THE BRAIN GAME 3

Golf is 10% mechanical and 90% mental!" Is it fact, or fiction? Going by what most people do, it's fiction. More than one player in my acquaintance has paused between two of the 500 balls he was hitting to remark,"it's all up here between the ears," and then gone right back to whacking.

Very little, except the labels, has changed in the way players approach the mental game since Grantland Rice gave us the keynote in 1920. So let's get serious. If the game is mostly mental, why not practice that way?

About as mental as we ever get is letting our minds follow us around. We're either reacting to what's ahead or what just happened. What we need is a mind that leads. That seems to happen more by accident than design, which is not very reliable and only occasionally productive (when "good fortune" drops in for a visit).

A mind that leads is a quiet mind, with a well planned thinking path that stays steady. The fewer thoughts, the better. If you are hacking in your head, it's a dead level cinch that you will be hacking in your hands, as well.

Thinking - that is, conscious thought - is what the mental game is about. Thinking is not to be confused with emotion, which is what most golfers appear to be trying to manage when they talk about the mental game.

Emotion arises in anticipation of what's coming or writhes in despair (sometimes delight) at what just happened (the joys of victory and the agony of defeat). Neither of those are much help at the actual moment of shot-making.

What supports our swing skills is a conscious thinking path that has all of the following components: as simple as possible, with the fewest number of things to remember; non- mechanical, so that it does not give the body any commands or interrupt the habits we've built into our swing; focused on the present, so as not to arouse the emotions from anticipation of the future or fretting over what's past; and highly repetitive, just like we want our swing to be.

That's the structure of thinking that accompanies shot- making. That requires only about 180 seconds of our time while we are on the course. The rest of the time, it doesn't matter what we think about. We only need the conditioning to use a specific, consistent mental process with every shot.

We take nothing away from mechanical thinking. We are, however, making a case for the right thinking at the right time. The right thoughts at the wrong times won't work very well, if at all. Timing our thoughts consistent with what we are doing is critical.

There are four parts to this game: building it, adjusting it, shot-planning and execution. Execution requires an entirely different kind of thinking from the other three. It is, in fact, a different game.

You can think mechanics all you want while building, adjusting or planning. But when it's shot time, mechanical thinking can wreck your train.

If you think for one minute that any of that will happen of its own accord, you are allowing your conscious mind to be a follower. The mind that leads is one that gets a lot of organized practice, which isn't likely to happen while we're beating balls.

Watch the best players you know. It's like they expect their games to go through a lost and found department. On again, off again. Considering the number of times they've put a swing on a club, at some point, they're bound to form a swing habit.

We all have swing habits, for good or bad. What seems to cause most of the trouble is getting them into action consistently. For that, we have to have good mental habits to activate our good swing habits. But it's hard to trust something we never practice.

It shapes up like this: to learn a skill, it's 90% mechanical and 10% mental; for memorizing that skill, it's 50/50; for practicing, once you develop your swing skills, it's 90% mental and 10% mechanical. On the course, once you are over the ball, it's 3% conscious, passive thinking, 97% automatic swinging and zero mechanical thinking. Between shots, it's anything you want it to be.

Let us know if you have questions or comments.