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No Mulligans

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Head games

Using both sides of your brain will lead to a more balanced game.

BY JAMIE MULLIGAN, PGA, WITH GREG FLORESPublished: February, 2009

When I started as a golf instructor, I tried to teach hippies to be more like accountants and accountants to be more like hippies. But the more we studied how people learn and assimilate information, the more we found that these two wildly different people use different parts of their mind to learn.

To simplify things, the left side of the brain is analytical and the right side is artistic.

In the 1980s, Tom Watson, Nick Faldo and Jack Nicklaus all played the game with an amazing amount of organization, technical control and fundamental skill, but they also were graceful and athletic in their movements. They were totally balanced and used both sides of their brain to play.

It’s true across any sport when you take the time to dissect a great athlete. Joe Montana was phenomenal at reading defenses and managing the game clock. Both are left-brained activities. But if you look at his throwing motion, the position of his feet and the balance of his body, he was perfect there as well, meaning that his right brain also performed well in games.

What happens with most amateurs and some of the professionals we work with is that they get going so far in one direction that they lose the ability to play. The analytical guy will get stuck on the fundamentals and forget about the fluidity of the motion. The feel player can get too loose on the course and lose track of his fundamentals.

The ultimate diagnosis for me when trying to determine what side of the brain a player is using is to boil it down to whether they analyze my instruction or they feel it.

Whether we lean to the left or to the right, we are who we are. If you really want to see improvement, you should go in the opposite direction for an entire year. If you attack the game like an accountant, loosen the tie and feel the game more. If you go after the game as a free-spirited hippie, inject a few fundamentals. The gap isn’t as wide as you think.

Jamie Mulligan is chief operating officer and a PGA professional at Long Beach’s Virginia Country Club. He has twice been recognized as Teacher of the Year by the Southern California PGA.