This piece began with two scorecards. One day I shot one under par at Drumoig. The next day I shot fourteen over par at Craigtoun. Same golfer, same body, same clubs, same swing, twenty-four hours apart. Nothing material had changed, but something clearly had. At Drumoig I had simply played golf. By the time I arrived at Craigtoun, expectation had joined me.
That contrast bothered me because I had only recently written You’ve Gotta Have Faith, an essay about trusting the golfer who turns up, and recognising that faith cannot depend on a particular outcome. That piece developed its own soundtrack. George Michael would appear at the start and tell me to have Faith, while Bon Jovi arrived in times of stress to tell me to Keep the Faith.
For this essay, I have expanded the musical theme rather substantially. What began with two songs has somehow become a 36-track playlist, and I’ve called it The Sounds of the Wave. Some songs describe the golf, some describe what happens inside my head, and several describe the surprisingly inventive ways I can self-sabotage, despite having written extensively about why I shouldn’t.
Listen along: The Sounds of the Wave — a 36-track soundtrack to the rise, fall and recovery.
But why a wave? Well, golf, like life, is cyclical. Form rises and falls. Confidence rises and falls. Mood, energy, belief and expectation move with it. At any one time, we will be somewhere on those waves. Some will coincide while others will cross in opposite directions. The mistake is believing that your current location is permanent. For good or bad, all waves will turn.
Fools Gold
Somewhere between leaving Drumoig and arriving at Craigtoun the following morning, a good round had acquired a burden. One under par was no longer simply something that had happened; it had become evidence of what I thought I should now be capable of.
That is the seductive thing about a peak. It can start to feel less like a passing crest and more like the sea level itself has risen. Perhaps this is the level I belong at now. Perhaps all the physical work, speed training and swing changes have finally come together. Perhaps I have found it. I had already written about exactly that tendency in You’ve Gotta Have Faith. But apparently writing something down doesn’t make me immune from doing it again.
That is where some of the confidence at the crest becomes Fools Gold. Not because confidence is false, but because it is so easy to mistake a temporary state for a permanent entitlement.
A recent podcast with Debbie Crews gave me a useful way to think about what happened next: the difference between wants, intentions and needs. “I’d like to hit this fairway” leaves room for whatever outcome happens. “I need to hit this fairway” gives the shot another job before I have even started the backswing. Miss the fairway and I have somehow failed.
At Drumoig, I had intentions. At Craigtoun, I had needs.
I needed to confirm the previous day. I needed to prove it wasn’t an aberration. I needed to look like the golfer who had just shot one under. Each shot stopped being merely a shot and became evidence for or against the story I was telling myself.
That is a pretty efficient form of Sabotage.
The irony is that nothing meaningful about the golfer had physically changed overnight. What changed was my relationship with the golf. Something I had previously allowed to happen became something I was monitoring, protecting and trying to reproduce.
The grip tightened. The swing became more manufactured. Freedom acquired supervision. There was no graceful descent. One under, then fourteen over. I was Shot Down in Flames.
Yesterday’s golf becomes today’s obligation, and the wave turned down.
Loaded
That matters because I genuinely am trying to change as a golfer, and I am working hard at it too. I’m 57 and want to be playing competitively at 77. I’m in the gym to get stronger and more flexible. My swing speed has improved through my work with James Tait. The movement changes associated with that have produced some of the best iron striking I can remember. There is evidence that the ceiling has risen. There is rather less evidence that the floor has caught up.
However, it does raise an uncomfortable question. Should I have left the old golfer alone? That golfer got me to a handicap of 3, but he also contained the limitations that made me want to improve. So the answer is no. Training is where I work on changing the golfer. Playing is where I have to let whichever golfer the training has produced that day actually play. But I also have to remember that I’m going through swing Changes and be kind to myself through the process.
Speed training has taught me something else: effort and speed are not the same thing. When I become anxious with the driver, I tend to go hard from the top, tense up as I try to muscle the ball and spend the speed too early. Fastlove, originally added to the playlist as a joke, turned out to be annoyingly accurate. I want the speed now, the movement now, and the good golf back now.
That brought me back to Transcendental Golf, which described one of those rare rounds when everything felt quiet and unforced. I was absorbed in the game rather than standing outside myself supervising it. Trying to reproduce that state has proved considerably harder. I joked recently that perhaps “the zone” is a bit like Fight Club: the first rule of getting into the zone is not to talk about getting into the zone.
Something similar happened after You’ve Gotta Have Faith. Before writing it, the songs appeared spontaneously. Afterwards, I’ve caught myself trying to summon them. I had taken something spontaneous, examined it, named it and then, like many golfers, attempted to turn it into a repeatable technique. Perhaps I hadn’t lost faith. Perhaps I had simply started trying too hard to recreate the state that had allowed it to appear.
The opening of Primal Scream’s Loaded asks a beautifully simple question: “Just what is it that you want to do?”
That feels much more useful than asking what I need to shoot, where my handicap needs to go or how I get back into the zone. What do I actually want to do? If I’m honest, I just want to make good decisions, commit to shots, swing freely, compete, accept what happens and, most importantly, enjoy myself. I’m supposed to be here to have fun, not to drive down the Road to Hell.
Born Under a Bad Sign
If the crest distorts perspective, so does the trough.
Deep enough into a poor spell, Born Under a Bad Sign begins to make perfect sense. The putt lips out because, “of course it does”. A good drive kicks into trouble because apparently “nothing ever goes right for me”. Someone else gets the lucky bounce, and it becomes another exhibit for the prosecution.
Before long, I am no longer simply playing badly or experiencing bad luck. I have created a story in which the universe has taken a personal interest in ruining my afternoon.
That is self-pity rather than analysis.
One of the dangers of the trough is believing that the experience is uniquely mine. It isn’t. Everybody Hurts, even if golfers are particularly skilled at assuming nobody else has ever hit three drives that badly.
And when the trough lasts long enough, there is another temptation: to believe There Must Be a Better World Somewhere — another swing, another answer, another version of me in which all of this feels easier. YouTube and The Cult of Personality suck you in with the promise of quick fixes.
And the awkward part is that I know all this already. I have spent years reading about patience, acceptance, trust and commitment, and have written essays explaining them to myself. But none of it prevents a part of my brain from occasionally turning into Rage Against the Machine and screaming, “fuck you, I won’t do what you told me.”
Apparently intellectual understanding and behavioural compliance remain two different departments.
There was more happening than golf too: my daughter had left for university, one of my closest friends had suffered a stroke, and autumn had arrived. None of those things causes a hook, but they inevitably affect the resources with which I respond to one.
Golf is normally somewhere I go to feel absorbed and free. During this spell it has occasionally become another place where I felt uncertain. My behaviour was the giveaway: shoulders down, moping, complaining about shots and bounces and generally behaving like an entitled brat.
The Thrill Is Gone would be overstating it, but some of the lightness certainly had.
That’s Life
This is where the wave began to make more sense.
There isn’t only one. There is a long wave of life involving ageing, family, health and identity. There is a seasonal wave affecting mood and energy. There is a golf wave affecting form and confidence, with smaller waves inside it for driving, putting, course management and everything else.
Usually they are at different stages. Occasionally several troughs coincide and the combined experience feels much bigger than any one part.
Progress itself seems to have the same shape. We like to imagine improvement as a steadily rising line: practise more, get better; get stronger, get better; handicap falls and continues obediently downwards.
Reality looks more like a sine wave wrapped around a longer-term trend.
I can be stronger, faster and capable of better ball striking while simultaneously scoring worse. I can shoot five under on the Strathtyrum, one under at Drumoig and fourteen over at Craigtoun without any one of those rounds providing a definitive verdict on whether I am improving.
There is a phrase I have often heard at funerals that seems particularly suited to the wave: this too shall pass. We usually hear it as comfort in difficult times, and it certainly works that way in a golfing trough. Poor form, frustration and self-doubt are not permanent conditions, however convincing they feel while we are inside them.
But it applies equally at the crest.
The good golf will pass too. The confidence, the feeling that everything has clicked, even the belief that I have finally found “it” — none of them come with permanent residency.
That isn’t pessimism. It is perspective.
As Frank says, That’s Life.
The difficulty is that handicap is not simply a number to me. Getting to 3 represented years of work and competence, and I subconsciously attached status to that, whether I like admitting it or not. Moving back towards 5 therefore felt like more than losing a couple of shots. It started nibbling at identity.
That raises a Who Made Who question. Did I construct the golfer, or has the golfer — the handicap, competence and status — become part of how I construct myself?
Probably a bit of both.
That is when The Pretender arrives. Standing over a tee shot with very little idea where the ball is going can make a low-handicap golfer reconsider his entire history. Perhaps I am not as good as I thought. Perhaps the handicap flattered me. Perhaps no one will ever take my blog seriously if my handicap goes up!
Emotionally persuasive. Logically ridiculous.
The good golf was real. The bad golf is real too.
What I cannot reasonably demand is that past ability guarantees present performance. Perhaps that is where confidence needs redefining.
In You’ve Gotta Have Faith, I wrote that faith was not the belief that my A game would arrive, but faith in whichever game did. Perhaps confidence is not believing the good golf will show up. Perhaps it is believing I can cope if it doesn’t.
Pick Yourself Up
That is a less glamorous form of confidence, but perhaps a more useful one.
A better question than “which golfer is going to turn up?” is: what game have I got today, and how well can I play with it?
That accepts uncertainty without surrendering responsibility. I do not need to know whether the driver will behave for eighteen holes. I need to decide what I want to do with the shot in front of me, bring whatever serves that intention and live with the result.
Sometimes that may be Mr Nice: patient and accepting. Sometimes it may be Mr Nasty: stubborn, competitive and unwilling to indulge another five minutes of internal drama. Like the CEO I used to know who signed off emails with JGIFD, perhaps I need to just get it fucking done.
A recent round on the New Course gave me some evidence. After a messy stretch on the front nine, I carried on rather than declaring the day lost, played the back nine in one under and finished four over. Nothing had been fixed; the poor golf simply hadn’t been allowed to dictate what happened next.
I reread an essay I wrote in 2023 called Pick Yourself Up. It wasn’t just about golf, but much of this was already in there.
Apparently some lessons need to be repeated to be learned.
A Little Less Conversation
That may be the real relationship between this essay and You’ve Gotta Have Faith. The earlier essay wasn’t wrong. I’ve simply mistaken articulating the lesson for learning it.
I had already written that faith couldn’t depend on which golfer turned up, and that the difficult moments might be the lesson. The poor golf days I’m experiencing now are the difficult moments. They are where the philosophy has to earn its keep.
But there’s a point where analysis becomes another form of interference. I have read the books, listened to the podcasts, written the essays, discussed the essays, reflected on the reflections and assembled a Spotify playlist sufficiently elaborate to provide musical commentary on most of my psychological weaknesses.
Elvis may have had a point with A Little Less Conversation.
The next time I play, it doesn’t need to prove that the slump is over, recreate Drumoig or rediscover some perfect state. I can want to play well without needing to. I can choose the shot, decide what serves me, commit to it and accept what happens.
A good shot that gets a bad bounce can remain a good shot rather than becoming another verse of Born Under a Bad Sign. A great round can remain a great round rather than becoming tomorrow’s compulsory standard. I can recognise Fools Gold at the crest without declaring bankruptcy in the trough.
The wave will keep moving. That is not the problem.
The aim is not to flatten it, but to become better at living with it: enjoying the peaks without believing I am entitled to remain there, and navigating the troughs without believing they define me.
The crest passes. The trough passes. This too shall pass.
Maybe that is what Faith looks like when it is tested: not certainty about what comes next, but enough trust to keep playing when it doesn’t look like yesterday.
The practice never finishes.
Perhaps that is the journey.
Where are you on the wave at the moment?
And if your current stretch of golf had a soundtrack, what song would be on it?
Add it in the comments. I may yet find room on The Sounds of the Wave.
The Playlist (Spotify)
Further Reading: