What Makes A Golf Shot “Bad”

When I was working as a golf professional, there was a group of golfers who went out every Saturday. They all shot 115 pretty consistently. It was just their number. But if one of them shot 118, they walked off the 18th green mad.

Nobody had told them 115 was good. It was just what they expected so 118 felt like a miss.

I got it.

I played highly competitive golf for a long time and now I'm a mom of two who works, makes dinner and squeezes in nine holes when I can. I'm still mad when a 15-footer for birdie doesn't drop. It's internal. I'm not outwardly mad but the thought is always: I should have made that.

Why should I have? Nobody is keeping score but me.

A bad shot is a comparison

A bad shot is only bad compared to what you expected to happen. The ball finishes 10 feet short and that's all it did. Hit the same shot with a different golfer's expectations and it's a good one. It's bad because you had a bar in your head and that shot didn't get over it.

Where the bar comes from

That bar doesn't come from the pros. We like to blame par and what we watch on TV but that's not what got those golfers and it's not what gets me. It comes from us. We have one great nine, one day when everything worked and, instead of filing it as the best we've done, our head files it as normal. From then on, anything less feels like a miss.

And it only goes one direction. When you get better, the bar moves up. When you get worse, it stays right where it was, waiting for you at every shot.

Why you can't just lower it

That's why the bar sitting where it is is so hard to fix. It isn't a number you picked so you can't just pick a lower one. You can't see it. You only find out where it is when the ball comes up short of it.

I've tried.

I'll get to the first tee and tell myself today is just about being out here, forget par, forget what I used to shoot, just get the ball in the hole however many shots that takes. Then I three-putt the second hole and there it is again: I should have made that.

What if you took it away?

So what if you took it away? No par, no 115, no number you're supposed to hit. A 118 is just a 118 and nobody walks off the 18th green mad.

But nobody walks off happy, either.

Those golfers didn't remember the 118. They remembered the day it was 112, when they finally got over their bar. The same bar that made 118 feel bad is what made 112 feel great. You don't get one without the other.

What I do instead

That's why I'm not going to tell you to lower your bar to make the game more enjoyable. I've tried and I can't. But I've started doing one thing. When the ball finishes short and I feel that heat come up, I stop and ask what I was expecting it to do.

Not what it should have done.

What I was expecting. Most of the time, the answer is a shot I hit once, a long time ago, that my head decided was normal.

It doesn't make me satisfied with a "bad" round or a "bad" shot. What it does is separate the two things that got mixed together. The ball finished short of the hole and that's the whole event. The disappointment came from me. Once I see that, I can ask whether what I expected was fair and, most of the time, I can set it a little more realistically.