Golf_ The Mind Game - Marlin M. Mackenzie [45]
Put another ball in the same place as the earlier chip. While taking a practice swing feel, in your mind, the exact same amount of muscle tension and swing effort that you felt on the previous successful shot.
Hit the ball, reproducing the swing effort and muscle feelings of the prior successful shot. As soon as you see the clubhead strike the ball close your eyes.
Keeping your eyes closed and remaining keenly aware of the muscle feelings, make an internal picture of the ball going to the hole.
Estimate how close to the hole you think the ball came to rest—within two feet of the pin, shorter than two feet, or longer than two feet—based on the degree of muscle tension you felt while swinging the club.
Open your eyes and see where the ball actually came to rest. Anchor the shot in your Uptime Anchor if it came within two feet of the pin.
Repeat the entire process several times for chip shots taken from different locations around the green, anchoring only the successful ones.
The V-K Weave can also be used for a variety of approaches and for long putts. The fundamental idea is to learn how to peg the amount of swing effort used while hitting a variety of shots. Closing your eyes forces you to attend consciously to muscle feelings. After you become adept at this, let this mental process drop into your unconscious mind, bringing it back to conscious awareness only when your approaches and putts are missing the mark.
The Emotions of the Short Game
The most important K, for the short game especially, is the just-right feeling state for the shot at hand. When that feeling isn’t present, good golfers step away from the ball and plan the shot again. I believe the “yips”—feeling nervous and stabbing at a putt instead of stroking it—are the result of not knowing your just-right putting state and not making use of your nervous, uncomfortable feelings.
Valerie, a middle-handicapper, complained of having the “yips,” often missing short, easy putts. I asked her to remember a recent putt and describe the feeling she had when standing over the ball. She said she had a feeling of tension in her stomach; and when she putted, she poked at the ball, zipping it past the hole.
I asked Valerie to use the Sherlock Holmes Exercise to get more details about that putt out of her unconscious mind. After she became Sherlock, she realized that she had misread the line and felt uncertain about how to hit the ball; she didn’t trust the line. She said the feeling of stomach tension appeared at the same time she felt uncertain.
“You had a vital piece of information available to you and you ignored it,” I told her. “Your unconscious mind was telling you, in the form of an uncomfortable feeling in your stomach, that something wasn’t right. Had you trusted your distrust about the line, and had you trusted your feeling of uncertainty about the putt, you could have conquered the ‘yips.’ You could have stepped away from the ball and prepared to putt differently, with a new line and perhaps a different swing effort. Instead, you went ahead and putted anyway and created a just-wrong anchor.”
To suggest that the “yips” were something to be used constructively, rather than just ignored, was a switch. Most people say, “Don’t think about them. Just trust your ability and go ahead and putt.” My experience suggests that that perspective is foolish when you are uncertain about a shot to begin with. Only when you feel certain, or at least comfortable with the way you’ve planned the shot, should you put trust in your putting skill.
Some people buy new putters to increase their confidence and overcome the “yips.” This doesn’t make sense for a couple of reasons. First, a different putter won’t correct the way you’ve been reading the greens and determining a swing effort. Second, building another memory bank of associations between the speed of putts and the length and weight of a new putter will take a great deal of extra practice time; and it may even aggravate