“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.”
“The landscapes of golf courses change and the cityscapes we drive through to get to them change, but so much remains the same. Some pieces get pulled out by uncertainty, or adrenaline, or creating problematic stories based on problematic past experiences. Some get pulled out by an actual pull draw and a right to left wind.”
“I wanted to ask every male player I bumped into at the Scandi Mixed what they thought about the merger news… but I left Sweden far more captivated by why the men have better short games than we do – confidence? Forearm strength? Exposure to those kind of courses? Black and white technique? – than whether they thought Richard Bland would be able to play on career money in 2024. “
“Reality doesn’t give a f*** about waiting for your process. It doesn’t wait for you to figure out which pieces you want to see more clearly and which pieces are still part of the wrong puzzle. Reality doesn’t hold your hand and tell you it’s getting better.”
“How do you spend that time when thinking about it might be what helps you climb you out of it? But it also might dig you deeper into it? That quote about hoping the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t a train is a fun way to spend your weekend when you’re not getting paid.”
“It’s the one that threads the swing changes and the fatted wedges and the yipped three footers and the inferiority complexes and the Wednesday evening anxiety together with a poison that tastes like the medicine you’re supposed to drink to get better. The mind.”
“But then I watch the US Open, or the KPMG, and share that experience alongside gifs on my Twitter feed, or fellow players on a buffering stream on a 4 hour bus journey across two European countries and I wonder… whether I win or nearly win tournaments because I find the zone, or whether I find the zone because I win or nearly win tournaments.”
