Control

It's not a trick!

As I recover from surgery, I’ve been thinking a lot about control. Mostly because I currently have very little control over how I feel, or what I can do. It’s getting better on a daily basis, but the return to normal has been slow. As my recovery progresses, I’ve looked at what I can control and tried to do my best with it. These ideas can translate directly to golf, and I think they are worth contemplating.

To me, control is like a light switch. When things are perfect, we believe the light switch controls the light. We turn it on, and light follows. The truth of the matter is, we control a circuit. When we flip a light switch “on”, it closes a circuit and electricity moves through the LED, which then emits light. There are many failure points between the switch and creating light, we just don’t often think about them because usually the light turns on. When the power is out, you might say to yourself “oh yes, the switch doesn’t work!”. In reality, we still have the same amount of control over the light switch. It just no longer creates the result we are looking for. 

Control isn’t an illusion. We just don’t often contemplate what we are controlling. Functionally, a light switch turns on a light. We control the light via the light switch. The reality is far more complex than that. That same concept carries over to every other aspect of our lives. What we think we control, and what we actually control can be very different things. If we understand that, and use it to find the things we can control, things become less complicated. 

With golf, control is both important and elusive. There is plenty on the golf course we cannot control. This ranges from large things like weather and course design, to small things like a small imperfection moving a putt offline. People curse “the golf gods” for a reason. There is plenty out there we simply can’t control. So what can we control?

The simple answer is ourselves.

To me, the interesting question becomes, how do we figure out how much of our golf swing we can control?

Before my hiatus, I was working on a drill from Jayson. I put an alignment stick about 6 feet in front of me on the range and tried to control my club face. This drill does a good job of isolating club face control, as the ball goes where the face is pointing (mostly). My first run at it, I was awful. I had very little actual control over the clubface, and it was hard for me to fine tune how far left or right I was hitting the ball. After 30 minutes of frustration, I gave up. 

A week later, I returned to the drill, and found that my control had improved. Not drastically, but my shots were more in line with my expectations. Previously, I had never tried to control the club face on the range. The first session showed me how little I understood actually controlling the club face. The second time around, I better understood what I was trying to do and ended up having better control. This drill will be a staple for me moving forward, because it actually adds more control to my game. 

Even as I dial in control with my club face, it will not be perfect. Hopefully, it will be less imperfect as I practice, but still, a 1 degree change is almost 2 yards “offline” every 100 yards. Combine that with swing path variance, and you start to understand why professional golfers have 70 yards of dispersion with their driver swing. My face and path control is just not good enough for me to expect better than that.

I can, however, control my understanding and acceptance of my lack of control. 

There is no reason for me to be upset at a drive that went offline by a large amount. I can do a brief post mortem and make sure I had controlled everything I could, but if I was present in the shot, went through my setup routine and picked a smart target, then there is little to be frustrated by. If I am going to expect the occasional above average drive, I need to accept the below average drive as well. If I properly control the things I can control, I should be able to mostly stay out of big trouble on the course. 

In my experience, my worst misses are when I am NOT in control (of the things I can control). I still vividly remember getting on the 13th tee, thinking to myself “I haven’t hit a bad drive all day” and then immediately snapping one left and out of bounds. I was not in control of my focus, and paid the price almost instantaneously. I tend to focus on things I can’t control. My current score or the next hole. One of my big goals for 2024 is to control what I can, hit the ball and accept the result.

I can also control the length of this article. There is more to be said about controlling our routines, our practice and using our time, but I think it’s important to just start with the basic idea. Exploring what we can and can’t control. The more we understand what we can control, the better the chance we can work towards our actual goals. It’s something I’ve discussed with my wife about her job and my daughters about their education. Control is not an illusion, we simply need to make sure we are trying to control the right things.