“Can you have elite skill without an elite mindset? Can you have an elite mindset without elite skill? Of course you can. But more than that: does mindset have the power to actually create skill? And then, in turn, destroy it? Which of those things is most defining in a professional sportspersons’ career?”
“An opinion on something has a direct bearing on beliefs about something else. The world shouts this at you with mocking disinterest; only willing to listen if you shout something, anything, louder. If you do something better. If you achieve something more. When you’re younger – or maybe just the world was a little softer – it feels as though it cares more.”
“It was all part of the sick, satisfying dissatifaction – what can I do next to be better? Being hurt was always an opportunity, and I think that’s part of why so many of us stay in this sport for such a long time. But then I spent two years being absolutely broken by it.”
“As I was going round in circles with a Virgin Atlantic representative about the £280 flight cancellation fee that they don’t actually charge, I struggled to shake the weight of emptiness tugging at me. But I eventually realised that there are some patterns my brain continues to make, and sitting helpless in a hotel room while a tournament is going on and no longer being part of it was a familiar one.
But that was last year.”
“Every time I play with a relative beginner, I’m struck by the same bewilderment: how on earth can you enjoy the process of getting only marginally less terrible, with glimpses of success so fleeting it’s unsettling rather than satisfying, at something so endlessly complicated? That only gets more complicated the more of it you understand? But then, I realise, they must wonder the exact same thing about me.”
“When it comes to my golf, I have a fierce determination that is finally lifting me up, rather than being something I’m clinging to. Because for the first time in a long time, it’s coming from my soul… and that might be too deep, but it’s me. It’s something I recognise again.”
“Your arena is the place where you push yourself; the place where you’re on the edge between failure and success. Sometimes that’s closing your eyes as you hole a four footer to win – not because you’re scared, but because you have the trust to know that’s exactly what you need to do. And sometimes it’s holding all your pieces together in front of cameras that you don’t deserve until you crumble in the space between scoring and leaving.”
“I don’t know what exactly starts turning that ignorance into doubt and I don’t know what exactly shifts that doubt from something that pushes you further down the path of progression and clarity into something that pushes you down a path of fragility and uncertainty. I do know that those two paths often look exactly the same.”
