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    Putting Out of Your Mind
    Putting Out of Your Mind
    Putting Out of Your Mind
    Ebook169 pages2 hours

    Putting Out of Your Mind

    By Bob Rotella

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    About this ebook

    This old adage is familiar to all golfers but is especially resonant with Dr. Bob Rotella, the bestselling author of Golf Is Not a Game of Perfect and one of the foremost golf authorities today. In Putting Out of Your Mind, Rotella offers entertaining and instructive insight into the key element of a winning game—great putting. He here reveals the unique mental approach that great putting requires and helps golfers of all levels master this essential skill.

    Much like Golf Is Not a Game of Perfect and Golf Is a Game of Confidence, Putting Out of Your Mind is an informative and valuable guide to achieving a better golf game. While most golfers spend their time trying to perfect their swing so they can drive the ball farther, Rotella encourages them to concentrate on their putting—the most crucial yet often overlooked aspect of the game. Great players are not only aware of the importance of putting, they go out of their way to master it, and mastery can only begin with the understanding of the attitude needed to be a better putter. Rotella's mental rules have helped some of the greatest golfers in the world become champion putters and, for the first time, are now available to golfers everywhere.

    With everything from true-to-life stories of such greats as Davis Love III, David Duval, and Brad Faxon to dozens of game-changing practice drills, Putting Out of Your Mind is the new bible of putting for amateurs and pros alike.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFree Press
    Release dateJul 4, 2001
    ISBN9780743216739
    Author

    Bob Rotella

    Dr. Bob Rotella is the bestselling author of a dozen books, including Golf Is Not a Game of Perfect, The Unstoppable Golfer, and How Champions Think. He was the director of sport psychology for twenty years at the University of Virginia, where his reputation grew as the expert champions talked to him about the mental aspects of their game. Rotella was a consultant multiple times to the United States Ryder Cup Team. His golf client list includes Hall of Famers Pat Bradley, Tom Kite, Davis Love III, and Nick Price, as well as many of today’s stars, such as Justin Thomas, Darren Clarke, Jim Furyk, Padraig Harrington, Brad Faxon, and Rory McIlroy. A long-time consultant to Golf Digest, he lives in Virginia with his wife, Darlene.

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      Book preview

      Putting Out of Your Mind - Bob Rotella

      Introduction

      by Brad Faxon

      WHEN I FIRST ENCOUNTERED DR. BOB ROTELLA, GOLFERS SPOKE OF psychologists in whispers, if they spoke about them at all.

      In 1979, my first year at Furman University, one of my new classmates was a tennis player from Charlottesville, Virginia, named Frank Taylor. Frank had a book on athletic motivation, one of the first published works that made an effort to apply the science of psychology to sports. It was by two University of Virginia faculty members, Dr. Linda Bunker and Dr. Bob Rotella. I was intrigued. I read it and it helped me. I had a good career at Furman, becoming an All-American and a member of the Walker Cup team.

      In 1983, I turned pro. On the PGA Tour in those days, players who talked to psychologists still didn’t advertise the fact. But one day I played a practice round with Denis Watson. Denis, at the time, had risen suddenly out of the pack of Tour players to become one of the leading money winners. As we walked off the 18th green, I asked him what was behind his rapid improvement. He looked at me almost shyly. He confided that he had gone to see a sports psychologist in Virginia who had taught him better approaches to the mental side of the game.

      Bob Rotella? I asked him.

      Denis was startled that I knew the name. I told him I had read one of Rotella’s books. I asked him about what Rotella had said that had helped him so much.

      Everything, Denis replied.

      That was enough to persuade me to go to Charlottesville myself. Bob and I hit it off right away. We have been working together ever since, and Bob has become more than a consultant to me. He’s become a friend and an important person in my life. Bob’s ideas did not affect my game as suddenly or dramatically as they did Denis’s. But they helped me, particularly in putting.

      In seventeen years, Bob has never tried to change my putting stroke. To me, that makes sense. Golf has seen a tremendous variety of putting strokes and styles. If I close my eyes, I can see pictures of the great players putting—the crouching Nicklaus, the knock-kneed Palmer, the upright and flowing Crenshaw, and the determined and robotic Watson. They’re all different. Tiger Woods, the best in the game right now, has a classic stroke. Tiger looks perfect standing over his putter. But there have also been greats such as Isao Aoki, Bobby Locke, and Billy Casper, with peculiar styles that few would dare emulate.

      What Bob Rotella knows is that the secret to great putting is not in the stroke. It’s in the mind. When you putt, your state of mind is more important than your mechanics.

      Some people have a hard time understanding this. Because I am usually among the leaders in the Tour’s putting statistics, I’m often asked if there’s a secret to great putting. I usually reply that if there were a secret, I’d bottle it and sell it. I’d make a lot of money. I’d make a lot of golfers better putters and happier people.

      But while there is no secret, there is a set of ideas—a way of thinking—that can help anyone become a better putter, perhaps even a great one. That’s what you’re going to find in this book. The good news is that these ideas make sense and they can be learned. I say this because I learned them and they became the foundation of my putting game. If I learned them, you can learn them, too. Maybe you’ve tried to improve your putting and haven’t been successful. That doesn’t mean you can’t putt. It just means you’ve been going about it in the wrong way. The ability to putt well is inside you. You just have to get out of your own way and use it.

      You’re going to encounter concepts in these pages that may be new to you, concepts like trusting yourself, letting go, freeing it up, and loving the challenge of putting. You’re going to learn how to develop a putting routine that works under pressure. You’re going to find out what it feels like to love putting and to love making putts. You’re going to learn some practice games and routines that I and other players use on the Tour. You’re going to learn to understand the paradox that is at the heart of putting success: You make more putts when you don’t care if you miss.

      Judging by the way my pro-am partners generally act on the greens, these ideas may well be radically different from the thoughts you have now. A lot of the amateurs I see don’t know how to trust themselves, don’t know how to let go. They loathe and fear putting. They try very hard and they care desperately whether the ball goes in the hole. Not coincidentally, they don’t putt very well.

      If this sounds familiar to you, prepare for a change. If you can read, absorb, and adopt the ideas Bob Rotella teaches, you’ll do more than sink a few putts. You’ll enhance the pleasure you take from the game. You’ll feel that a weight has been lifted from your shoulders.

      Bob Rotella’s ideas on putting are simple, but that doesn’t mean they’re easy to assimilate and follow. They may contradict attitudes you’ve carried around for most of your life. People often look at me in disbelief when I tell them I don’t care that much if I miss a putt, that the result isn’t as important to me as where my mind was when I stood over the ball. They don’t understand what I’ve learned from Bob: If I can consistently achieve the right state of mind, I will consistently hole more putts.

      Of course, if putting in the right frame of mind were easy, everyone would do it. And then you wouldn’t get the competitive advantage you’re going to have when you finish this book.

      For now, trust me. Bob Rotella is a master in his field. Thanks largely to him, golfers don’t whisper about seeing psychologists any more. He has helped me improve as a player and as a putter. He can help you. Since you’ve got this book in your hands, I’m willing to venture two predictions. One is that you will never need another putting book. And the second is that you will enjoy reading this as much as you will enjoy putting in your next round of golf.

      Foreword

      by David Duval

      ONE OF THE MOST CHALLENGING PUTTS I’VE EVER FACED WAS THE ONE I had on the final green of the 1999 Bob Hope Chrysler Classic. It wasn’t the length or the break that made it hard, of course. The putt was only about seven feet, with a little tail at the end. If I’d had it on Thursday, I probably wouldn’t have thought very much about it. But this wasn’t Thursday. This was Sunday afternoon. It was an eagle putt to win the tournament. And it was for a score of 59, which would be the first sub-60 score anyone on the PGA Tour had ever shot in a final round. I knew that I might never have another chance to set that record. The circumstances surrounding the putt challenged my mind. And putting, I’ve learned, is all about your mind and your attitude.

      Fortunately, I had something to fall back on under pressure, something I’d been taught by Bob Rotella—my putting routine. All that day, I’d been trying to do the same thing with every putt. For the first sixteen holes, it hadn’t been so difficult. I’d started the day seven strokes behind the leader, Steve Pate. All I’d been thinking about was hitting the ball close to the flag and making birdie putts. I was hitting it well that day, and the putts I’d had generally weren’t very long. It wasn’t until I made birdie on the 16th hole to get to 11 under par for the day that I became fully aware of how low my score was. It was then that I realized what I had to do both to win and to shoot 59.

      Once I started thinking about those things, the challenge got harder. When I hit my five-iron to the 18th green and saw it roll up close to the hole, it got harder still.

      One of the principal elements of my routine is a decisive read. I don’t want to second-guess myself. My caddie, Mitch Knox, and I didn’t take a long time reading the putt. We both saw the same little break. I told myself to stick with my first instinct, not to waver, and to concentrate on executing my routine. One temptation in such a situation is to try to be too precise. Another is to focus too much on the outcome, on whether the putt falls. I resisted both. If you watched the tournament on TV and wondered what was going through my mind at that moment, here’s the answer: I was telling myself not to think about the outcome and not to question what I was doing. I was thinking about preparation and routine. I wanted simply to hit the putt the way I’d hit the other putts that day, the way I’d practiced thousands of putts before.

      I did, and it fell.

      Some people, I suspect, might be a little disappointed to read this. They want to believe that there’s some secret about putting that few players know and even fewer divulge, some act of self-hypnosis or mysticism that I used on that final green. I hear this when people ask me what I do with Bob Rotella. They think there must be something Doc and I discuss that he doesn’t disclose in his books or his talks.

      There isn’t. Doc tells me the same things he’ll tell you in this book. They’re very simple. But great putters keep it simple.

      I first met Bob Rotella when I was in college at Georgia Tech. My coach, Puggy Blackmon, invited him down each year to talk to the golf team. I remember that we worked that first time on routine, on attitude, and on confidence. Nearly a decade later, we’re still working on the same things. Great putting isn’t something you suddenly get and thereafter always have. It’s a long-term challenge that you have to work on every day.

      Doc didn’t concern himself much with the mechanical aspects of my routine. As it happens, I have just a couple of physical keys I concentrate on when I practice. I try to keep my grip pressure light and consistent. I try to make sure the ball is positioned in the same place every time, just inside my left heel. Doc helped me realize that the particular mechanical elements I chose weren’t as important as doing them consistently and believing in them.

      We worked on ways to build confidence. As you’ll read later on, Doc has some firm ideas about practice. He and I both believe that when you practice with a ball and a hole, it’s vital to see the ball going into the hole. This means a heavy emphasis on practicing short putts. As a general rule, I spend a little time working on longer putts, to maintain my touch. But I spend hours at a time working on five-footers. As a result, I’ve become a really good putter from six or eight feet on into the hole. This benefits my whole game. I hit my longer putts more confidently, since I’m not worried about making the next one if I miss. I make birdies when I hit my chips and approach shots close.

      We’ve worked longest on my attitude. This has been a gradual process with me. Some of it I’ve worked out by myself and some of it I’ve worked out with the help of Doc’s advice. I’m still working on it. By way of an interim report, I can tell you that you must love putting if you want to be a great putter. You must always look forward to the challenge of holing the next putt. At the same time, you can’t get wrapped up in putting statistics, or whether other people think you’re a great putter, or how many putts fall. Even when you read them and stroke them perfectly, putts can miss for a lot of reasons, beginning with imperfect turf. So you have to set other standards for great putting—following your routine, observing your practice habits, maintaining your attitude. If you can honestly tell yourself that you’re meeting those standards, then you’re putting well.

      I’d been a very good putter when I was a kid. But as I got bigger and was able to hit it longer, I focused more and more on the full swing. In high school and college, I’d characterize myself as a mediocre putter. That, of course, wasn’t good enough to take me where I wanted to go in golf. You have to hit the ball well to win on the Tour. But there are a lot of players out there who hit it well. Week in, week out, the Tour becomes a putting contest. You’re not going to have any success if you’re not a great putter. There’s no way around it.

      To get from where I was when I turned pro to where I was when I shot 59 took a lot of thought, a lot of time, and a lot of work. Somewhere along the way, I had to shed a fear of failure when I putted. I can’t tell you exactly when it happened. But gradually I found that I was coming to enjoy the moments when I walked onto a green and sized up a tough putt. Gradually, I learned to care less about whether that putt went in and more about whether I had done everything I could to give it a chance to go in.

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