When My Golf Game Hit Rock Bottom I Was Convinced My Swing Was Broken... But The Truth Was More Complicated
Is your bad golf a technical or mental problem? Neil Tappin tells his story of poor golf and climbing scores
In mid-August, my golf hit rock-bottom. I can remember in vivid, high definition the exact moment when the last vestiges of a respectable game left me and all hope faded.
It came very early in a counting round. My opening tee shot was an ugly pull with a 3-wood (for safety) that finished perilously close to some out of bounds posts. My attempt at punching back out was so poorly executed that it went straight left, hit a path and trickled OOB.
I stood watching in disbelief at my own ineptitude. I'd turned a simple par 4, one of the easiest on the course, into a card-wrecking quadruple bogey.
At the time, I felt that my swing was to blame, but having reflected, I've come to the conclusion that my issue was mainly mental. For context, I had been struggling with my game for a couple of months.
My scores plateaued at first, then started creeping up. As the quality of my game nosedived, I started thinking in terms of resets, adjusting my goals and searching for new swing thoughts. Here are some examples of the swing thoughts I tried:
- Pause at the top of the backswing
- Push down into my left heel at the start of the downswing
- Hold the finish position
- Weaken my grip
- Retain my spine angle better through impact
As you can see, my mind was scrambling and yet I continued to think that it was purely a technical issue. Part of the problem was that, being in the thick of the competition season, I couldn't step away or hit the pause button.
The competitive rounds kept coming and all I had was the hope that a new swing thought would work. As painful as these moments are, they're only ever fleeting.
In September, I took a couple of weeks away from playing and went to the range. Without doing anything different, I started hitting the ball properly again. The knotted doom loop of destructive thinking was beginning to loosen.
The moral of the story here is that the mental challenge of golf is uniquely taxing. It is hopelessly optimistic to think that recent poor performances will suddenly change with nothing more than a new swing thought. And yet, it's a trap I still find myself falling into almost 40 years after I started playing.
A series of lessons to iron out my technical issues would certainly be sensible (I'm certainly not saying I don't have swing problems), but so too would working out my own approach to the mental game in general.
What I've come to realise was the list of swing thoughts I tried were born out of panic. They were often settled upon hours or even minutes before stepping onto the first tee.
Is Your Bad Golf A Technical Or Mental Problem?
Clearly, I should have been focussing on my performance skills but instead I was searching for swing fixes. The results were predictably awful but my mind was too frazzled to see the reality of the situation. I wasn't even asking: Is your bad golf a technical or mental problem?
What I would like to ask is - have you transformed your fortunes by exploring different mental techniques? There is a comment box below and I'd love to hear from you if you have. It could provide the inspiration to help other golfers who find themselves spiralling into negative thinking without realising, myself included.
