TheOldCaddy

I disagree that coloured balls are easier to find for older eyes. My GF just took up the game, and still being a girl at 54, she bought pink balls. Can't find them at all. We spent more time looking for her balls that she hit 50-70 yards than any drive of mine. The pinkish-purple just seems to blend in with the colour of old divots and dying grass. We literally drove over some balls. Meanwhile, we could be 150 yds from my white ball, and it stood out like a beacon.

When I read Gallwey's "the Inner Game of Golf" years ago, I came to a similar, yet quite opposite, conclusion. From listening to pro's on interviews to my own experience, I realized good golfers came in two distinct categories: 1) very smart individuals who had found ways to harness the power of their thinking minds, yet still let their subconscious body actually 'play' the shots, and 2) fairly thick individuals, who have difficulty holding two different thoughts in their head at one time. To me, Jack Nicklaus is the supreme example of type 1 - he's clearly a smart guy, and he harnessed his conscious brain for visualization, letting it inform without directing his subconscious. Fred Couples seems to be the example of #2 (not that he's not a very nice guy, just that I suspect he's not the guy you'd want to discuss philosophy, literature, or physics with.) I played a lot of golf with a #2 type; he always hit it down the middle because that's all he could think of. Grip and rip, indeed. Your average golfer ("AG") falls between these two extremes. The more active the mind, the more the tendency to fill it up with more 'knowledge' about the swing, mechanics, equipment, etc. But when it comes time to hit the ball, the AG's mind is so busy with thoughts and instructions - what Gallwey calls the 'sergeant-major' barking drill instructions - that the poor body gets confused. As Yogi Berra once said about baseball "I can't think and hit at the same time!". The whole point of Gallwey's book (and it helped me immensely) was to find ways to distract the sgt-major and occupy the conscious mind so that the body - which effortlessly co-ordinates all the variables in muscles, bones, tendons, etc. while walking, a task which modern computers have only recently become capable of imitating closely - can take control and make the swing. When I'm on the range before a round, I use my conscious brain to evaluate how I'm hitting that day - am I hitting it thin? hooking the short irons? whatever - and I work on one swing thought to fix that. I carry that thought all day, and I trust my subconscious to make the right swing while my conscious is tied up with "Make a full turn" or "See the club hit the ball", or whatever I worked out on the range. I wouldn't exactly call it 'stupid monkey', but I definitely agree that learning how to quiet and control the conscious mind is a huge part of the mental game.

My father gave me some advice years ago: Never teach your wife to drive a standard, and never teach your wife to play bridge. I'm adding "golf" to the list! Let someone else do it - she'll listen to them in a way she'll never listen to you, and you won't get as frustrated when you tell her she's bending her wrists and she says she's not, as her wrists hinge back and forth like a broken gate.