Hello from Roanoke, TX, hope this finds everyone doing well and enjoying life. When I quit my job last August in pursuit of my dream of playing golf professionally, I knew I had a long way to go to be competitive on the Mini Tours, let alone the PGA Tour. Five consecutive missed cuts later, I feel as though I have traversed the parking lot and reached the information kiosk at the base of the mountain I intend to climb. It took me a bit to get here as I parked the car in the back row to keep people from dinging the door. Now that I've reached the information kiosk with a nice illustration of the birds and snakes I might encounter along my hike, I feel slightly more worthy to make a judgment of the scale of the mountain before me. And from here it looks a bit more daunting than it did from the parking lot, and I'm not sure I've got the proper footwear. No I'm not quitting, I just need to run back to the car for a few things.
In order to start gaining any kind of ground, I need to find my "deal". While crossing the parking lot, I was able to do a bit of people watching on my fellow dreamers. It is immediately evident which guys know their "deal" and which ones are still finding it. The guys that know their "deal" have their rations portioned, boots strapped, and avalanche shovel shined up and ready to go while others arrive at the base of the mountain in gym shorts and flip flops. The guys that know their "deal" have a chance to reach the summit, unfortunately there is no gondola for the other goobers.
Moving away from the trite mountain analogy, the bottom line is guys that know their "deal" are consistently able to "play the game" in competition. They may not always play well, but they are always playing while others are dodging bullets while herding cats. I've not yet been able to consistently and tangibly describe what it means in my own game to just "play golf", but I've been able to observe plenty of examples of others doing it. To non-golfers, it probably sounds horkus dorkus and redundant for a golfer to learn how to "play golf" but I assure you, the game is hard enough when played with a confident approach, let alone with any kind of doubt. The best description I can give of the on-course demeanor of those "playing golf" is a perfectly calm, balanced mental teeter totter between care and don't care. People who are able to operate in this emotionless, logical balance are only able to do so because they've worked out a set of truths about their game through productive practice, effectively eliminating a barrier of doubt others face on each shot. It is as though they are operating at a deeper level of consciousness and playing a much easier version of the game. They already know how far they will carry their clubs within a couple yards, they know where their miss is going to go, and more importantly where it's not going to go, they know their general trajectory with each club, and they know where to place the ball on each hole for the best probability of success given their style. People that know their "deal" have built such a solid operating system that they are able to almost conjure each shot from their body as if pushing a button. This "base note" or "stock shot" occurs purely from muscle memory at at low level of conscious thought, freeing the rest of their brain to create the artistry required to counteract variables such as wind and terrain. It is a hard-wired piece of software that a club will put a ball through a certain window at a certain yardage, and there are redundant surge protection systems in place that free the player up even more knowing they will get the ball up and down in the unlikely event of a missed green. Operating with true belief in this level of mastery of physics, it is much easier to find that balanced teeter totter between care and don't care. People in this zone have done the homework, and are rationally pointing and clicking on the screen where they want the ball to go. They realize they are human and the ball might only go exactly where they click once or twice per round, but the mentality is the same every time no matter the outcome, even if terrible. These folks have figured out how to turn 3-D chess into checkers. It's like a Broadway star that takes his show on the road. He's already committed the choreography and lines to memory, he just has to unfurl them in Toledo instead of New York, no big deal. Meanwhile his equally talented, less experienced understudy's stomach is churning and mind is racing at the thought of having to fill in at the last minute.
So what do I need to do to find my "deal"? I'm working on it....
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