A Perfectionist’s Nightmare

Would I be writing this today if I hadn’t forced myself into a day off?

More importantly to me, will I play better or worse in final qualifying on Monday for having a day off today?

I don’t wear a Whoop anymore, and if I did I might have found it easier to make that decision. But would that have made it the right one? I haven’t done enough research to know if the data Whoop (or any fitness wearable) provides is accurate enough to guide my daily routines. Part of the reason I stopped wearing it is because there are certain days – aka in tournaments – where you don’t have a choice about what your daily routine is. You aren’t going to not play the first round of the Scottish Open because a number on a screen tells you you aren’t primed for optimum performance. But the number on the screen might give you an excuse – valid or not – for a poor decision you make on the golf course, or a score you don’t want to see on the leaderboard. I didn’t like passing responsibility – however small – for my performance both at tournaments and in practice onto something that I didn’t even know if I fully trusted or not.

The funny thing is that golf at the highest level almost definitely needs more sports science, not less. I can’t comment on what or who Rory uses, or Nelly Korda, but I’ve been a professional for almost ten years and the concept of having a full sports science team looking after your daily needs is laughable. We hear more and more about footballers struggling with the volume of games they now have to deal with, and phrases such as ‘red zone’ and ‘injury risk’ are regulars in managers’ press conferences. Golf isn’t a sport with the physical demands of football or tennis, but it is still elite sport. The world has slowly started to realise that, particularly given the profile of most modern golfers. Almost everyone (me included, believe it or not) is stronger than they might appear at first glance. Ryan Fox might look like someone you want to go and have six beers with, but you don’t have to search far on social media to realise he can bench press well over 100kg. You don’t build that kind of strength just by lifting pints to your mouth.

Most professional golfers travel for close to 30 weeks in the year, rarely with more than a couple of weeks off a time. Most professional golfers practice almost every day, whether they are at tournaments or not. And most professional golfers deal with an unexplainable level of mental stress and fatigue. Obviously this is all in the context of golf being a sport we play for a living, with no significant consequence on the world at large. But it’s significance to each individual is, to varying degrees, defining. And in that context, it is highly unlikely that anyone is going to tell you if and when your workload – be it physical or mental or both – is reaching a potentially damaging level.

So much of what we do in professional golf is reliant on ourselves. The self ownership is what makes it the most rewarding sport in the world. But I think the self ownership is also responsible for so much of its difficulty at the highest level. I think it’s what causes some people to stay in the sport perhaps longer than they should; often not realising how little they enjoy what they do – when you don’t really answer to anyone other than yourself, who is going to tell you enough is enough? There are consequences in professional golf of course – you can lose your status, lose money, lose sponsors. But often, there is a visible path back, regardless of whether you’re capable of walking it. The point is that it is there.

No one is going to fire you in this game. (Apart from maybe a caddie or coach that you piss off, which doesn’t lose you your job). No one is going to force you to stop, no one is going to take away your ability to keep trying. Unless you have people around you willing to potentially jeopardise their relationship with you forever, no one is going to tell you you’d be better off if you quit, or that you’re just not good enough. Which is partly because, in this game, everyone’s definition of ‘good enough’ is different. Are you only successful if you reach world number one? If you win a major? If you win a tournament? If you earn your tour card? Success has infinite connotations in professional golf, but the dark side to that is that it has infinite excuses. Infinite ways you can tell yourself failure is ok.

Over the last year or so, I’ve recommitted to the idea of building a system to help me understand what I actually want from this game, and why I do it. It’s helped me immeasurably, but I still fall down the same self-ownership trapdoors as I have always done. I still fight knowing whether having a day off because I wake up tired is a smart decision, shaped by understanding that rest and recovery is more important to my performance as I get a little older, or a shallow decision, based on years of finding satisfaction in the grind, years of building confidence and resilience by finally completing tasks that I know others wouldn’t have. I still fight the question that asks whether I’m practicing because there is a slight issue that I believe needs addressing or whether I’m practicing because my subconscious is shouting at me that I can’t perform unless everything is perfect. I think a lot of professional golfers fight the (often unconscious) battle between resting because you just need to rest and resting because somewhere unexplored is the fear that if you give everything and you still don’t achieve what you thought you were capable of then your entire identity might be shattered.
(Psychologists would have a field day with me).

Maybe the people who don’t have a predisposition to over analyse their thoughts or actions or history or scars are predisposed to do better at this game. I’ve alway felt – admittedly usually after wasting some time over analysing – that it can be a strength too, if used effectively. I think it’s too simplistic to say that you have to be either really smart or really stupid to be good at this game. I think that cliche only shows that actually, you can be anything, and still find a way to be good at this game. The difficulty is in allowing your personality to shape your strengths and help them shine, rather than magnifying your weaknesses. Ryan Fox shone at Birkdale in part because his golf down the stretch so clearly reflected who he is at his best. I think we could all learn from that.

Side note:
Even though this isn’t really a blog about the Open, I want to give a shout out to all the golf writers who did write about it.
It feels like there is less and less space for thoughtful, written opinion pieces – not just in the golf world, but more generally. Everything has to be bite sized and divisive… and even the media that isn’t – particularly the one form that has grown so much, podcasts, represent a shift in this world away from anything that allows you to be away from a screen, or away from ‘doing’ things. Whether it’s an attention deficit or a capitalist guilt – technology allows us to feel like everything is moving at such a pace that if we aren’t also moving at that pace then we must be behind – carving out time to just sit and engage with something (or someone) for more than a few minutes feels more and more difficult. Going back to golf, I only hope that some of those golf writers can give a share of their talents to covering the women’s game with the same thought. While there might not be a Bryson scale level of content at Lytham next week, there will undoubtedly be stories worthy of real insight.