Golf_ The Mind Game - Marlin M. Mackenzie [41]
When he senses that the match is just right, he reproduces the desired swing effort with several more practice swings. In his mind he again creates a moving picture of the ball as it leaves the club face and rolls into the hole. He says it’s important for him to see the club face strike the ball in his mental image; if he doesn’t, his chip will be bad, either too strong or too weak, because he can’t be sure how sharply to hit the ball.
Finally, when his internal pictures match, when he sees the complete flight of the ball, and when he has the right feeling of the swing effort in his arms, wrists, and hands, Bill trusts his preparation, steps up to the ball, and hits it without any conscious thoughts in his mind at all. Clearly, Bill’s expertise comes from knowing what to look at, what to feel when he swings the club, and how to translate all that information into the just-right swing effort. Let’s look more closely at the crucial information a golfer needs to know about swing effort and how you can acquire it.
Crucial Visual Information
Two kinds of visual information are crucial for controlling swing effort: the information you see on the outside and the internal images that are either remembered or created on the spot. Both kinds of information are processed at the same time. It’s all of this visual information taken together that tells the golfer how hard to strike the ball.
Many golfers have a stored visual chart in their minds that contains a list of their clubs and the amount of yardage they can hit with each of them under normal conditions. They also have yardage figures related to wind and wet conditions that they subtract from or add to the normal yardage; some have a figure related to feeling pumped up that is factored in too. With the more skilled golfers this information about the weather and their feeling states is automatically cranked into their decision about club selection and how hard to swing.
Estimating distance is obviously a visual process. For example, many golfers have ten-yard, twenty-five-yard, and fifty-yard visual templates stored in their minds that they use to estimate the distance of approach shots; for putting they have three-foot and ten-foot templates. They project and superimpose these templates onto the ground, using either the 150-yard markers, the ball itself, or the flagstick as the initial points from which to calculate the distance to the hole.
If they’re not sure, they’ll actually step off the distance. Tour golfers or their caddies walk a tournament course before the first round, chart the location of water sprinkler heads, hazards, and trees, and record their distances to the front of each green. In addition, they check pin placements before each round and record their distances from the front of the green.
Planning the trajectory or flight of the ball over intervening hazards such as sand traps, rough, knolls, and even trees is important for landing the ball close to or on the putting surface. The loft of the club, the address position, and the degree of openness of the club face are other bits of visual information that are cranked into the decision about how fast to swing the clubhead.
After distance and trajectory are ascertained, certain internal visual information related to past, similar approaches and chips is retrieved from their memories; this also serves as a basis for making a decision about how hard to strike the ball. Significant remembered visual information about past shots includes: the club used, the line or trajectory of the ball, the position of the club face in relation to the pin or hole at the end of the swing, and the trajectory, bounce, and roll of the ball to its resting spot. All of this visual information helps the golfer select the right club and gives him a good idea of the required swing effort.
Establishing the Line of a Putt
After the ball is on the green, the major task is to determine the line of the putt. Golfers spend a