breaking 80. game improvment, the mental game
Golden Tee Golf: Has it revealed my fatal flaw?
30/12/11 14:31
My 14-year-old son received the popular TV Games Deluxe Golden Tee
golf game for Christmas, so, of course, I had to
sit down and give it a try!I’ll say right now that I do really enjoy the game and will do a full review in a future post, but that’s not what’s troubling me today.
I’m one of those people who golfers who is always looking for ways to improve my game in unlikely surroundings, and believe that there are things that certain video games teach you that you can apply to the real game on an actual golf course. I found the putting action of the roller ball in Golden Tee to have a similar instinctual feel to actual golfing an dI think that a golfer can learn a lot about course management on a game like golden tee. But, for me, Golden Tee has another tie to my real golf game.
When I’m on the golf course, I almost always start off pretty well, and by the fourth or fifth hole the thoughts begin to creep into my consciousness: “Today’s the day!”, “I’ve really got it going today!”, “ I don’t feel like I could possibly eve bogey a hole today if I tired!” , I’m going to break 80 today!”. Usually somewhere around the fifth or sixth hole it happens: A careless drive ends up in the trees or a fat approach drops into a pond, or an easy chip shot is skulled across the gree and before I know it I’ve double or triple bogied a hole. “Uh-oh”’ I think”” Well, I’ll just bear down and make sure that doesn’t happen again!”
By the turn I’m usually in the low to mid 40’s, and thinking that at least I should be able to make the high 80’s with no problem. Of course, it’s like a rerun of a bad old TV show that I’ve seen over and over again. The wheels begin to come off on the tenth, eleventh, twelfth holes. Balls are flying everywhere. Any bad thing that I can think of I manage to achieve with my golf clubs. I can almost always suck it up by the middle of the back nine and limp home to a score in the low 90’s or high 80’s if I’m lucky, but another perfect day has gone frustratingly and inexplicably bad.
So, imagine my amazement when these very things started to happen to me at the Golden Tee Golf console! Fast starts followed by quick climbs up the leaderboard. Momentary mental lapses and ill-advised shot attempts. Huge blow-up holes. A return to reality, a steadying moment and a decent finish, by which time I’ve free fallen completely out of site of the leaders.
My question is this: Why do I do the exact same things on the golf course and on a seemingly unrelated electronic simulation game? Do I have some sort of flaw in my mental make-up? Am I unable to properly concentrate? Do I become over-confident? Or do I have some sort of fear of success that requires me to sabotage my own efforts?
Obviously I do not have the answers to these questions, but I feel that at least recognizing and acknowledging these things brings me one step closer to conquering them. And by seeing the parallels between Golden Tee and real life, maybe I’ll be able to use my TV game console to rise to glory on the golf course!
My Breakin’ 80 golf blog details my quest to break 80 on the golf course and gives me an outlet for any other deep thoughts I might have on the great game of golf. Be sure to visit my eBay golf club store for great deals on used golf clubs the I can no longer find a place for in my garage or my Amazon.com Golf Shop for shiny new gear!
|