[Note: At some point we’ll resurrect my golf site, honestswinggolf.com, and move this particular blog over there entirely. For now, I’ll leave it here at sanielandlinda.com.]

I’ve had a couple of mornings on the course recently that I’d mostly rather forget, if I look at them with an eye to either performance or enjoyment. But the learning … good stuff.

(That’s the Tim Gallwey “Inner Game” triad: Performance, Enjoyment, Learning. I think any of us who steps onto a course without a balanced desire to enhance our game in each of the three arenas is missing a whole lot of what The Game offers.)

What I had a chance to experience—more than I wish I had!—is what I’m coming to call “Golf Shock.” It relates to things I’ve been ruminating about in the aftermath of this summer’s U.S. Open at Winged Foot in New York, where Tiger Woods for the first time ever as a pro missed the cut at a major, and Phil Mickelson treated the entire cosmos to one of the most appalling, deeply disappointing chokes in Earthly golf history.

In our spiritual and psycho-emotional work with clients, my wife Linda and I and the teachers I’ve trained address what we call the “broken zones” of everybody’s psyche. A serious discussion of broken zones could go on and on. I’ll spare us. The essence of what we mean is this: they’re “broken” in the sense that when a person tumbles into one of them, his basic feeling of identity suffers a sharp, severe discontinuity from his ordinary, everyday sense of who he is. Suddenly he’s in another, very weird and extremely uncomfortable world. People describe how it feels to be in these psychic zones with intense terms: “shattered,” “drowning,” “knocked back,” “miles away,” “spinning,” “no ground underneath me,” “burning alive,” “freezing up,” “being strangled,” “can’t feel anything,” and so on.


Experiencing a broken zone is a form of psychological and emotional shock that invariably has serious physiological symptoms and expressions. Neurologists speak of how these incidents activate primitive flight/fight/freeze reactions. They trigger our most primitive portions of the brain to take over. Outwardly, for instance, it might look like a person is just gently being reminded by a loved one about, say, a forgotten task. But inwardly they may feel like they’re being violently attacked and made wrong. Their reactions can then be wildly disproportionate to the actual events taking place around them.

Sound familiar, fellow golfers?

So I hereby dub that terrible state most of us can so easily fall into, “Golf Shock.” One of the marvels of those lovely garden paradises we call golf courses is just how extreme our invisible psycho-emotional landscapes can become while we’re out supposedly “playing” on them. In “Golf in the Kingdom,” Mike Murphy tells of a golfer who, from his private golfing hell, threatened suicide on the tee of one hole, only to proclaim just moments later on the green that he was absolutely “in heaven.” Unfortunately, many if not most golfers would say that they spend far more time in their private hells of Golf Shock than they do in any kind of heavenly Golf Bliss.

Now, in the realm of “do as I say,” ahem–since I’m clearly a work in progress with respect to my own practice–I’d like to suggest that the very First FundaMental of Honest Swing Golf™, Honest Swing Realism, can become a powerful antidote to Golf Shock if we will but use it. As graphic, recent illustrations of two ways we can go into Golf Shock, I’ll point to what I personally felt were unwanted, sad and strangely discomfiting gifts that the golf world received from Phil Mickelson and Tiger Woods during this last U.S. Open.

In describing this First FundaMental in “What Does It Really Mean to Take an Honest Swing?” (my main presentation of Honest Swing Golf™), I make clear that Honest Swing Realism takes sensitive, nuanced application every single time. For example, it’s not just about deciding whether you can realistically pull off a certain shot. That’s certainly part of it. But it’s also about whether, realistically, you’re the kind of person who sometimes just has to try a shot both others and you might consider impossible, or extremely improbable, for you to pull off.

In its most complete applications, Honest Swing Realism takes into account as many aspects of our actual, present reality as it can. Including, to point to a glaring example for so many of us so often, Golf Shock.

Let’s look at Phil’s famous implosion on the 18th at Winged Foot in the final round, after a truly masterful 71 previous holes. I later heard John Daly comment that it might have been wiser for him to hit a 2-iron off the tee and play for bogey and a spot in a playoff at worst, par and a win at best. That would have been a very realistic approach indeed. But, as he acknowledges in one of his TV ads, Phil is a gambler. We all know and love that about him, and if we’re being honest, we don’t want him never to gamble again. We just don’t want him to detonate the most important hole of his life to date that way ever again!

The gift we didn’t want to get from Phil was his failure to apply Honest Swing Realism not at the tee–who could know?–but rather standing there in the woods over his next shot, contemplating turning a golf ball into a boomerang instead of just taking his medicine, chipping out to the fairway, and saving at least bogey. And I have a hunch that the reason he didn’t do that is because Phil fell into one of his particular versions of Golf Shock. It probably didn’t feel that way until one or two shots later. But something much more primitive in him took over based on the perceived threat of his predicament there in the woods. The rest of what happened need not be recalled again here; seeing it the first time was already too much. He restored himself to honesty and realism after the championship, commenting for all the world, “I am such an idiot!” But at the time, Phil the Gambler–as one golf journalist named him, “Old Phil”–took over and threw prudence to the winds, and an extraordinary possible place in golf history along with it (winner of 3 straight majors).

Phil’s sudden derailment into Golf Shock came about the way it most often does for most of us: through a performance error. Another good example happened just yesterday in the U.S. Women’s Open. Annika Sorenstam was cruising along doing just fine and suddenly out of nowhere pulled an easy wedge into a creek–with at least 20 yards of green on the other side of the pin. We all know what that feels like, right? “Where the hell did my swing go? What was THAT?” It was a top pro’s version of something like a shank, even a whiff. That kind of thing, in the midst of immense tournament pressures, can unnerve even the best of us, and that’s exactly what it did to Annika for a few holes until she turned herself around and reclaimed her game and, today, her 3rd Open victory.

It’s interesting to me to listen to high level former players like Johnny Miller, Dottie Pepper, and Paul Azinger acknowledge how much these disasters hit golfers at their level the same way they hit the rest of us. They’re playing The Game on a whole other plane of competence, both physically and mentally (which really means psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually all at the same time). But it’s still THE GAME. And it’s as fraught with perils such as Golf Shock for them, on their rarefied plane of play, as it is for others of us wherever we are in our development as golfers. That’s part of the universal beauty of The Game itself.

A less easily perceived version of Golf Shock, I’d say, was experienced by Tiger in that same tournament, his first major ever that he went home from on Saturday, having missed the cut. It’s hard to even talk about this, but I expect that many of us who are both avid golfers and golf fans and to any degree competent professionals in dealing with the human psyche and soul felt something about it. Of course Tiger has had to deal with a lot of questioning about his game since his father’s death from cancer a while back this year. And something of the comment I heard he made may have come from frustration at having to put up with all that. Even so, for him to assert that his poor performance had nothing to do with his grief but only “failure to execute” … well, far less accomplished golfers who are older and wiser in the ways of life and its companion, death, likely winced along when they heard that.

This is a more existential or circumstantial reason for Golf Shock, and because that’s so, it’s also perhaps a harder version of that shock to recognize and take into account. Darren Clarke is surely suffering it at this point in his life due to his wife’s terrible struggle with cancer also. Mickelson must have had a severe case of it at least briefly when his wife Amy almost died in childbirth. Nicklaus, over the drowning death of his grandson. There are so many examples, and it’s almost crude to bring them up, because the human realities of those situations are so much bigger and more all-encompassing of life and its meanings and passages than The Game would appear to be at face value.

I understand both Tiger and Phil are going to be talking later this week–July 5th–presumably about their particular experiences at the Open and what they feel about them now. I hope Tiger is able to acknowledge the devastation of actually losing his father without it somehow meaning to him that his golf game is automatically going to continue to be less than his finest. I remember when my mother died nearly a decade ago. I was 46 and my sister was five years younger. When she called an old friend of our mother to inform her, the woman’s first comment to her was, “Oh, I’m so sorry! 41 is way too young to lose your mother!” It was way too soon for me too. Nothing could have prepared any of us for the shock of my mother’s unrelieved absence.

Even though Tiger knew his dad was in danger for years after the original cancer diagnosis, the actual hole in the world that we suffer when we lose a parent–especially one as beloved as Earl Woods was to his son–is something no one can prepare for. It puts the entire rest of our lives into inevitable shock for some time thereafter. This is so no matter how well we are able to continue in our established patterns and do the things we need and love to do.

As a fan and an avid golfer, I admire and respect both Tiger and Phil tremendously. I intend these comments only in that spirit. Their recent experiences, I feel, offer many of the rest of us much to contemplate. One is with respect to this factor I call Golf Shock, how it can get instigated by events both on and off the course, and how Honest Swing Realism might help us deal with it. And how, sometimes, as in enduring the death of a precious loved one, that kind of practical realism might not help us deal with the larger shock much at all .. except in the simple fact of being able to acknowledge that we’re in it.