Recently, I had a nightmare round. It was a tournament of minimal significance, but enough to have me embarrassed by how poorly it was going. Even in the throes of it, I started formulating an explanation in my head about how everything could unravel so quickly.
This is when I realized a lot of it was crummy luck: An approach over the green and into a back bunker; a bad lie just off the fairway after a decent drive. To be clear, these shots were not great. But I’ve hit plenty worse and not suffered nearly the same consequence.
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If you’ve seen the video from Thursday of Scottie Scheffler finding the water on the 16th hole at Muirfield Village during the first round of the Memorial Tournament and then griping to his caddie Ted Scott about getting the wind direction wrong, you might be tempted to think, what a baby. In fact, it’s probably something some of us need to do a little more.
A few years ago, when I first wrote about excuses on the golf course, I surprised even myself in concluding they play an important role. If we can agree that competitors who blame everything else for their poor performance won’t learn how to get better, the smart ones can compartmentalize certain mistakes in the interest of self-preservation.
“This will sound weird, but I think excuses when you’re on the golf course are OK,” Golf Digest Top 50 Teacher Tony Ruggiero told me then. “I think good players do that. They’ll say it’s not them. That’s generally why they don’t have fear.”The key consideration here is timing. Much as I believe you need to be accountable for your idiotic decisions—I call these ISAIs (“I’m such an idiot”s), which I explained a few weeks ago—berating yourself while also trying to get the ball in the hole isn’t particularly constructive. So you wait, or you project. Most of us don’t have a caddie we pay a handsome salary to be the subject of our frustration, but we can all find something in the interim before doing the hard part of looking within.
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“I’ve talked to players whose self-talk is so bad on the golf course. Everything is, ‘they suck,’ and it’s brutal,” Ruggiero said. “The guys that blame other things on the golf course tend to do better.”
Of course, you need to take inventory of what’s lacking in your game. That’s not only a necessary path to improvement, but also a source of hope. You want to feel as if better golf is within reach, and not entirely subject to elements outside your control. Until then, go ahead and blame the wind or the lack of sand in the bunkers. A word of caution is to hold back on ripping into other people, though. It might work once in a while, but eventually you’re going to have a hard time filling out your foursome.
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