Feeling good about what you’re facing is key to surviving toughened courses

A couple of years ago, when Davis Love III won the PGA Championship at Winged Foot, one of the factors working for him was his attitude about the course. Going into the tournament, Davis felt that Winged Foot would favor a long hitter who was on his game. He felt good about the fact that Jack Lumpkin, his swing coach, had worked at Winged Foot and knew the layout intimately. He’d have all the local knowledge he’d need to play intelligently. Couple that attitude with the fact that Davis was hitting the ball as well as he ever had and the result was a dominant, satisfying triumph.

These days, though, it’s getting more difficult for players to combine those attributes as they start a major championship. Bringing a player’s game to a peak is no more or no less a challenge than it ever was. But having a good attitude about the golf course gets more difficult all the time. It sometimes seems that a contender at a major has to vanquish two foes: the field and the course superintendent.

The superintendent, of course, does the bidding of the group that organizes the championship, be it the Augusta National Golf Club, the United States Golf Association, or the Professional Golfers Association. Those groups know what they want. They want a course that will put players - and the television audience - through an emotional wringer. They want the winner to seem like the last man left standing. They want to see tears in his eyes when he hoists the trophy - tears of elation, yes, but also tears of relief and exhaustion.

There’s nothing new in grooming major championship venues to test the best players. It’s been going on at least since Robert Trent Jones turned Oakland Hills into a “monster” for the 1951 U.S. Open. But what Jones did was straightforward compared to the way courses are now prepared.

At the recent U.S. Open in Pinehurst, for instance, the false fronts of many greens were soft and the rest of the putting surfaces were hard. That meant that shots hitting the first third of the typical green spun back and rolled off. Shots hitting past the mid-point of the green generally bounced through. The effective targets were a lot smaller than Donald Ross intended.

So a lot of what I do when I help players prepare for majors involves how to react to the caprices of the golf course. These ideas can be helpful to anyone who’s got to play on a course that’s been altered by the course superintendent to play tougher.

First, forget what the course was like the last time you played it, or how you think it should be groomed. That isn’t going to help you. Decide that you love the course as it’s presented every day, remembering that everyone has to work with the same greens and the same rough. Assume that some good shots are going to be punished by terrible bounces and some bad shots will be rewarded by freakish luck. Don’t get upset when it happens, either to your detriment or an opponent’s benefit.

Second, make sure the mechanical aspects of your game are as finely honed as you can get them before you arrive at the tournament site. If you arrive and decide you’ve suddenly got to master a lob from a tight lie, or a one-iron off the tee, you’re going to wear yourself out practicing that shot. You’ll want to conserve energy during the competition, not spend it on frenzied practice. Just surviving the tournament will take all the mental and physical stamina you can muster.

Remember that the thick rough and the slick greens will take a double toll on a lot of your competitors. They’ll lose strokes directly to those hazards. And they’ll lose some more in an indirect way because they’ll let irritation, frustration and anger throw them off their normal games.

The player who can find a way, as Davis did at Winged Foot, to feel good about the course is a player with a real chance to win.

Eminent sports psychologist and author, Dr. Bob Rotella, works with numerous top tournament golfers. Bob Cullen is a regular contributor to The Majors of Golf.