Intro
Golf has always rewarded a good swing—but it’s never been just about the swing. This piece explores the mental game of golf through three shifts in how golfers think about performance: muscle memory, mental toughness, and today’s emerging AI-era “brain as receiver” idea.
“Competitive golf is played mainly on a five-and-a-half-inch course, the space between your ears.”
– Bobby Jones
Golf is a mind game disguised as a ball sport. Any activity that’s been around for five hundred years is bound to have experienced more than a few changes, and golf is no exception.
Technology, for example, has transformed the game, with advances in ball and club construction leading to today’s urethane-covered, multi-layer balls, hybrid irons, and metal woods.
However, an even more meaningful—yet less often discussed—advancement in golf has been in the realm of the mind: how we think about the game, our golf mindset, and golf consciousness.
Over time, golf has experienced at least three major paradigm shifts in how it is perceived by golfers. These three distinct perceptions of golf neatly parallel their respective periods in history.
While these are distinctly different approaches, success in golf will most likely be based upon some combination of all three perspectives. And each of us must decide what combination works best for us—that is, through which lens we choose to primarily view the game.
Muscle Memory
The first stage, “Muscle Memory,” is unsurprisingly the product of the Industrial Age (late 19th–early 20th century), a period of assembly lines and mechanical wonders. This perspective remains an essential learning component, especially for beginners, and it’s still the view most widely held by weekend warriors today.
The muscle memory school of thought is based upon a famous Ben Hogan quote: “The secret is in the dirt.”
This means that golf is essentially a physical activity, and like other sports, improvement depends on practice and repetition.
Grinding away at the range and hitting countless buckets of balls, it’s believed, will lead to improved performance because you will train your “muscle memory” to perform more effectively. This approach requires intense focus on mechanics and technical swing thoughts with which we are all too familiar: “Keep your head down, take the club back slowly, supinate or not supinate?”
It was golf philosopher Phyllis Diller who said that the reason the instructor tells you to keep your head down is so you won’t see him laughing.
However, as so many of us have learned through cruel experience, excessive focus on mechanics and swing thoughts often builds tension—and tension rarely produces good results.
As Yogi Berra said, “You can’t think and hit at the same time.” What’s more, some research has suggested that “muscle memory” is not as simple as we describe it, and that the mind is more adaptable than purely trainable—perhaps an evolutionary result of the need for rapid adaptability among early hunter-gatherer people. So, there must be something more to golf than just hitting a little ball into a gopher hole with a crooked stick.
Fred Couples was, perhaps, the first Tour pro to publicly debunk the Muscle Memory school of thought when he said,
“There is no truth in the idea that the person who hits the most balls will become the best golfer. Golf is a bizarre sport. You can work for years on your game, without making any improvement in your score.”
Fred Couples was ahead of his time in looking beyond the muscle memory paradigm and seeking, instead, to find a “natural flow” as a key to success. “You swing your best when you have the fewest things to think about,” says Couples. It’s really a mental game as much as a physical one. And the key, at the right moment, is to let the swing happen without forcing it.
“Golf is a game in which attitude of mind accounts for incomparably more than mightiness of muscle,” according to Arnold Haultain in his masterful work, The Mystery of Golf.
Performance Consciousness
This brings us to the “Performance Consciousness” stage of golf’s evolution, which created a new kind of coach for every tour pro’s staff: the sports psychologist. A product of the Computer Age (late 20th century), in which all we need to do is “download” the performance data stored in our minds.
“Mental Toughness” became the phrase du jour, and golfers of all abilities became obsessed with learning methods by which they could access the regions of the mind that store this elusive mental toughness—hoping to apply it at The Open on Sunday afternoon at St. Andrews or Saturday mornings at the local municipal golf course.
Countless trees were felled in service of publishing a tsunami of golf psychology books with titles such as “The Golfer’s Mind,” “The Mental Game of Golf,” “Fearless Golf,” “Golf is Not a Game of Perfect,” and others. The central operating principle was that the information necessary to play great golf was stored in the brain, and all we need do is coax it out. The objective was to access this information—this state of consciousness—and utilize it effectively, resulting in peak performance. However, mental toughness proved to be a fickle mistress and needed to be courted through what seemed like a battery of Jedi mind tricks designed to bypass the brain’s conscious control: visualization, affirmations, pre-shot routines, and a laser-like focus on positive outcomes.
Mastering the mental side of golf, it was believed, could lead to more consistent performance and lower scores than muscle memory alone. As Gary Player said, “We achieve success or failure on the course primarily through our thoughts.”
Dr. Bob Rotella, perhaps the best known of the burgeoning stable of golf psychologists, said that the body works best when the conscious mind is turned off, establishing a kind of Zen-like state of simply being in the moment. His book, “Zen Golf,” was toted around in more than a few duffers’ golf bags.
Mental Toughness
Mental toughness, it’s believed, stemmed from developing a particular state of mind, and the best way to access it was to “seek a feeling” of calm confidence in order to create an environment welcoming to positive outcomes.
“A golfer can’t force results to happen. They can only do everything possible to give those results a chance to happen,” said Dr. Rotella. Maintaining a calm, collected demeanor, regardless of circumstance, was essential to accessing this special energy stored in the deep recesses of the brain.
As Marcus Aurelius said, “You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this and you will find strength.”
So now we could attribute a bad round to forgetting our mantra. Is it any wonder that Tiger Woods’ mother was a Buddhist? Or, as Greek philosopher Epictetus put it, “It’s not what happens to you but how you react that matters.”
All of this can, of course, lead to trying hard not to think too hard and a kind of paralysis by analysis. Or, as mythical Scottish golf instructor Shivas Irons put it, “You try too hard and think too much.”
Artificial Intelligence in Golf
This brings us to the present emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI), which is already redefining the construction of golf clubs and balls—so why not our minds?
AI is behind many of the most recent advances in brain research, and it has great potential applications for improving a golfer’s performance. Which leads us to the “Non-Local Consciousness” or “Brain as Receiver” model, which suggests that rather than viewing the brain as a storage facility, it may be better understood as a receiver for information through which levels of awareness are downloaded from a universal consciousness.
Think of the mind not as a computer downloading stored information but rather like a cell phone receiving data from an outside source. This was described by inventor Nikola Tesla, who said, “My brain is only a receiver. In the universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge.”
The brain-as-receiver model provides plausible explanations for previously inexplicable phenomena such as child prodigies and Traumatic Savant Syndrome, a condition where an individual, after experiencing a blow to the head, suddenly displays exceptional, genius-level abilities in disciplines such as art or music, or fluency in a previously unknown language.
Author Dan Brown likened Traumatic Savant Syndrome to listening to a car radio while hitting a pothole and having your dial bleed over into another station. We are all basically receivers picking up various channels and incapable of tuning into certain other frequencies. This could help explain different levels of awareness between people.
The next generation performance golf model might involve learning how to willfully tune into specific frequencies or channels while blocking out others. This process might be further advanced by what’s known as The Singularity, a hypothetical future where human biology and AI are merged, creating a new consciousness and making Homo sapiens obsolete.
I know more than a few golfers who would readily volunteer to have a chip implanted in their brain if it would prevent them from three-putting. Technology futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts that The Singularity could be a reality by 2045.
“Golf is in its infancy concerning the power of the mind,” according to Gary Player.
This may all seem mysterious and a bit creepy, but we are on the threshold of an entirely new way of thinking about how we process information—and its impact on golf remains to be seen.
As Einstein said, “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”
Anyone who has ever stood on the first tee box knows precisely the kind of beautiful mysteriousness of which Einstein speaks.
Final Thoughts on the Mental Game of Golf
It’s interesting to note the parallels between human technological advancement and our view of golf. The Industrial Age of machines gave us the “Muscle Memory” perspective; the Computer Age begat the “Mind Storage Download” model; and the age of AI and the cloud brings us to the “Non-Local Consciousness” paradigm.
One thing seems certain: the golf ball will do what you do to it, and that depends entirely on what your mind does between shots.
Where all of this is heading, God only knows, but I’d still rather be on a golf course thinking about God than in church thinking about golf.
Author Bio
Dan Camilli is a Contributing Writer for Senior Golf Source and a retired Teacher and Professor of History, Philosophy and Humanities. He is the host of Golf Mystics: Golf as a Path to Expanded Awareness, a free online Meetup Group and the author of Tee Ceremony: A Cosmic Duffer’s Companion to the Ancient Game of Golf.