winner
Effortless. 100 percent effortless. I’d say effortful is trying too hard. Every shot feels forced. There’s a “try” element in the game, in the shot. Flow is totally effortless. There is no try. There is no anything. It just is. It’s absolutely zero trying. No effort. Zero. It just happens.
Charles Howell III, 3-time PGA Tour winner
To me when things are flowing, things seem to go so easy, it is effortless. Calmness, no panic, everything is under control. I think it is when effort and talent come together is when you reach flow.
Hal Sutton, 14-time PGA Tour winner
What an elegant insight Hal provides: “when effort and talent come together.” In a sense, that combination is precisely what generates flow—a great deal of past effort combined with the inherent talent, and the trust in both the effort and the talent—to allow the combination to pay off.
Chapter 4
Awareness
Everything about golf indicates that the athletes are in pursuit of an objective. Whether it is to shoot a particular score, win a match, or practice a certain shot, golfers behave as if achieving their objective is all they have in mind. This purposeful, outcome-oriented behavior is even more prominent in competition in which diversions that draw attention to the score are plentiful. On the PGA Tour, money lists, leaderboards, and various statistics that measure every possible outcome abound—scoring average, proximity to the hole, putting averages, which side of the fairway tends to be missed, up and down percentage, strokes gained putting, and FedEx Cup points!
In this results- and outcome-driven context the paradox of awareness emerges. Although people are going after outcomes, they completely lose track of the outcomes, get lost in the moment, and turn themselves over to the experience that they are having. In these cases, playing golf becomes almost ancillary to enjoyment of and immersion in the experience of the moment.
Consider the case of Matt Kuchar at the 2002 Honda Classic, where he shot a final-round 66, including a back-nine 30, to claim his first PGA Tour victory. Here are the facts. Matt signed up for the tournament. He drove to the golf course every single day that week and practiced. He was in a competitive frame of mind. He knew where he stood at the end of each day. He was, by all measures, engaging in what psychologists call purposeful, goal-directed behavior. He was there to achieve a desired, measureable outcome: winning a PGA Tour event. All of his explicit behaviors that week demonstrated that Kuchar had an outcome in mind and was working toward it.
But during that final round of golf, a change took place. Matt’s awareness shifted to a quiet, calm, transcendent state of being immersed in the totality of the experience. Instead of becoming more focused, more intense, and more attuned to his score, Matt went blurry. He relaxed, zoned out, and detached from the intensity and pressure of the back nine on Sunday. And because he turned himself over to the experience, Matt won his first PGA Tour event.
To gain insight into the shift that took place for Matt Kuchar, let’s examine the following passage from his postround transcript:
Reporter: Take us through the emotions of the day when you started the final round. You had Joey in front of you and Mike Weir, and you knew it was going to be a shootout today, didn’t you?
Matt Kuchar: I wasn’t paying much attention to any of that. To win the event, I was sure I needed to go low. But I never put a number in mind. I never paid attention. I didn’t really look at what scores the leaders shot, how many back I was. I went out there to the first tee and I hit the first tee shot. I didn’t look at a leaderboard and didn’t know how I stood. The 17th green is the first leaderboard I looked at.
Actually, I got in the scorer’s tent and I’m adding up my scores, and, of course, you go hole by hole. And I add up my scores, compared to what the scorecard says on
Effortless. 100 percent effortless. I’d say effortful is trying too hard. Every shot feels forced. There’s a “try” element in the game, in the shot. Flow is totally effortless. There is no try. There is no anything. It just is. It’s absolutely zero trying. No effort. Zero. It just happens.
Charles Howell III, 3-time PGA Tour winner
To me when things are flowing, things seem to go so easy, it is effortless. Calmness, no panic, everything is under control. I think it is when effort and talent come together is when you reach flow.
Hal Sutton, 14-time PGA Tour winner
What an elegant insight Hal provides: “when effort and talent come together.” In a sense, that combination is precisely what generates flow—a great deal of past effort combined with the inherent talent, and the trust in both the effort and the talent—to allow the combination to pay off.
Chapter 4
Awareness
Everything about golf indicates that the athletes are in pursuit of an objective. Whether it is to shoot a particular score, win a match, or practice a certain shot, golfers behave as if achieving their objective is all they have in mind. This purposeful, outcome-oriented behavior is even more prominent in competition in which diversions that draw attention to the score are plentiful. On the PGA Tour, money lists, leaderboards, and various statistics that measure every possible outcome abound—scoring average, proximity to the hole, putting averages, which side of the fairway tends to be missed, up and down percentage, strokes gained putting, and FedEx Cup points!
In this results- and outcome-driven context the paradox of awareness emerges. Although people are going after outcomes, they completely lose track of the outcomes, get lost in the moment, and turn themselves over to the experience that they are having. In these cases, playing golf becomes almost ancillary to enjoyment of and immersion in the experience of the moment.
Consider the case of Matt Kuchar at the 2002 Honda Classic, where he shot a final-round 66, including a back-nine 30, to claim his first PGA Tour victory. Here are the facts. Matt signed up for the tournament. He drove to the golf course every single day that week and practiced. He was in a competitive frame of mind. He knew where he stood at the end of each day. He was, by all measures, engaging in what psychologists call purposeful, goal-directed behavior. He was there to achieve a desired, measureable outcome: winning a PGA Tour event. All of his explicit behaviors that week demonstrated that Kuchar had an outcome in mind and was working toward it.
But during that final round of golf, a change took place. Matt’s awareness shifted to a quiet, calm, transcendent state of being immersed in the totality of the experience. Instead of becoming more focused, more intense, and more attuned to his score, Matt went blurry. He relaxed, zoned out, and detached from the intensity and pressure of the back nine on Sunday. And because he turned himself over to the experience, Matt won his first PGA Tour event.
To gain insight into the shift that took place for Matt Kuchar, let’s examine the following passage from his postround transcript:
Reporter: Take us through the emotions of the day when you started the final round. You had Joey in front of you and Mike Weir, and you knew it was going to be a shootout today, didn’t you?
Matt Kuchar: I wasn’t paying much attention to any of that. To win the event, I was sure I needed to go low. But I never put a number in mind. I never paid attention. I didn’t really look at what scores the leaders shot, how many back I was. I went out there to the first tee and I hit the first tee shot. I didn’t look at a leaderboard and didn’t know how I stood. The 17th green is the first leaderboard I looked at.
Actually, I got in the scorer’s tent and I’m adding up my scores, and, of course, you go hole by hole. And I add up my scores, compared to what the scorecard says on
Similar Books
