. At least he must have no bad luck.