It’s Tough to Find the Trick to This Confidence Game

If you’re a golfer, every year at this time, the heart pounds a little faster, you hyperventilate a trifle and you get this surge of euphoria.

The world’s best players are coming through this part of the country, and you get this little thrill thinking contact with them will finally get you the clue that will lock your game into place and enable you to win all the presses the guys at Bel-Air can throw at you.

I mean, these players are always going around shooting 63s and winning all these millions of dollars--so they must have some secret to the game the rest of us don’t possess.

You know how Americans are. They’re always convinced someone is holding out on them. They believe implicitly there’s some single secret to success and it’s transferable or transmittable. If only someone will level with them.

Everybody from Thomas Edison to Arnold Palmer has told them the secret is long, hard work, that the one element of genius is sweat. But, the Yank figures, what do they know?

So, you talk to the pros and it’s disappointing. They don’t tell you the vees are pointing in the wrong direction or that the whole essence to the game is an upright swing.

To a man, they tell you the game is mental. You have to believe in yourself. The equipment, the position at address, the swing plane is secondary. First, you have to get in the right frame of mind.

That’s not what Americans want to hear. They want simple solutions.

The pros won’t give it to them. For instance, a lot of people couldn’t wait to hear what Craig Stadler would have to say about the fact he went nearly eight years without winning and then won twice in two years.

Stadler brushed right by any technical explanations for the turnaround. “I got my confidence back,” he explained simply.

Confidence!? You were hoping he would steer you to a new grip or stance--something you could copy. Instead, he steered you to the uncharted territory of the mind.

But golfer after golfer echoed Stadler. Success is not a weight shift, it’s a mind set.

The most important club in the bag is confidence. And it’s not a brand name. You can’t turn to the caddie with your hand out for him to give you that stick. You don’t go into the locker room and say: “Anybody here seen my confidence? I had it here a minute ago, but I mislaid it and I’m on the tee in five minutes.”

The whole answer to golf, they tell you, is believing in yourself.

That’s easy for them to say. You know how they are. They step up to the tee, and you say, “Watch out for that water on the right!” And they say, “What water?” I had a pal once who told me that what Jack Nicklaus does is, “He wills the ball into the hole.” A few minutes later, he asked me what I had done on the hole, and I told him, “I willed it into the water.”

Golf, you have to know, is one of the great confidence-destroyers this side of your mother-in-law.

It’s a heartless old strumpet. Sooner or later, it will make a fool out of you, whether you’re Bobby Jones at the Royal & Ancient or a weekend hacker at Camarillo. No harlot in high heels and net stockings ever made a bigger chump out of a guy who wooed her. Golf is the ultimate in unrequited love. A great part for Bette Davis. Golf the heartbreaker.

They tell you to picture the shot coming off textbook perfect. Try as you might, though, negative thoughts creep in. Doubts multiply.

I had a caddie once come up to me on a long par-four at Riviera and try to get me to change clubs. “You’ve got too much club there,” he told me. “You’ll go over the green.” “My boy,” I told him, “I’ve never been over a green in my life. But I’ve been short of a green about a hundred thousand times.”

He was upset. “You’ll never play the game that way,” he grumbled. I suspect he’s right.

But we see the water. We know the sand’s there. We know we can top it into the barranca. Probably will. Golf is an unplayable lie. Trust me. If the pros are worried about their confidence, we should be lighting candles. I have seen Nicklaus shoot an 83, to give you an idea. And then go out the next day and shoot a 65. Ben Hogan made a 12 on a hole in Jacksonville once. And made a birdie two on the next hole.

But we don’t do that. We shoot 102 one day--and 108 the next. Golf is just toying with you. She’s a world-class trollop. She’ll take your money, your health, your well-being and leave you standing on a corner with flowers in your hand wondering who’s kissing her now. Robbing you of confidence is what she does best. Ever stop to think, you almost never see a cocky golfer? Nobody does sack dances on a green here. Because they know the old gal is just waiting to cut you down to size.

That’s why these guys never come into the press tent to tell you that going to a new driver or a long-shafted putter or a cross-handed stroke made the difference. They know what wins. No fear of failure.

But they’re as scared of this two-timing floozy as you are. They know she’ll turn on them without a qualm. The minute she sees a self-doubt cross your mind, she’s gone.

So, if you come down to the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic this week in the hopes of finding the swing change that will make all the difference in your game, forget it. Don’t expect the pros to give it to you. If you want to be a better player, don’t go to a pro, go to a church. Never mind Greg Norman. Try that other Norman--Norman Vincent Peale.