Under pressure, anyone can choke

On the 72nd hole of the St. Jude Classic, Robert Garrigus did what we’ve all done at one time or another — he choked. 

In Robert’s case, it cost him a bucket load of money and an invite to next year’s Masters.

In the seven shots and 20 minutes that it took for Robert to play the last hole on Sunday, he joined a large group of infamous players who simply thought too far ahead. 

It is very much a cliché but, when playing golf, we all must stay in the present.

Staying in the present is much easier said than done.  “If I can par the last three holes” we tell ourselves “I’ll set a new personal best”. Frankly, as soon as we start thinking like that, we might as well set the table for dinner because our goose is cooked. 

Very often, when we get ahead of ourselves, we begin to play differently, we begin to think differently and we lose the rhythm of what we have been doing.

Kenny Perry got ahead of himself at the 2009 Masters with two holes to play. 

“Two pars and I’ll be the Masters champion” thought Perry. 

Greg Norman lost the Masters to Nick Faldo one year, despite having a huge lead going into the last round. 

The trouble with a huge lead is the player will often think about what final round score will be sufficient to win the event, even before he has decided what shot to hit off the first tee. 

He’s already thinking about the end of the round before it has even started.

Unlike for players on the professional tours, our choking moments do not cost us much money, nor do they tend to affect any invitations to play at Augusta National, nonetheless, they are just as painful. 

They can also sap our confidence if we do not take the opportunity to learn from our missteps.

Opportunities to choke come at every level of golf, no matter whether we choose to play in competitions or simply with the same group of friends each weekend. For each of us, the opportunity will arrive to do something that is meaningful to us, when future joy or misery will depend on what we do with our next shot. 

At those moments, whether it is beating our friends, winning the club championship or winning the St. Jude Classic, the difficulty that we all face is in shutting out the result we want to achieve. 

The fact of the matter is that since the result is part of the future, and because it isn’t part of the present, we should ignore it. 

All much easier said than done, of course, and if you can find a way to shut out the result, bottle it and sell it, for everybody will want it. When we hit any golf shot, there are only three things we should ever think about and they are, in alphabetical order, execution, execution and execution.