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Other than lightning strikes and screaming line drives from the other fairway, a golf course is generally meant to be a refuge from thoughts of our own mortality.
Would you feel differently if you knew those thoughts helped you play better golf?
The topic is surprisingly relevant after both Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy this week turned questions about their legacies into existential reflections.
First Scottie: “I have never once thought about how I’m going to be remembered. To me, it truly doesn’t matter from a sense of accomplishment. Like when I die, ‘Hey, Scottie won four majors and 20 tournaments and he won this much money’. That has zero effect on me.”
Then Rory: “I would like to think that the people that love and care about me think a certain way of me, but yeah, I’ll be long gone. I’ll be dead. I don’t think I’ll be seeing what people say about me. I’ll be six feet under.”
Maybe this feels like weighty subject matter for guys just trying to navigate a ball around the golf course, yet there is evidence to suggest this perspective helps with even that. The reason is something called “temporal distancing”, which the University of Michigan psychology professor Ethan Kross describes as “mentally time travelling into the future.” In other words, by trying to anticipate how we might feel (or not feel) about an event in the future, we’re more likely to reduce its perceived significance now.
“Studies show that when people are going through a difficult experience, asking them to imagine how they’ll feel about it ten years from now, rather than tomorrow, can be another remarkably effective way of putting their experience in perspective,” Kross writes in his book Chatter. “Doing so leads people to believe that their experiences are temporary.”
Regardless of whether Scheffler or McIlroy had this concept specifically in mind when entertaining questions about their place in history, their answers still speak to a valuable tactic for handling competitive pressure that I’ve referenced before. When do golfers experience stress? When they sense something important is at stake. That response on its own is natural, and even needed. But as scientists have found, our nervous systems respond better when we feel we have the resources to meet a demand rather than believing we’re overmatched. Some of that can come from belief in our skills. But it’s also by recognising that the “demand” isn’t so daunting to begin with.
“What it does is it tends to reduce the meaning of a failure to you,” said Dr Jeremy Jamieson, a stress researcher and psychology professor at the University of Rochester. “If you’re immersed in something, this means everything right now, but if you can see yourself in a more third-person objective standard, the meaning becomes less intense.”
Distancing by time, by perspective, or by imagining the worst are all versions of the same move: shrinking what the moment demands of you until it’s something you can meet. If you’re dreading missing a putt at the end of a match, take a moment to remember what it really means. At some point in the near future, it’s not going to seem as important as it feels now. And as even McIlroy reminds himself on occasion, he’s likely to wake up the next morning regardless.
“If you’re trying to overcome anxiety or nerves around performance, I do try to think about, well, what’s the worst that could happen? I’m not going to die on the golf course.” McIlroy said on the Whoop podcast. “Imagining the worst-case scenario gave me a level of comfort cause I felt like any worst-case scenario that I could bring up in my head, I’ll be able to deal with.”
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Main Image: Stuart Franklin
