Gyra Golf: Golf's 1St Mental Scorecard

GYRA Golf

Golf’s 1st Mental Scorecard

Dr. Izzy Justice

GYRA GOLF

Golf’s 1st Mental Scorecard

Copyright © 2020 Dr. Izzy Justice.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-6632-0058-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-0057-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020909443

iUniverse rev. date:  06/08/2020

Dedication

To Stephanie, Lexi, Hunter, and my eternal mentor, Gary Mason.

Acknowledgments

This book would not be possible without the input of so many golfers who participated in the invaluable research and insight into this book. Special thanks to Gary Player, Hunter Justice, David Ross, Matt Ryan, Tim Straub, Seamus Power, Jason Gore, Courtney Hall, Cornel Driessen, and my editor, Anjum Khan.

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter 1

Why Train in EQ?

Chapter 2

Neuroscience of a Golfer

Chapter 3

GYR – Golf EQ (Emotions)

Chapter 4

Agnostic (A)

Chapter 5

The GYRA Mental Scorecard

Chapter 6

GYRA Tools – Focus

Chapter 7

GYRA Tools – Tournament Week

Chapter 8

GYRA Golf Bag – Tools for Competitive Round

Chapter 9

Making Adjustments Using the GYRA Scorecard

Chapter 10

Q School with GYRA

Foreword

I love how golf can bring people, friends, families, and communities together – as I’ve always said, golf is a friendship factory! It is a gift of time. When I design courses, I take pride in knowing thousands of conversations are going to occur on the property. Memories will be made. Golfers will have a chance to beat their best every time they play. I love knowing that, as a designer and architect of holes, I am testing not just the physical ability of the golfer, but also the ability to make decisions, take risk-reward challenges, take pride in conquering the course, and view failures as a challenge to come back and give it another go. I know I am testing the human brain and its capacity to make good and poor decisions, to create narratives, good and bad, and to tell stories of the battle that occurred on the golf course. I know this because I did the same as a player. I know that I enjoyed the test and I loved the memories of the challenges. I know that the test is both physical and mental, and frankly, more mental than physical.

So you can imagine my surprise when the concept of a mental scorecard was introduced to me. I was quite intrigued as I had not heard of such a thing. Keep a mental score after each shot and each hole? What? How? I know we keep score after each hole, number of shots taken, and this is a measure of your battle against the course. Every golfer knows that the first battle on the course is not against the course, it is against oneself. Can we recover from a bad shot? Can we recover from a bad break? Did we consider all the factors correctly before picking the club and choosing the shot to hit? Is there a way to measure this mental battle?

If you can describe your shoes or any golf club better than you can describe your brain, then you are like the rest of us. This world of neuroscience, understanding how the brain works, has always intrigued me. Technology is allowing us to go inside the tiny neurons of the brain and see where they are going when over a critical putt, after a bad shot, or hole or bad break, and understand for the first time what is happening.

The notion that we can keep mental score was completely foreign to me until I read Dr. Justice’s work. What a game-changing concept! Why not keep mental score when keeping golf score on the same scorecard? Why not use the mental scores to make adjustments? The golfer’s brain is constantly working, negotiating with itself, playing roles of judge, jury, prosecutor, defendant, and narrator of the past and future, all without our understanding of what is really happening. Win the mental score first and then you can take on the golf course. This is the right order of battle. I know this to be true from my own experience. The most frustrating part about golf is not losing, but when you lose because of your own mental or emotional mistakes, when you perform below what you know you are capable of.

Dr. Izzy Justice has created golf’s first mental scorecard. Unbelievable! It is simple; it is kept on the same scorecard as the golf score, no devices needed, so that you know exactly where your brain is after each shot. This book is easy to read and understand so that you can get to know your own brain as well as any of your clubs. I can see how any golfer of any level would find great value in this. You may never play golf the same way if you start measuring your mental performance on the golf course.

Gary Player

World Golf Hall of Fame

Nine-Time Major Winner

165 Professional Victories over five decades

Introduction

I am proud to share the first golf mental scorecard that is based on the results of a 12-month longitudinal, neuroscience-based research study on the correlation of emotional state, brain activity, and quality of golf shots. Golfers from all levels were taught an easy-to-understand model, GYRA, and asked to keep their emotional and mental score per shot and per hole on the same traditional golf scorecard. The randomized data from 500 of these scorecards was entered into a database that allowed us to draw conclusions on the impact of poor shots on subsequent shots. Certain shots correlated to half-stroke cost while others were a full-stroke cost to the overall score. I will lay out the neuroscience used, explain the GYRA model, share how costs are calculated, describe tools to use to adjust for these costs, and end with a first-hand account from a professional on how to use this model to essentially make you your own sports psychologist when you are playing so you can make better decisions and perform to your potential. To learn more, go to www.gyragolf.com.

As a sports neuropsychologist, I have worked with professional athletes, coaches, and teams in many sports, as well as with business professionals for three decades specializing in Emotional Intelligence (EQ). When working with golfers and golf instructors, I always start by asking them to describe their driver to me. Invariably, it is usually quite detailed. Most can tell me their brand, length of shaft, stiffness, flex points, club head size, loft, grip type and size, and so on. I then ask them to describe their brain. You can visualize the blank stare response. Golfers use a driver about 14 times a round. They use their brain on every shot, between shots, before a round, and after a round. It is the brain that creates the running commentary, where decisions are made on club/shot selection and course management, and where the signal is created and transported to the muscles to execute those decisions. I have found a profound deficiency in golfers in their understanding of the brain. Equally deficient is emotional literacy to label and adjust the spectrum of emotions felt through the course of a round. This book will provide that brain understanding and emotional literacy so that as a golfer, the ‘club’ you use on every shot, your brain, is as familiar to you as your driver.

It should be noted that this book is not a golf instruction book. I do not teach you how to swing any club. There is no substitute for being taught how to swing any golf club, or for a player understanding the mechanics behind a poor shot; and for that, I wish to acknowledge the invaluable role of golf teaching professionals. However, if you know how to hit a particular shot — and you have done it many times before successfully at your command — but that skill is not showing up in a critical situation, that is where this book comes in. If you find yourself saying, I am underperforming! or, Where did that come from? or, I can’t believe I just did that! or, I don’t know why I did that, then this book will answer those questions. When my phone rings, it is not because of any score that a player has just shot, it is because the player does not understand why he or she underperformed.

Golf Background

Golf is played in more than 200 countries. There are over 34,000 golf courses in the world. The U.S. has the most, with over 15,000. In 2005, player participation in the U.S. was at its peak, with roughly 30 million players. Shortly after that, numbers dropped steeply to around 24 million. In the last four years, the numbers have increased and are holding steady at around 25 million players.

There are 1,289 men’s college golf programs and 939 women’s programs. Division One programs have the highest number of teams from both sexes, with 299 men’s and 262 women’s programs. For these Division One programs, over $9 million are given out in scholarships combined.

The top five world golf markets are: (i) U.S., (ii) Japan, (iii) South Korea, (iv) U.K., and (v) Canada. These five markets represent 80% of total equipment sales. The U.S. and Japan control over 65% of the world market. In 2015, golf generated $8.7 billion globally.

The two governing bodies are the United States Golf Association (USGA) and the R&A. The USGA was founded in 1894 and is the governing body in the U.S. and Mexico only. The R&A was originally founded in 1754 as the Society of St. Andrews Golfers (in Scotland), and it governs the rest of the world.

One can discern from all these hard statistics that golf is a lucrative and global sport, and growing at the junior levels at an unprecedented rate. What these facts do not show is the spirit and soul of golf.

Golf is as much a sport as it is a social and business enterprise. There are vast housing developments built around golf courses so that homes can have views of fairways, greens, flowers and ponds. There are social events, such as Member-Guest tournaments, that usually are the annual highlight for most clubs. Golfers take golf trips around the country and world to build friendships and take a break from the hustle and bustle of work and family life. Vacations are planned around golf destinations that also cater to non-golfers with amenities like spas.

A ton of business is also conducted on the golf course. Corporate outings and business dealings are a norm as the change in scenery from office space is often welcome, not to mention an emotionally-disarming environment.

There is also the relaxation and physical health component that most retirees cherish. It feels great to get out of the house, and go out with little physical stress and walk on fairways. Many find it therapeutic as the social interaction with friends in an outdoor setting just feels good.

Golf as an Endurance Sport

It can be easy to forget, given all these benefits of the game of golf, that it is a sport requiring skills that has measurable outcomes. Golf, for all practical purposes, is an endurance sport. An average round of golf for 18 holes lasts about 4.5 hours. That is about the same time it takes on average to complete a full marathon of 26.2 miles, or just an hour less than a half Ironman event of 1.2 miles of swimming, 56 miles of riding a bike, and 13.1 miles of running.

What makes golf the ultimate endurance test is that it is quite literally 93% mental and 7% physical. How so? It takes anywhere between 5 and 15 seconds to actually hit a golf shot; that is, to draw a club back and strike the ball physically. With an average score of 85 shots for 18 holes, that is less than 20 minutes of physical activity. This means that for a 4.5-hour round, 4.1 hours are spent on non-physical activity that very few golfers have any plan for. It begs the question of why almost 100% of time training for golf is spent on the physical activity, yet almost no time is spent on effectively managing the large amount of time between shots?

I speak at events about 20-30 times a year and often ask golfers: What percentage of golf is mental versus physical? The lowest mental number I have heard is 60% and the highest is 95%. I have found that the better the golfer, the higher the percentage of the mental side is acknowledged. It begs another question of why, if both the quantitative time and the actual percentage of skill (60-95%) required is mental, there is almost no time spent training for this?

This book is largely about managing that 93% of time so that when you are ready to hit a shot, your emotions and thoughts are in the best place possible for the shot to come out as you want. It is about recognizing that, just because you are not hitting a shot 93% of the time, the brain is still working, processing past and future shots. If the brain is left to do what it naturally does, that is a wasted opportunity. It is about having a plan to play golf to give you the best chance of being fully ready (mentally, emotionally, and physically) to hit the next shot to the best of your ability, whatever that ability is.

The central premise of this book is that golf is as much an emotional and mental endurance test as it is a golf skill test.

In trying to understand why little to no time is spent training for the emotional and mental test of golf, of the many reasons offered and researched, I have found one cause more compelling than all others. As a tour pro confessed, I don’t even know exactly what I’m supposed to do to mentally prepare or grow. This is because there is no measurement of the mental side of golf.

In all sports, and golf is no different in this regard, the measurements of the physical side of the sport are abundant. In basketball, stats are provided for the number of minutes played, shots taken, shots made, rebounds, assists, and 3-points made. In golf, just go to the PGA Tour website, pick any pro, and under their profile you will find more statistics than you are likely to understand. The most common ones are score, fairways hit, greens hit, and putts made. For tour players, there are about 20 other measurements available. Because of these measurable results, it is easy to identify areas of improvement. If you only hit 2 fairways in your round, then you likely need to work on your driver. If you took 54 putts, 3 per hole, then you likely need to work on your putting. Measurements allow us to identify areas of strength and weakness, thus making it logical to know what to work on to improve.

However, as noted in the earlier paragraphs, the consensus is largely that golf is driven not by these measurable physical skills, but actually by the mental ones. In Chapter 2, I will show neurologically that, in fact, the physical golf skill rests on first the emotional and mental state of the brain. In other words, those golf statistics we measure are more dependent on other variables (emotional and mental) than on the proficiency of golf skills themselves.

What if there was a mental scorecard that allowed you to do the same things as the other golf metrics? What if the mental score per hole, and even per shot, allowed you to know exactly where you are emotionally and mentally? Could the metrics help you make adjustments while you are playing? Once the round is complete, could the mental scorecard be used to identify what to work on, to improve? Could a mental scorecard provide an answer to the tour pro’s question of knowing what to actually do to build mental strength? The answer is YES!

The emotional and mental endurance test that is golf requires a scorecard that can identify the true root cause of poor shots.

It is worth repeating the question many good golfers ask me: I don’t even know what to work on so I can be mentally stronger when I’m playing? If your putting is off, you have dozens of drills and training aids to help. If your bunker play is off, and the statistics show your bunker save-percentage is low, then you know to get a lesson on bunker play and work on it. If your swing is off, you may have an instructor who knows your swing and knows what is off. But in the hours of practice time you have, what exactly are you supposed to be doing to grow mentally?

This book presents what I believe to be the first Golf Mental Scorecard, called the GYRA Scorecard. I will share how to train your brain off the golf course to become mentally stronger during practice time; and how to use the score card when playing to properly identify the root cause of a bad shot (or hole or sequence of shots/holes) so that the adjustments can be made and rounds/scores can be saved.

Crises are part of life. Everybody has to face them, and it doesn’t make any difference what the crisis is. -Jack Nicklaus

I will also introduce you to a sequence of emotional and mental preparation, before, during, and after a round, as well as for practice. You will be introduced to a new emotional and mental language similar to the physical language of golf. In the latter, golfers know what a bunker is, what fairways, greens or rough are, and what a putter is versus an iron or a driver or wedge. We know what a fade, draw, hook, and slice are. These are all words that form a language that allow you to understand the physical game of golf. Yet, we do not even have a language to understand our own brain or emotions; words that we can use in the same way to properly label and adjust what is going on during the round.

In addition to a new language, you will build your own personal game plan. No two human beings are the same emotionally and mentally, so the plan for each person will be different and has to accommodate the emotional fluctuations of both life and golf, where highs and lows can impact so much of decision-making. I call this the software of each person, as opposed to the hardware, which is our physical and biological bodies, which are virtually identical in function. Your software is different from any other human in the world, even though you have the same organs and body parts as everyone in the world.

During a round of golf, the sheer volume of monologues (software) that occur is quite unprecedented. Each monologue, that self-talk