How to score well when we’re not playing well

In the first of a series of columns with Golf365, mental coach Duncan McCarthy says we need to remember that mental, physical and technical aspects all dictate how we score

We all want to play our best all the time but how often do we actually play with our A game? How often does that actually happen? Not as often as we probably would like or anticipate.

I will always look at it as having our A, B or C games as, more often than not, we’ll probably produce our B game where it’s not far off. So we’re playing OK but there will be a couple of ugly shots in there. This is quite relative to any standard of golfer, right from a tour player down to a club golfer, and this is where most of us play our golf from.

Acceptance here is crucial and having the understanding that the B game’s going to be there more often than not, the A game will show its face now and again but, equally, we’ve got to be aware that sometimes our C game might show its head.

When we reflect on a round we will base things on how we swung it and hit the ball. But when we actually break it down, a performance is made up of our mental, physical and technical abilities – and in no particular order.

Just because we have a technical C game one day, that doesn’t mean that the physical and the mental have to be C as well. So, if we’re not hitting it great at all and we class this as a C, it’s then about priding ourselves on an A game mental performance. We’ll have a good idea of how good a physical shape we are in before a round but we can also look at how good we were at eating and drinking over the 18 holes and how our body stood up to the whole round.

Some days we will be an A technically and we’ll be hitting the ball great but we’ll not be matching that with an A game mental performance. We have to pride ourselves on getting the best out of each of these three areas. Obviously if we’re swinging it great then that will influence on maybe taking on a couple more shots and, equally, if we’ve got our B game, let’s just try and dump it in the centre of the green. It’s always worth remembering that the middle of the green never hurt anyone.

If we have our C game technically then fairways are good, greens are good and around the greens are good – let’s eliminate the worst-case scenario and put the ball into those smart areas.

Talk about the good stuff and be proud

We’re almost told right from our school days what we did wrong and what we didn’t do well. We definitely don’t spend enough time on how well we actually did do something. Part of my job is to identify where a player can improve but we’ve always got to talk about the good stuff that we’re doing and the progress that we are making.

We don’t choose our memories wisely and it’s important that we start using our past a little bit better and go OK, this is what I’m proud of in my past and these are the lessons that I want to bring forward into my present and future. And if we start to use that a little bit better, then we can get more out of ourselves in the here and now.

We would be able to count the number of times a tour player will have their absolute A game on the fingers of one hand. There are a few exceptions, like a Scottie Scheffler, and any tour player’s absolute A games is unbelievable but it would be on one hand and that’s not playing it down or being negative.

I’ve spoken about this with one player on having a C game that makes cuts and a B game that can get us close to being in contention. Then our A game sticks us into contention and hopefully crossing the line more often than not with a win.

But remember that each game is made up of mental, physical and technical so we’re talking about everything functioning well there. We might have our A game mentally and physically but technically our B game and that can still get us into contention.

Learn from Tiger

Tiger Woods won 82 times on the PGA Tour and, as incredible a player as he is, he didn’t have his technical A game for all of those weeks but mentally he will have been absolutely spot on.

As a club golfer we could mark ourselves at the end of a round rather than coming off and just counting up how many putts we took and leaving it at that. And do grade this over the 18 holes and not just on our emotional reaction to the last few holes.

Everyone’s different but we could have a grading out of five for our mental, physical and technical performance. Performance is a mixture of those three things and it’s the ability to pull all those three individual skills together on any given day to go perform.

About Duncan McCarthy
Duncan works with golfers across all tours including Marcus Armitage, Erik van Rooyen and Women’s British Open winner Ashleigh Buhai