I got to thinking about
intent last week after a chance encounter with the Albert Einstein of raccoons.
Our foursome parked near the green on #5 of the Pecan course at Grapevine GC, chatted
as walked down the hill to hit our putts, but our conversation was interrupted
by some commotion near the carts. We looked back to see a rather large, gaunt raccoon
rummaging through our gear. I ran over and shooed the beast back to the woods
with the flagstick, only to look back moments later as he was prying the lid
off my playing partner’s vacuum sealed YETI cup. I watched in amazement as the
critter removed the lid with his jaws, spit it out like a spent sunflower seed,
raised the heavy thermos out of the cup holder, dumped the coffee on the cart
path, grasped his shiny prize in his creepy paws, and ran off into the woods. At
first, I filed this away as non-conscious opportunistic behavior, a lucky raccoon
stumbling across the perfect ambush spot to collect car keys, Casios, and cups.
I’m starting to think he’s come to realize the value of his new honey hole
after he ambushed my cart again three days later much more stealthily. I’m not saying
the perspicacious Procyon is going to one day build a rocket to the moon, but I believe he
has demonstrated sufficient awareness and planning to establish a brief
foothold in our world crafted of conscious intent.
There is a delay between
the moment we decide to do something and the resulting movement of our bodies as
a representation of that idea. This delay exists on microscopic and macroscopic
level. On a small, relatively unchangeable scale, there is the physics-based delay
of electrical signals making their way from your brain to your muscles, and on
a more variable scale, the observer-based delay of turning decisions into
actions. In basketball, these observer-based delays are nearly nonexistent for
a skilled ball handler weaving through traffic on a fast break, in baseball,
there’s no time to try and figure out the best plan to hit a ninety-eight mile
per hour fastball into the gap, but in golf, we’ve got nothing but time. The
proverbial good news and bad news is the same here: we’ve got time to consider
all the variables in our environment before we turn our decision into action.
If we define our decision
as intent, a plan yet to be tried, and our action as the swing, a resulting
motion, I think it is fair to say intent will always beat action in a foot race.
Said another way, intent is our puppeteer; our golf swing is the marionette. The
golf swing is a shadow cast by intent, the wake behind the boat, and I
encourage golfers to spend their time better understanding the true cause of
their results, good and bad.
To better understand the importance of untarnished intent, grab a scorecard and try playing nine holes where you compare your intention with the result on each shot. If the shot was a reasonable approximation of your intent, write "OK" in the box as shown below. If the shot was a near carbon copy of your intent, write "WOW" and enjoy the rare moment. If you hit a poor shot, try and figure out why your body did not appropriately interpret your intentions. It could be that you never gave your muscles clear instructions about what you wanted to try and do, aka not having a clear plan. Or it could be that your clear plan was somehow muddied. This usually happens when something stressful, confusing, or interesting in our environment distracts us enough to reign supreme in our consciousness, floating above the plan.
For example on #11 below, I hit an awesome drive within yards of my target = "WOW", a decent approach to about 25 feet = "OK", my attention was distracted by a spectator walking through my field of vision as I hit my first putt 5 feet short = "DISTRACTED, RESET", I hit a good putt that lipped out for par = "OK", then tapped in for bogey, "OK".
On #14, I had a clear intention to hit a cut driver toward the right fairway bunker. Right before my swing, the wind gusted just enough to grab my attention for a moment. The breeze did not become my main focus, simply the first bit of confusion thrown at my intention. This confusion acted like a doorway however, welcoming more corruption to the mix. With my intention slightly tainted, I lost track of the big picture of the shot and began being aware of every position in the swing. I remember looking at the clubface as the swing began, thought it looked a bit shut for my liking, and ended up hitting a sky-high slice toward the houses on the right = "Aware". I took an unplayable to get the ball away from the OB fence = "X". I hit a high pitching wedge toward the fairway over the tree in my way = "OK", then nearly jarred my 20 yard short sided lob shot, "WOW".
The more you start to keep track of score this way, you should begin to understand the correlation between uncorrupted intent and decent/great golf shots. On the flip side, you'll often see poor shots stemming from poor planning or dishonest comfort. The takeaway here should be that your best golf is played in a trance of uninterrupted intent, point-and-click golf, simple as that.
