Chances Are...

What I love about the game of golf is that it is so complicated, yet so simple. If you have sufficent talent and practice enough, you can physically execute the shots that are needed in pretty much any given situation. But as any golfer knows, executing the shots and actually pulling off the shots at the right times are two very different things.

You can practice for as long as you want, for as many days in a row as you want, play practice rounds to your heart's content and work on your game until the cows come home, but if you can't pull it off when it counts, golf can destroy you. Golf is the master and we are the students and that will never change.

Practice makes perfect. We all know that. I firmly believe in the theory that if you can practice, practice, practice, develop a routine and stick to it on every shot, that in pressure situations you will pretty much go into automatic mode and the routine will act as a calming mechanism to help you execute the shot. I know this because I've done it. I have been able to execute shots in what for me are pressure situations and I can look back and know without a doubt that the mindset that the routine put me in is what helped me through it.

But before the shot, before the routine comes the decision making process. For me, decision making is beginning to come with age and experience. I can stand over a shot now and run the scenarios over in my head and most of the time I can come up with a decision that I am confident in. Harvey Penick called it 'controlled agression'. If you want to take chances, you can, but you want to be sure to put yourself in a position where the percentages are in your favor when you take that chance.

If I'm a professional gambler and I don't play the percentages, I won't be a professional gambler for very long. It's the same on the golf course. You and you alone are in control of when it's best to take the chance and when it's best to lay up. If you always take the chance no matter the situation, you're not a 'Riverboat Gambler', you're just a high handicapper with delusions of grandeur.