There’s a fella I know who is a reasonable golfer. I play with him from time to time and he’s good company.
He can knock it round his home course easily under 80, but has a handicap in the high teens.
How does that work I hear you cry?
I ask myself the same thing time and again when I have to hand over the moola to him after giving him copious amounts of strokes in our head to head fixtures.
Here’s a fella who can hit the tee ball around 250 yards on a good day.
Is solid over the short putts.
Can chip and pitch no problem at all.
And knows how to navigate his way round the course in the safest way possible, never wasting a stroke.
Yet he still has a handicap in the high teens. Now don’t get me wrong he’s not burning the course up every week, but he’s a lot better than his handicap suggests.
Want to know why his handicap is so high? There’s a simple reason for it.
He literally goes to pieces when he has a card in his hand. He goes from cool, calm and confident into a complete mess.
Any opportunity he has to play in a competition in which his score actually counts, in order to get his handicap down, he melts like ice in the desert.
Turns out he simply tries too hard and puts too much pressure on himself. He knows he’s capable of better, knows he should be a lower handicap than he is, and he wants that lower handicap badly, I mean real bad.
There’s a fine line between giving your best and trying too hard, cross that line and you make the game a lot more difficult that it needs to be. That’s why you have to be strong mentally if you are to achieve what you want from the game.
Here endeth the lesson.
Now onto something quite important, what would an extra thirty to forty yards off the tee do to your game? Yes, I thought so, it would have a remarkable impact.
Did you know that most golfers are being robbed of valuable, game changing yardage off the tee?
You can get the full scoop here, for free.
Bob James PGA