Confidence Kills!

What if everything you’ve been told to think is wrong?

- Sam Weinman

MOST GOLFERS HAVE SELECTIVE MEMORIES. Ask us to recount our best shots, and we can tell you the club we hit, where we hit it, and whatever it was we just had for lunch. It’s everything else that tends to be a blur. The implication of needing just one great shot to “bring you back” is that you’re choosing to repress all the mediocre shots that came before and after. Even the best in the world can filter the game this way. Consider the eventful September that Billy Horschel had in 2014, when he won the BMW Championship and the Tour Championship, which also meant the FedEx Cup and its $10-million bonus. A lucrative hot streak made all the more impressive considering what had immediately preceded: The week before the BMW, at the Deutsche Bank Championship, Horschel hit one of the worst shots imaginable under pressure when he chunked a 6-iron into a hazard on the final hole and lost by two.

When it came time to make sense of what happened, Horschel’s strategy was to dismiss it as mostly rotten luck. He knew he played well, had put himself in contention, and says the sidehill lie was tricky enough that he caught more turf than he anticipated. It happens in golf, and he didn’t see the point in dwelling. That he won twice in the next two weeks suggests he was right. “Just a really bad swing at the wrong time,” Horschel says.

Fast-forward to November 2016, though, and Horschel committed another tournament-ending blunder when he missed a two-foot putt to remain in a playoff in the RSM Classic. This time there was no redemptive follow-up, but here, too, Horschel says he profited from the experience. Revisiting the sequence, he recognised he had rushed through his routine, and that a weak left hand on the putter kept the clubface open at impact. It was a crucial mistake, but at least he understood why.

“It’s a tough way to learn something, but I learned it,” he said days later.