December 19, 2025 • 42 mins
GS#460 October 28, 2014 Sports Psychiatrist Dr. Michael T. Lardon returns to discuss his latest book Mastering Golf’s Mental Game - Your Ultimate Guide to Better On-Course Performance and Lower Scores - In this helpful book, Dr. Lardon shows us how to organize our thoughts and use them for maximum performance. Not just an associate clinical professor of medicine at UC San Diego, Michael was a world ranked table tennis player. So he understands how the mental game can bring us down. But he also knows how to get into the zone and stay focused on what works. Since this is two episodes combined from our Members Only period, in part 2 Dr. Lardon discusses his work with PGA Tour players including how he developed a close relationship with Phil Mickleson.
This episode is brought to you by Warby Parker with over 300+ locations to help you find your next pair of glasses. You can also head over to warbypaker.com/golfsmarter right now to try on any pair virtually!
This episode is sponsored by Indeed. Please visit indeed.com/GOLFSMARTER and get a $75 SPONSORED JOB CREDIT. Terms and conditions apply.
This episode is sponsored by HIMS. Start your free online visit today HIMS.com/golfsmarter and received personalized ED treatment options.
If you have a question about whether or not Fred is using any of the methods, equipment or apps we’ve discussed, or if you’d like to share a comment about what you’ve heard in this or any other episode, please write because Fred will get back to you. Either write to golfsmarterpodcast@gmail.com or click on the Hey Fred button, at golfsmarter.com
This episode is brought to you by Warby Parker with over 300+ locations to help you find your next pair of glasses. You can also head over to warbypaker.com/golfsmarter right now to try on any pair virtually!
This episode is sponsored by Indeed. Please visit indeed.com/GOLFSMARTER and get a $75 SPONSORED JOB CREDIT. Terms and conditions apply.
This episode is sponsored by HIMS. Start your free online visit today HIMS.com/golfsmarter and received personalized ED treatment options.
If you have a question about whether or not Fred is using any of the methods, equipment or apps we’ve discussed, or if you’d like to share a comment about what you’ve heard in this or any other episode, please write because Fred will get back to you. Either write to golfsmarterpodcast@gmail.com or click on the Hey Fred button, at golfsmarter.com
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ah, I'm Sam what you've seeing from Fort Worth, Texas
and I play at Merivus to Country Club.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
This is Golf.
Speaker 3 (00:06):
Smarter number four hundred and sixty.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Welcome to Golf Smarter Mulligans, your second chance to gain
insight and advice from the best instructors featured on the
Golf Smarter podcast. Great Golf Instruction Never gets Old. Our
interview library features hundreds of hours of game improvement conversations
like this that are no longer available in any podcast app.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
If in that shot you took the second or two
or five seconds to figure out I'm really going to
hit a seven iron, and you're not ambivalent, you make
your best choice. You have met the first criteria of
the shot. The next criteria is to make sure you
sort of feel the shot. How's it going to feel
if you're put right? You know, when we put we
kind of walk halfway and this is the feel of it.
(00:53):
And then you get in and hit it. And it's
that simple. And if you do those three things regardless
of the result, because we're only concerned with everything that
happens before the ball leaves the club face, because after
it leaves the club face, there's not a lot we
can do. But if you do those three things, that
SHOT's a one for one. If you don't do all
of those three things, you do not get the point,
(01:15):
and it's a zero for one. And again that's independent
of the result. You got one hundred shots, only fifty
of them did you do it? The other fifty you
were smoking cigars chatting. If you apply this very simple concept,
it's hard not to increase your percentage to sixty or
even more maybe, and that really will have a huge
(01:36):
impact in the average golfer.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Mastering Golf's Mental Game with author doctor Michael T. Larden.
This is Golf Smarter. Welcome back to the Golf Smarter Podcast. Michael, Hi, Fred,
how are you.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
I'm doing great. Nice to be here. Fred.
Speaker 4 (01:57):
It's great to have you back on the show. Your
first book, who was many years ago?
Speaker 1 (02:02):
Right, two thousand and eight now hard to believe?
Speaker 4 (02:05):
Wow, Well, congratulations you've gone through a lot in that
time and professionally as well. But you have a new book,
Mastering Golf's Mental Game, the Ultimate Guide to better en
course performance and lower scores. Michael, I have a shelf
full of metal game books. Is why should I be
(02:28):
getting rid of all of them to keep yours.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
Well, I don't know about getting rid of them all.
But this book is really designed to be a little
bit different, and it's modeled next to a very famous
book called Feeling Good by David Burns, which is a
psychology book and if you ever go to all the
outpatient clinics, it's sort of a bible in the model
(02:54):
is like this. That Feeling Good book is actually a
workbook where you look at pieces of your mindset and
then you get to rate it and then you get
to reframe it. So if you get through the book,
you end up it's hard not to get better. And
this book is really set up for you to interact
(03:15):
with the book. It has drills, it has ways in
which you can find out I'm strong in motivation, but
I'm weak in emotional control. And if that's the case,
these are exercises to get you better. So it's really
meant to be a hands on book to help you improve.
Speaker 4 (03:32):
Well, it's clear that that's the case because you have
homework assignments, you have tests in it, which I found
to be a lot of fun.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
And that is that.
Speaker 4 (03:42):
The format of the other book is it give you
a little assignments as the across the board.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
Yeah, I mean the famous Feeling Good book is like that.
And really this book comes from you know, I get
calls all the time to work with various players of
various levels, and I don't have the time to do that.
I can barely work with the tour players that I
work with, and so at the university, I teach a
curriculum for sports psychology, if you will, And really, this
(04:11):
book is a compilation of the curriculum I teach the
medical students and the residents who are interested in sports psychology.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
I see, And where do you teach.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
I'm at UCSD, the University of California, San Diego. I'm
a professor there.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
Good science school, right, very.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Good neuroscience, tremendous neuroscience.
Speaker 4 (04:33):
Well that's good to know because I have a nephew
who went there and majored in neuroscience. Yeah yeah, yeah.
Now he's a professional musician.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
Oh, he's a smart he's a smart guy.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
He's the smartest drummer in on the stage.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
Of course.
Speaker 4 (04:50):
I'm like, I'm going through because I dog eared a
whole lot of stuff in this book, and I don't
even know where to get started. On picking apart which
parts are so important. But again, this podcast is more
about how do we get the average golfer better?
Speaker 3 (05:07):
So you know, let's go there, let's just go there.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
Yeah, sure, sure, Well here's the main thrust of it.
And it's the same for the tour player as it
is for the average golfer. And I really think it
probably benefits the average golfer more. And what I mean,
I mean this everybody that plays sport, especially in golf,
(05:31):
it's human nature to become result oriented. I just need
a par on the last hole to break ninety or
break eighty, or you say to yourself, gosh, how did
I make that triple bogie on the last hole that
leaks into the next hole and you play poorly. So
we have to accept that we are result oriented people,
(05:53):
human beings are. That's one piece. Now, if you read
all the sports psychology books on your shelf, and mind's
bre probably up there too, my old one. And what
you hear the sports psychologists talk about very consistently is
that the golfer or the athlete really has to focus
on the process. Now what do we mean by process?
(06:16):
We mean what are the components of hitting each shot?
So I've come up with this term called pre shot pyramid,
which is very simple and it kind of has three parts,
and it goes like this. Every shot you have to calculate.
You know, if it's a putt, the breaks over here,
the speed is such and such. If it's a driver,
(06:38):
you know, I'm going to cut it off the left
tree or an iron, I need to hit it one
hundred and fifty five yards. So you make some calculation
and in a very general way, we call that the
left brain. If you don't make that calculation, you're probably
not going to do well. But after that is a
really important part. You make your calculation, and it's important
(06:59):
you just don't go up and hit it. It's important
that you use your right brain and you either visualize
the shot. That's like Aaron Baddeley, he sort of closes
his eyes and sees the shot, or you feel it kinesthetically.
And what I mean by that is, let's say you're
going to hit a draw or a hook, you sort
of reverse, I mean you rehearse, you know, your hands
(07:21):
turning over. Conversely, if you're going to hit a slice,
you would kind of maybe rehearse holding on and if
you look at the good players, David Duval, Tiger Woods, Phil,
many of them. Phil has a lot of visual stuff,
but many of them really they have the feel of
the shot. And then after that, ideally you just step
(07:41):
in and hit the shot with instinct. So we go
left brain, think about it, right brain, feel it, step
in and hit it. And those are the three components
of the pre shot pyramid for all shots. Now, why
that's important, Fred is because we ask the golfer to
rape his process, and that means, let's say on the
(08:02):
first hole, I hit a great drive right down the middle,
but I didn't really take the time to decide where
I wanted to hit it. I sort of got lucky,
so I didn't go through the left brain part one.
So even though I hit it two hundred and eighty
yards down the middle, I do not get a point
for that shot because I didn't get through the process.
(08:23):
Now conversely, I might hit my second shot and I
might you know, think about it, well, rehearse it and
hit it, and I even could hit it out of bounds.
But if I went through that process, I get a
one for one. And so what we get is the
golfer starts to pay attention to rating as process and
that satiates the human nature to sort of rate how
(08:46):
you're doing. But what you've done is you've turned your
attention to the right thing, which is I don't want
to worry about the double bogie behind me or the
birdie I need. What I'm really focused on is just
doing these opponents that lead to a good shot. So
we sort of trick the golfer into being process oriented
(09:07):
while he's rating himself. And that's sort of the trick
of it. And let's say you shoot one hundred that day.
Then you look back and you say, of those hundred shots, well,
sixty of them, I really did my pre shot pyramid,
So you'd get a sixty percent that day. And what
we found is the average golfers around fifty to sixty percent,
(09:27):
where the tour players are in the ninety percent tile range.
And if we can help you, you know, stay on
task with a few more shots, you're going to end
up scoring a lot better.
Speaker 4 (09:38):
You'll get higher scores on your pyramid and lower scores
on your card.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
Exactly. That's exactly right, friend. So that's kind of the trick,
the big overarching principle, and you.
Speaker 4 (09:48):
Have various components to your pre shot pyramid. It's not
just the planning and the concentration. It starts low. I
really like the you had attitude, motivation, control, optimization, concentration
and then planning.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
Why that order, well.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
I mean we start with you know things like you know,
do you have the right attitude? And really that chapter
it's derived from a woman Carol Dweck at Stanford who's
a very famous psychologist, and she has articulated a concept
called mindset. And over thirty five years she studied successful
(10:31):
people in sport, art, politics, and she studied people who
were not. And what she has found and she's published
academic papers in addition to a popular book called Mindset,
is that successful people they view an obstacle as a challenge,
They take criticism as something that they can learn from
(10:52):
where they and they see other people's success as inspiring.
Where people with a fixed mindset, not a flexible mindset,
they see obstacles as intimidating or other people's success is intimidating.
And so in that chapter in particular, we teach you
that concept the mindset of very successful people and then
(11:16):
those who are not. And then we ask you to
rate yourself and find out where you are on that continuum,
and then we actually give questions and drills to help
you move to a more flexible mindset, a more adaptive mindset.
And that's kind of chapter one that sort of sets
the stage, you know. Then we talk about motivation. Why
(11:38):
do you play? And if your motivation decreases, sort of
getting connected with falling in love with the game, and
we call that internal motivation. And so we give you
concepts and again we go through what I think are
the really important things, which are, you know, what's your attitude?
How do you stay motivated? Then how do you deal
(11:59):
with emotion positive and negative? If we make a double
legal we want to be you know, a little fist pump,
but be relatively cool because we have a hole after that.
Or you have you know, negative thoughts, don't hit it
in the water, and we look at you know, when
those thoughts come up. These are techniques to turn your
attention to what is going to be best for you
(12:22):
rather than let your mind drift there. And then we
talk about, you know, how to put this whole thing
together in a cohesive plan. When we talked about the
mental scorecard a minute ago, that's really the application on
the course where the first part of the book that
we're talking about now, that sort of sets the ground
stage for you know, the components that very good athletes
(12:46):
and very good golfers need to have to perform.
Speaker 4 (12:49):
Well, I'm fascinated about the motivation part. I'm sure that
you have discovered a wide range of answers on motivation,
going from amateurs to tour players. But I'm curious about
amateurs and recreational players. What you hear, what's the vast
(13:13):
difference of motivations they have to play golf.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
Well, it's a great question. And if your motivation is,
you know, to smoke cigars with your buddies and have
a cocktail at the turn. If that's your motivation, just
to fratnize and have fun, well that's one thing. And
you probably aren't buying this book because you're less concerned
(13:37):
about scoring well. But let's say your motive.
Speaker 4 (13:41):
I think those guys are more concerned about scoring well
with the cart girl. But that's a whole different conversation.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
Yeah, that one. I don't have the expertise, and I
don't even want to go there.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
Go ahead, I'm sorry I did, But maybe.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
When I before I was married, younger, three kids ago.
But anyhow, so yeah, I mean the average guy. You know,
they generally play golf because they love it. It's a
lot of fun. And then what happens is, you know,
they get in the Saturday morning games with their buddies
and they start to you know, compare themselves to their buddy,
(14:12):
and their motivation changes from really enjoying the game making
good shots to you know, how do I stack up
against my friends? And it takes a lot of the
fun out of it. Sometimes if their mindset, if you will,
in competition is unhealthy. So what we try to do
is we try to identify if your motivation stays pure,
(14:35):
which is, you know, I play for the joy of
it and I love concentrating and competing. That's healthy versus
you know, you start to get scared and intimidated, and
then you start to let's say a negative cognition, which
is a fancy way of saying negative thought, which is,
you know, I'm not bad putter well or I can't putt.
(14:56):
You know, words like can't aren't words sports that colleg
loogists or sports psychiatrists like myself use. So we we
really kind of take a look and we try to
reconnect you with enjoying the game, and then we build
some armor around you to deal in the competitive environment
so you can still have fun and concentrate on what's important,
(15:18):
which is having fun.
Speaker 4 (15:21):
The motivation for somebody who and like for myself, my
motivating I want to get better, right, I want to
get better at golf.
Speaker 3 (15:31):
I want to improve.
Speaker 4 (15:33):
Is that a motivation that could become a problem.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
Well, no, that's.
Speaker 4 (15:40):
Great, I mean because that's results oriented, isn't it.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
Yeah, well yes, and no, I mean the goal is
you want to improve. So then I'd say, well what
does that mean? And you'd say, well, I want to
break eighty And I'd say, okay, that's a result goal. Okay,
what is the what is the process to break eighty? Well,
the process to break eighty is, you know, make a
lot of pars and a few bogies and maybe throwing
(16:04):
a birdie. And then I'd say, well, how do you
do that? And it will always distill down to well,
I have to hit quality shots, and so that's the process.
Goal is to hit better quality shots. And that's where
we come back to the pre shot pyramid. Now, let's
say your problem is in the short game we'd obviously
(16:26):
spend more focus over there, but we still use that
pre shot pyramid as a process goal. And then over
here we have the result goal of improving the short game,
and the overarching result goal would be to break eighty.
So there's actually in the goal setting chapter. I think
that's underplanning. We use a matrix where we ask you
(16:47):
to define what's your result goal, and then we ask
you to define, well, how are you going to get there?
And that's the process, and so we actually keep tally
of both things so you make sure you have a
a good healthy balance.
Speaker 4 (17:02):
Passion seems to be a huge motivation for a lot
of golfers.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
Well, and that's the beauty of the average golfer because
passion they play. Most average golfers play with this what
we call internal motivation. And I use a analogy of
premium gas versus low octane. So premium gas would be yeah,
I play for the love of it. Low octane gas
(17:31):
would be, gosh, I need to make the cut to
pay the rent this week. So the tour players, they
actually paradoxically have at times more problems with motivation because
they get burned out and then their golf, you know,
they don't just play for fun like we do. They
have to do golf outings and there's a business aspect
(17:53):
and that can sort of burn them out. And we
see that all the time, and then we, you know,
we try to reconnect them with their youth when they
played golf and they had fun, because if you're not
having fun, it's very hard to play well.
Speaker 4 (18:08):
There is a great example in the book of a
young phenom who comes up and hits the tour while
he's still in high school. Didn't you share that story
about how his motivation was.
Speaker 3 (18:20):
It seemed like it was derailed.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
Yeah. Now we're talking about Ty Tryon, who really is
a heck of a good kid. And I think he's
almost thirty now, but when he was I think sixteen,
right or seventeen.
Speaker 3 (18:33):
Think he said seventeen in the book.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
Yeah, seventeen. He actually earned a fully exempt card on
the PGA Tour, which I think, to this date is
the youngest player my brother. I was cattying in for
my brother, ironically behind him, and we watched him get
his card, and that year my brother also got his card.
But the next year Ty came to visit me, and
(18:58):
you know, he was a junior in high high school
or maybe a senior at that time, and you know,
it was very tough because you know, he wanted to
have fun like normal high school kids. But the next thing,
you know, he had contracts with Nike, IMG was his agency,
and Red Bull, and he had all these corporate responsibilities.
(19:18):
So now you take a high school kid who really
just wants to have some fun and loves golf, and
you put him on a private jet and he flew
around with Tiger a lot, and that was big business.
And I think that would be you know, very hard
at seventeen years old to go through that process, and
it made golf less fun. I mean, we've heard about
(19:39):
Michelle Wee talking about those kinds of things in the
media and you know, now she's playing great and won
a US Open, but she also talks about how she's reconnected,
you know, to the passion of golf. And she's another
example of a very young phenom who when she had
to deal with everything that comes with being a female,
(20:00):
that sort of derailed a lot of her passion. We
saw that with Rory McIlroy. You know, he he wins
his major, you know, he blows the Masters, but then
he comes and wins his major and becomes you know,
this phenom, and then he has a dip in the
level of his game because he has to integrate, you know,
being under the microscope of the media and all this
(20:20):
other stuff. And it probably wasn't that fun. I mean,
people think, oh gosh, it to be super fun to
be famous. I think, like Andy Warhol in reverse, maybe
for five minutes it's super fun, but it's but after
a while it's pretty tiring not to be able to
be a normal person. And that's a tough challenge for
many of the high profile athletes. So you know, how
(20:43):
do we reconnect them with the reason they fell in
love with golf? That's really the goal, and keep that
connection strong.
Speaker 4 (20:51):
I thought Rory fell apart because he went to different clubs.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
The Nikes never mind, so he.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
Got well there's more than that conjecture, but certainly that
was part of it. Yeah, you know, breaking up with
a girlfriend and being under the spotlight of the media,
and I think there were a lot of things that
were a lot of new challenges and and if Rory
didn't play well, I'm sure Nike wouldn't have come to him,
you know, with a very lucrative contract. So that's all
(21:18):
part and parcel.
Speaker 4 (21:19):
And I frequently am asking questions about these young phenoms
that are coming up and if they can you know,
because golf is so mental, and even on the tour
it's got to be so mental, especially the stress of
a Sunday, that how can these kids handle this kind
of pressure and still you know it's not just hitting
the ball farther than everybody.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
Well, I mean, you know they you know, it's a
little like training Navy seals, you know, the really good
ones really learned to you know, how to how to
deal with that pressure and get a playbook if you will,
and I like, I like in my book to that
you know, it really has answers and suggestions. You know,
(22:01):
we go out and play golf and you know number
sixteen at my course has a lot of water on
the left, and you know ninety percent of the people
up there are aiming to the right and having really struggling.
Very few of them. You know, know what an anchor
thought is in ways to deal with our human nature
when our mind drips. So recently I had a web
(22:22):
dot com player, Camillo Betedetto, really a fine player, come
visit with me, and you know, he, like many players,
you know, had had good concentration, but really didn't have
kind of a playbook. So in certain situations, you know,
on the seventeenth or eighteenth hole, you know, to make
(22:43):
a cut or win an event, you know, what do
I do when when these thoughts come up? So I
think at almost every level, you know, we know a
lot about the golf swing. Most players know how to
do that, but most most players don't know how to
think in certain sitution situations. And that's one of the
main goals of the book to really teach some of
(23:04):
those parents.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
There are so many distractions on the tour.
Speaker 4 (23:15):
They go along with that level of competition, you know,
from the corporate outings, but then you've got just the
travel alone and the food, and the people who want
your time, and the women who want to go to
your room, and there's just so many different things that
can be distractions. How is it possible that these guys
(23:37):
are able to eliminate those thoughts once they step up
to the tea box, And how can we get a
shred of that to distract what's going on in our lives,
which you know, we it's great if we can get
time to go out to the golf course because there
are so many distractions and we don't get time to practice.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
We just want to go out and play because there's
so so many things in our way. How are we
able to do that? How can we get rid of
all that?
Speaker 1 (24:04):
Well, they're kind of two questions in there. But to
talk about us a regular golfer, you know, I suggest
for people to say, hey, you know, you have a
very busy work life. I know for me, I'm a physician,
and when I go to golf, I look at it
as my sanctuary. And that's what I encourage people. Let's
(24:25):
turn off the darn cell phone, you know, let's look
at the beauty of the golf course and for a
few hours, you know, let's really honor this experience. I
think for for a lot of average golfers, that's very,
very refreshing. Now they don't have all the distractions of
the tour player. Now taking a look at the tour player.
(24:47):
I mean, I can remember one of the guys I've
worked with. I won't mention his name, but it was
in the final group on Sunday at Riviera at Los
Angeles Open, and on Saturday night I met him and
he's on his third cocktail, and you know, we have
to go through the metabolism of alcohol, and that's not
really a very good thing because you're going to have
some alcohol, you know when you tee off tomorrow and
(25:09):
your blood. So needless to say that particular golfer, he
really struggled and you know, autographs and let me get
you another drink. Now we take other golfers, you know
that have been very successful. You know, you don't see
Steve Stricker doing that too much. You don't see Jim Furick.
You certainly didn't see Tiger, so I think you know
(25:32):
many of them have.
Speaker 4 (25:33):
Oh boy, yeah, come on, Tiger was seen. He was
seeing it a lot of bars and places.
Speaker 3 (25:39):
But he made I've been drinking but.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
He was, yeah, well we'll go there too much. But
on Saturday night, I would say he's very very disciplined.
I mean, I can tell you a great Tiger story
about Matt Gogel. They were playing in Florida and Matt
went off the back nine and Tiger the front, and
long story short, it was an arduous day and at
the end of the day and Matt had to do
(26:02):
a lot of local media Tiger did all the international media,
and the end of the day, Matt meets his wife
at the bar having a beer, and he's so exhausted
and his wife is all bright eyed and he says, whoa,
you look in great spirits? Where were you? And she said, well,
I just came back from the gym. And he goes, oh, okay,
what was that like? And he goes, well, next to
(26:23):
me for forty five minutes, Tiger was running sprints and
Matt just shook his head because Tiger had just had
the same eight hours prior as Matt did, which was,
you know, playing in bad weather on and off, super tired.
And the difference is Matt, like most guys you know,
wanted to go relax a little bit, and you know,
Tiger goes to the gym. So I don't think in
(26:45):
any way Tiger's work ethic is every question, and I
don't really know him to compromise, you know, himself right
before something very important now outside of the golf world,
and what he does in other domains is really beyond
the scope of this conversation.
Speaker 3 (27:02):
Fred, Okay, I'll buy into that. I'm fascinated.
Speaker 4 (27:05):
You mentioned a lot of players and Tiger is just
a one, you know, he's one name that makes sense.
But of the other players you mentioned Phil, tell me
about your relationship with Phil, and we're talking about Michelson
of course.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
Yeah. Well it's funny because you know, about eight years
ago I was helping Tim Micholson as a coach for
the USD golf team. Here. Now Tim's in Arizona.
Speaker 3 (27:30):
That's Phil's brother.
Speaker 1 (27:32):
Yeah, Tim Micholson. Sure, And and I used to play
a lot of table tennis when I was young. I
played competitively and Japan and Europe, and long story short,
Phil likes cable tennis and a lot of the tour
players love table tennis. They actually fly in a ping
pong table to the President's Cup. And Tim had said
(27:53):
to me, hey, Doc, you know my brother. Christmas is
coming up, and you know, I want to get my
brother something good. But he has everything and everything he
doesn't have that he wants, he just buys. But he
loves table tennis and he thinks his serve is really
good and he can beat me. But I know he's
not that good. So would you come and play with him,
(28:15):
you know, give him a lesson and that would be
his Christmas present. So I said sure, and then, needless
to say, a month or so later, I was actually
helping Na cating with the Chargers and I was going
down to the stadium. I got a call to meet
Phil and it was very funny. I was in blue
jeans and I started to think, well, maybe he's a
(28:38):
really good player. I mean, he's number five in the
world of golf. And then I pulled up to the
gate at the bridges and before I said anything, the
gate man said are you here for? Are you doctor Lardon?
Are you here for the match? And I go, guy's
getting scared. And they brought me into a private gym and
it's like a little basketball court. The stands and somebody
(29:01):
greeted me. And then the next thing I know, Phil
came with a little entourage of folks, many of which
were worked for Callaway or Tailor Made. Their factories are
near here. And the next thing you know, he and
I are playing table tennis and he gives the serve,
and needless to say, the serve, if you're a professional
(29:22):
table tennis player, is an easy serve to you know,
loop kill and I did that and Phil said wow,
And then I serve some and when we serve we
throw the ball up high. It's called the high toss,
and the ball comes out, you know, pretty fast, fifty
miles an hour with a big curve and kind of
curved around Phil's racket. And he said, wow, if you
can teach me that, I'll teach you the short game.
(29:43):
And I laughed. I said, it's too late for me.
Maybe you could help my brother. And then I started
playing them in a chair and giving them nine points
to eleven playing in a chair, teaching him footwork in fact,
and we had that interaction and that was quite fun.
And then right before the Houston Open in twenty eleven,
(30:06):
he engaged me to help him with golf and we
had a really good session and that's where the Mental
scorecard was named that day at the Bridges, and then
he won that week in the Houston Open. So that's
where it started. And it's been very fun to work
with Phil. He's very bright and curious and soaks up
information and his talent is, you know, legendary. So we've
(30:30):
had a nice relationship.
Speaker 3 (30:32):
And in the book you talk about.
Speaker 4 (30:35):
Mindset of growth versus fixed and Phil fit into that
very well versus a lot of other players. Can we
cover that for just a moment because I thought that
was really fascinating. I found myself on the growth side.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
Right. Well, that's good, Fred, that's good. That's where we
want to be. And I think an important thing is
if you have a fixed mindset, you can actually learn
to transform it into a growth mindset. And whether we're
talking about sport of golf as we are now or
really in life, the concepts are very important. So example,
(31:11):
if you kind of want to use Phil, Phil loves
when Tiger plays so rather than being threatened. And if
we think back to Tiger's heyday, there used to be
the Tiger effect. There was a great article in Sports
Illustrated and that showed and this was some years back
before two thousand and eight that when he played, the
rest of the field actually shot like almost a shot worse.
(31:35):
And what does that tell us? That tells us cumulatively
the rest of the field, you know, was intimidated by
Tiger and didn't play as well. In contrast, Phil and
many other great players, they are inspired when Tiger's out there.
And actually Phil has a very favorable head to head
record against Tiger. It gets them pumped up. You know,
(31:58):
he wants that a little like Federer and Nadell and
Jovachak and tennis. They have a wonderful growth mindset, those guys.
So it's a really important concept.
Speaker 4 (32:16):
You're kind of downplaying your level of achievement in table tennis.
Let's give us a background on that and how you
found yourself in the zone. And now that we're able
to give it to all of us.
Speaker 1 (32:32):
To make a long story short, when I was young,
I got involved. The Chinese table tennis team came to
Madison Square Garden in nineteen seventy two. Nixon and table
tennis diplomacy and those that are our age or my
age at least might remember that. But fast forward, I
got involved. It was the second it is the second
(32:53):
largest sport in the world. Participation at the Olympics in China.
It was actually watched more than the finals of the soccer,
if you can believe. But neither here nor there. I
ended up being trained in Japan by the world champion
over there, and I came home and I was in
the finals of the United States Junior Championships and it
(33:15):
was a three out of five And when we started,
I was in the zone where the ball that moves
at ninety miles an hour started to come in slow motion.
I could see it as big as an egg. And
I won the first couple of games handily. And then
at the break where you go to the other side
(33:35):
of the table, one of the coaches had said, and
the winner was going to get their name on all
these table tennis rackets distributed in Hermann's Sporting Goods stores.
I don't know if they have them anymore, but kind
of like golf smith a big change. That was a
big deal, and the coach said something like, oh, this
will be an amazing upset. I think I was seated
(33:56):
twelve and I was playing the perennial best player, multiple
national champion, uh. And the next thing, you know, I thought, wow,
I'm going to have my name on all these rackets.
I'll be the national champion. As soon as that happened,
I lost the next three and the rest is history.
It spawned my career as a sport you know, sport
(34:19):
psychology doctor.
Speaker 4 (34:23):
But you said that table tennis was the second world's
most popular participation sport. I've got three or four in
my head that could be first.
Speaker 3 (34:31):
What's first?
Speaker 1 (34:33):
Uh, soccer?
Speaker 5 (34:35):
Okay, yeah, and actually there's some data now that table
tennis may even rival it. But really, Yeah, Matt Matt Rudy,
the Golf Digest writer who helped me with my book,
he researched to find table tennis number one, But I'm
I'm not one hundred percent sure, so I say number two.
But when I was young, I played in the German
the German Professional League.
Speaker 1 (34:55):
I lived in Sweden. The Swedes are great players. They
beat the Chinese and have won the Worlds a couple
of times. So outside of America, it's a lot more
than you think. In fact, Freddie Jacobson, who is the
Swedish golfer, when he comes to Tory Pines, he and
I always have these great matches and we have a
lot of fun.
Speaker 3 (35:15):
Well that's awesome. Oh that's so cool.
Speaker 4 (35:19):
So let's talk about the scorecard and a little more
to wrap this up and making it a motivation to
purchase the book, which we will have available in our
Golfers mart In our book section, along with your first
book as well.
Speaker 3 (35:36):
We'll have them both. But I'm curious when you say
a number of shots that.
Speaker 4 (35:42):
Qualify in the middle scorecard system, what do you mean
by that qualify?
Speaker 1 (35:47):
Well, if if in that shot you you took the
second or two or five seconds to figure out I'm
really going to hit a seven iron, and you're not ambivalent.
You make your best choice. You have met the first
criteria of the shot. The next criteria is, you know,
to make sure you sort of feel the shot. You know,
how's it going to feel if you put right? You Now,
(36:09):
when we put we kind of walk halfway and this
is the feel of it. That's the feeling part. And
then you get in and hit it. And it's that simple.
And if you do those three things regardless of the result,
because we're only concerned with everything that happens before the
ball leaves the club face, because after it leaves the
club face, there's not a lot we can do. But
(36:29):
if you do those three things, that SHOT's a one
for one. Now, if you don't do all of those
three things, you do not get the point, and it's
a zero for one. And again that's independent of the result.
So you got one hundred shots, you know, only fifty
of them did you do it? The other fifty you
were smoking cigars, chatting. If you apply this very simple concept,
(36:54):
it's hard not to, you know, increase your percentage to
sixty or even more maybe, and that really will have
a huge impact in the average golfer, you know, the
tour players, the margins are so thin, but for the
average guy. We just have an email that came in
and we're going to get it posted on Amazon. And
(37:14):
the guy thanked me. He said, I'm a twelve handicapper.
And I went out and I shot seventy three, my
lowest round ever. And I didn't even know I shot
seventy three as I was focusing on, you know, your
pre shot pyramid. But my mental scorecard was what eighty
percent or something, he said. So that's a great case
in point. And we do give real examples. There's one
(37:37):
in the book of a web dot com player, Scott Fawcett,
who went from a club player to making theweb dot
com and almost a full tour card, you know, and
he was one of these guys that is into statistics,
and when we started, he went from sixty percent to
ninety percent, and sure enough, his level of play, you know,
was dramatically better. So to give you just a little
(38:00):
that's the application piece, and that's part two. And I
think that in and of itself would have a tremendous
impact on the average golfer.
Speaker 4 (38:09):
I recently played with a friend of a friend. I
went out with a friend of mine. He brought a
friend with him, and his friend is a three or
a four.
Speaker 3 (38:17):
I'm excellent golfer.
Speaker 4 (38:18):
And afterwards he said to me, well, you know, you're
a pretty good player. You know, you didn't have your intention,
wasn't there for every shot? And that kind of like
a bit a bit bit what wow? And that really
had an impact on the way I approach each shot.
Speaker 3 (38:36):
Now, I was kind of taken aback by that, but
I loved it.
Speaker 1 (38:41):
Well, it's probably a great observation. And I think of
like the tour players, they're great at hitting really hard
shots because they'd really concentrate. And I mean, I think
of my work with Rich Beam over a decade or so.
Give him a really hard shot and you know, he
was impressive. The ones that I worried more about for
him was, you know, a nine iron with a you know,
(39:03):
just an easy pin at one hundred and thirty yards
because sometimes the easy shot it's easy to space out.
And at tour level, all you need is one bad
shot and you can miss a cut. So I think
that happens a lot you know, with average guys, it's
more than one shot, it's more than a nine iron,
and even good players, even three or four handicappers. So
(39:27):
it teaches us just like we want to make a
good swing, we want to have a good mental framework
for each shot when we play. Now what we do
between the shots we talk about it in the book.
You relax your attention. You know, you can't grind and
concentrate for five hours straight. That's suboptimal. So you pulse
your concentration. And Jack Nicholas would talk about concentration with
(39:50):
the metaphor of an accordion. So the accordion squeezes in
as you do your pre shot and hit the ball,
and then once you've the balls left your club face,
you relax and you know, feel the grass, look at
the trees, and as that next ball comes towards you,
we start to get our attentional focus. We do our
calculations our left brain, our right brain until we hit
(40:12):
the ball shot again, and then we relax again. So
concentration is something that you know, you have to know
how to work with and if you don't, and minds
of muscle, so you have to practice it to get better,
and you have to have good habits, and I think
the book really helps, you know, teach people these good
mental habits.
Speaker 4 (40:31):
And on the top of the pre shot pyramid two
words here and one inside of the other, the now
the no mind.
Speaker 1 (40:40):
Well that is a love. Yeah, that's a triple on tondra. Okay,
so no is spelled ken a k n ow, which
is really to no knowledge. So if you have the knowledge,
you use no mind and no mind. You just look
at the n O in there, which is we don't
(41:00):
want to be thinking when we're hitting the ball. We
want to hit with no mind. We want to hit
with instinct if we can. Now we say that if
you can't get that bad thought out of your head,
you can use an anchor thought. An example, Billy Casper
used to talk about just finish high. Now that's a
non technical thought when you're a golfer. Finish high doesn't
really take you know, any of the mental energy reserve.
(41:23):
But what it does is it keeps you from thinking
about the water. Now we're in the zone, we just
hit it. We don't even think at all. But sometimes
we're in a tough situation and we need an anchor thought.
So but the ideal state is not to be thinking.
That's no mind. And then buried in the know is
the word now. And you want to be in the present.
(41:43):
You want to be the power of now. So you
want to have knowledge. You don't want to be thinking
when you're hitting it. And that's the There's an old
saying those who know do not think, and those who
think do not know. So that's how we stay immersed
in the present. And that is the top of the pyramid.
You know, just hit it, don't get too cerebral.
Speaker 3 (42:05):
Awesome again.
Speaker 4 (42:06):
The book is called Mastering Golf's Mental Game, Your Ultimate
Guide to better on course performance and lower scores by
the table tennis Wizard. He's a ping pung wizard, must be.
We're gonna rewrite the words to that song for you, right,
doctor Michael T.
Speaker 1 (42:23):
Larden.
Speaker 4 (42:24):
Mike, thanks so much for coming back on the show.
I really appreciate it. And best of luck. I'm sure
you're gonna be selling a couple of copies of the
Golf Smarter Community.
Speaker 1 (42:32):
Great and Fred, thanks very much. I love your podcast
and as always, it's great chatting with you.
Ah, I'm Sam what you've seeing from Fort Worth, Texas
and I play at Merivus to Country Club.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
This is Golf.
Speaker 3 (00:06):
Smarter number four hundred and sixty.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Welcome to Golf Smarter Mulligans, your second chance to gain
insight and advice from the best instructors featured on the
Golf Smarter podcast. Great Golf Instruction Never gets Old. Our
interview library features hundreds of hours of game improvement conversations
like this that are no longer available in any podcast app.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
If in that shot you took the second or two
or five seconds to figure out I'm really going to
hit a seven iron, and you're not ambivalent, you make
your best choice. You have met the first criteria of
the shot. The next criteria is to make sure you
sort of feel the shot. How's it going to feel
if you're put right? You know, when we put we
kind of walk halfway and this is the feel of it.
(00:53):
And then you get in and hit it. And it's
that simple. And if you do those three things regardless
of the result, because we're only concerned with everything that
happens before the ball leaves the club face, because after
it leaves the club face, there's not a lot we
can do. But if you do those three things, that
SHOT's a one for one. If you don't do all
of those three things, you do not get the point,
(01:15):
and it's a zero for one. And again that's independent
of the result. You got one hundred shots, only fifty
of them did you do it? The other fifty you
were smoking cigars chatting. If you apply this very simple concept,
it's hard not to increase your percentage to sixty or
even more maybe, and that really will have a huge
(01:36):
impact in the average golfer.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Mastering Golf's Mental Game with author doctor Michael T. Larden.
This is Golf Smarter. Welcome back to the Golf Smarter Podcast. Michael, Hi, Fred,
how are you.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
I'm doing great. Nice to be here. Fred.
Speaker 4 (01:57):
It's great to have you back on the show. Your
first book, who was many years ago?
Speaker 1 (02:02):
Right, two thousand and eight now hard to believe?
Speaker 4 (02:05):
Wow, Well, congratulations you've gone through a lot in that
time and professionally as well. But you have a new book,
Mastering Golf's Mental Game, the Ultimate Guide to better en
course performance and lower scores. Michael, I have a shelf
full of metal game books. Is why should I be
(02:28):
getting rid of all of them to keep yours.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
Well, I don't know about getting rid of them all.
But this book is really designed to be a little
bit different, and it's modeled next to a very famous
book called Feeling Good by David Burns, which is a
psychology book and if you ever go to all the
outpatient clinics, it's sort of a bible in the model
(02:54):
is like this. That Feeling Good book is actually a
workbook where you look at pieces of your mindset and
then you get to rate it and then you get
to reframe it. So if you get through the book,
you end up it's hard not to get better. And
this book is really set up for you to interact
(03:15):
with the book. It has drills, it has ways in
which you can find out I'm strong in motivation, but
I'm weak in emotional control. And if that's the case,
these are exercises to get you better. So it's really
meant to be a hands on book to help you improve.
Speaker 4 (03:32):
Well, it's clear that that's the case because you have
homework assignments, you have tests in it, which I found
to be a lot of fun.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
And that is that.
Speaker 4 (03:42):
The format of the other book is it give you
a little assignments as the across the board.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
Yeah, I mean the famous Feeling Good book is like that.
And really this book comes from you know, I get
calls all the time to work with various players of
various levels, and I don't have the time to do that.
I can barely work with the tour players that I
work with, and so at the university, I teach a
curriculum for sports psychology, if you will, And really, this
(04:11):
book is a compilation of the curriculum I teach the
medical students and the residents who are interested in sports psychology.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
I see, And where do you teach.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
I'm at UCSD, the University of California, San Diego. I'm
a professor there.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
Good science school, right, very.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Good neuroscience, tremendous neuroscience.
Speaker 4 (04:33):
Well that's good to know because I have a nephew
who went there and majored in neuroscience. Yeah yeah, yeah.
Now he's a professional musician.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
Oh, he's a smart he's a smart guy.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
He's the smartest drummer in on the stage.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
Of course.
Speaker 4 (04:50):
I'm like, I'm going through because I dog eared a
whole lot of stuff in this book, and I don't
even know where to get started. On picking apart which
parts are so important. But again, this podcast is more
about how do we get the average golfer better?
Speaker 3 (05:07):
So you know, let's go there, let's just go there.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
Yeah, sure, sure, Well here's the main thrust of it.
And it's the same for the tour player as it
is for the average golfer. And I really think it
probably benefits the average golfer more. And what I mean,
I mean this everybody that plays sport, especially in golf,
(05:31):
it's human nature to become result oriented. I just need
a par on the last hole to break ninety or
break eighty, or you say to yourself, gosh, how did
I make that triple bogie on the last hole that
leaks into the next hole and you play poorly. So
we have to accept that we are result oriented people,
(05:53):
human beings are. That's one piece. Now, if you read
all the sports psychology books on your shelf, and mind's
bre probably up there too, my old one. And what
you hear the sports psychologists talk about very consistently is
that the golfer or the athlete really has to focus
on the process. Now what do we mean by process?
(06:16):
We mean what are the components of hitting each shot?
So I've come up with this term called pre shot pyramid,
which is very simple and it kind of has three parts,
and it goes like this. Every shot you have to calculate.
You know, if it's a putt, the breaks over here,
the speed is such and such. If it's a driver,
(06:38):
you know, I'm going to cut it off the left
tree or an iron, I need to hit it one
hundred and fifty five yards. So you make some calculation
and in a very general way, we call that the
left brain. If you don't make that calculation, you're probably
not going to do well. But after that is a
really important part. You make your calculation, and it's important
(06:59):
you just don't go up and hit it. It's important
that you use your right brain and you either visualize
the shot. That's like Aaron Baddeley, he sort of closes
his eyes and sees the shot, or you feel it kinesthetically.
And what I mean by that is, let's say you're
going to hit a draw or a hook, you sort
of reverse, I mean you rehearse, you know, your hands
(07:21):
turning over. Conversely, if you're going to hit a slice,
you would kind of maybe rehearse holding on and if
you look at the good players, David Duval, Tiger Woods, Phil,
many of them. Phil has a lot of visual stuff,
but many of them really they have the feel of
the shot. And then after that, ideally you just step
(07:41):
in and hit the shot with instinct. So we go
left brain, think about it, right brain, feel it, step
in and hit it. And those are the three components
of the pre shot pyramid for all shots. Now, why
that's important, Fred is because we ask the golfer to
rape his process, and that means, let's say on the
(08:02):
first hole, I hit a great drive right down the middle,
but I didn't really take the time to decide where
I wanted to hit it. I sort of got lucky,
so I didn't go through the left brain part one.
So even though I hit it two hundred and eighty
yards down the middle, I do not get a point
for that shot because I didn't get through the process.
(08:23):
Now conversely, I might hit my second shot and I
might you know, think about it, well, rehearse it and
hit it, and I even could hit it out of bounds.
But if I went through that process, I get a
one for one. And so what we get is the
golfer starts to pay attention to rating as process and
that satiates the human nature to sort of rate how
(08:46):
you're doing. But what you've done is you've turned your
attention to the right thing, which is I don't want
to worry about the double bogie behind me or the
birdie I need. What I'm really focused on is just
doing these opponents that lead to a good shot. So
we sort of trick the golfer into being process oriented
(09:07):
while he's rating himself. And that's sort of the trick
of it. And let's say you shoot one hundred that day.
Then you look back and you say, of those hundred shots, well,
sixty of them, I really did my pre shot pyramid,
So you'd get a sixty percent that day. And what
we found is the average golfers around fifty to sixty percent,
(09:27):
where the tour players are in the ninety percent tile range.
And if we can help you, you know, stay on
task with a few more shots, you're going to end
up scoring a lot better.
Speaker 4 (09:38):
You'll get higher scores on your pyramid and lower scores
on your card.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
Exactly. That's exactly right, friend. So that's kind of the trick,
the big overarching principle, and you.
Speaker 4 (09:48):
Have various components to your pre shot pyramid. It's not
just the planning and the concentration. It starts low. I
really like the you had attitude, motivation, control, optimization, concentration
and then planning.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
Why that order, well.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
I mean we start with you know things like you know,
do you have the right attitude? And really that chapter
it's derived from a woman Carol Dweck at Stanford who's
a very famous psychologist, and she has articulated a concept
called mindset. And over thirty five years she studied successful
(10:31):
people in sport, art, politics, and she studied people who
were not. And what she has found and she's published
academic papers in addition to a popular book called Mindset,
is that successful people they view an obstacle as a challenge,
They take criticism as something that they can learn from
(10:52):
where they and they see other people's success as inspiring.
Where people with a fixed mindset, not a flexible mindset,
they see obstacles as intimidating or other people's success is intimidating.
And so in that chapter in particular, we teach you
that concept the mindset of very successful people and then
(11:16):
those who are not. And then we ask you to
rate yourself and find out where you are on that continuum,
and then we actually give questions and drills to help
you move to a more flexible mindset, a more adaptive mindset.
And that's kind of chapter one that sort of sets
the stage, you know. Then we talk about motivation. Why
(11:38):
do you play? And if your motivation decreases, sort of
getting connected with falling in love with the game, and
we call that internal motivation. And so we give you
concepts and again we go through what I think are
the really important things, which are, you know, what's your attitude?
How do you stay motivated? Then how do you deal
(11:59):
with emotion positive and negative? If we make a double
legal we want to be you know, a little fist pump,
but be relatively cool because we have a hole after that.
Or you have you know, negative thoughts, don't hit it
in the water, and we look at you know, when
those thoughts come up. These are techniques to turn your
attention to what is going to be best for you
(12:22):
rather than let your mind drift there. And then we
talk about, you know, how to put this whole thing
together in a cohesive plan. When we talked about the
mental scorecard a minute ago, that's really the application on
the course where the first part of the book that
we're talking about now, that sort of sets the ground
stage for you know, the components that very good athletes
(12:46):
and very good golfers need to have to perform.
Speaker 4 (12:49):
Well, I'm fascinated about the motivation part. I'm sure that
you have discovered a wide range of answers on motivation,
going from amateurs to tour players. But I'm curious about
amateurs and recreational players. What you hear, what's the vast
(13:13):
difference of motivations they have to play golf.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
Well, it's a great question. And if your motivation is,
you know, to smoke cigars with your buddies and have
a cocktail at the turn. If that's your motivation, just
to fratnize and have fun, well that's one thing. And
you probably aren't buying this book because you're less concerned
(13:37):
about scoring well. But let's say your motive.
Speaker 4 (13:41):
I think those guys are more concerned about scoring well
with the cart girl. But that's a whole different conversation.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
Yeah, that one. I don't have the expertise, and I
don't even want to go there.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
Go ahead, I'm sorry I did, But maybe.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
When I before I was married, younger, three kids ago.
But anyhow, so yeah, I mean the average guy. You know,
they generally play golf because they love it. It's a
lot of fun. And then what happens is, you know,
they get in the Saturday morning games with their buddies
and they start to you know, compare themselves to their buddy,
(14:12):
and their motivation changes from really enjoying the game making
good shots to you know, how do I stack up
against my friends? And it takes a lot of the
fun out of it. Sometimes if their mindset, if you will,
in competition is unhealthy. So what we try to do
is we try to identify if your motivation stays pure,
(14:35):
which is, you know, I play for the joy of
it and I love concentrating and competing. That's healthy versus
you know, you start to get scared and intimidated, and
then you start to let's say a negative cognition, which
is a fancy way of saying negative thought, which is,
you know, I'm not bad putter well or I can't putt.
(14:56):
You know, words like can't aren't words sports that colleg
loogists or sports psychiatrists like myself use. So we we
really kind of take a look and we try to
reconnect you with enjoying the game, and then we build
some armor around you to deal in the competitive environment
so you can still have fun and concentrate on what's important,
(15:18):
which is having fun.
Speaker 4 (15:21):
The motivation for somebody who and like for myself, my
motivating I want to get better, right, I want to
get better at golf.
Speaker 3 (15:31):
I want to improve.
Speaker 4 (15:33):
Is that a motivation that could become a problem.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
Well, no, that's.
Speaker 4 (15:40):
Great, I mean because that's results oriented, isn't it.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
Yeah, well yes, and no, I mean the goal is
you want to improve. So then I'd say, well what
does that mean? And you'd say, well, I want to
break eighty And I'd say, okay, that's a result goal. Okay,
what is the what is the process to break eighty? Well,
the process to break eighty is, you know, make a
lot of pars and a few bogies and maybe throwing
(16:04):
a birdie. And then I'd say, well, how do you
do that? And it will always distill down to well,
I have to hit quality shots, and so that's the process.
Goal is to hit better quality shots. And that's where
we come back to the pre shot pyramid. Now, let's
say your problem is in the short game we'd obviously
(16:26):
spend more focus over there, but we still use that
pre shot pyramid as a process goal. And then over
here we have the result goal of improving the short game,
and the overarching result goal would be to break eighty.
So there's actually in the goal setting chapter. I think
that's underplanning. We use a matrix where we ask you
(16:47):
to define what's your result goal, and then we ask
you to define, well, how are you going to get there?
And that's the process, and so we actually keep tally
of both things so you make sure you have a
a good healthy balance.
Speaker 4 (17:02):
Passion seems to be a huge motivation for a lot
of golfers.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
Well, and that's the beauty of the average golfer because
passion they play. Most average golfers play with this what
we call internal motivation. And I use a analogy of
premium gas versus low octane. So premium gas would be yeah,
I play for the love of it. Low octane gas
(17:31):
would be, gosh, I need to make the cut to
pay the rent this week. So the tour players, they
actually paradoxically have at times more problems with motivation because
they get burned out and then their golf, you know,
they don't just play for fun like we do. They
have to do golf outings and there's a business aspect
(17:53):
and that can sort of burn them out. And we
see that all the time, and then we, you know,
we try to reconnect them with their youth when they
played golf and they had fun, because if you're not
having fun, it's very hard to play well.
Speaker 4 (18:08):
There is a great example in the book of a
young phenom who comes up and hits the tour while
he's still in high school. Didn't you share that story
about how his motivation was.
Speaker 3 (18:20):
It seemed like it was derailed.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
Yeah. Now we're talking about Ty Tryon, who really is
a heck of a good kid. And I think he's
almost thirty now, but when he was I think sixteen,
right or seventeen.
Speaker 3 (18:33):
Think he said seventeen in the book.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
Yeah, seventeen. He actually earned a fully exempt card on
the PGA Tour, which I think, to this date is
the youngest player my brother. I was cattying in for
my brother, ironically behind him, and we watched him get
his card, and that year my brother also got his card.
But the next year Ty came to visit me, and
(18:58):
you know, he was a junior in high high school
or maybe a senior at that time, and you know,
it was very tough because you know, he wanted to
have fun like normal high school kids. But the next thing,
you know, he had contracts with Nike, IMG was his agency,
and Red Bull, and he had all these corporate responsibilities.
(19:18):
So now you take a high school kid who really
just wants to have some fun and loves golf, and
you put him on a private jet and he flew
around with Tiger a lot, and that was big business.
And I think that would be you know, very hard
at seventeen years old to go through that process, and
it made golf less fun. I mean, we've heard about
(19:39):
Michelle Wee talking about those kinds of things in the
media and you know, now she's playing great and won
a US Open, but she also talks about how she's reconnected,
you know, to the passion of golf. And she's another
example of a very young phenom who when she had
to deal with everything that comes with being a female,
(20:00):
that sort of derailed a lot of her passion. We
saw that with Rory McIlroy. You know, he he wins
his major, you know, he blows the Masters, but then
he comes and wins his major and becomes you know,
this phenom, and then he has a dip in the
level of his game because he has to integrate, you know,
being under the microscope of the media and all this
(20:20):
other stuff. And it probably wasn't that fun. I mean,
people think, oh gosh, it to be super fun to
be famous. I think, like Andy Warhol in reverse, maybe
for five minutes it's super fun, but it's but after
a while it's pretty tiring not to be able to
be a normal person. And that's a tough challenge for
many of the high profile athletes. So you know, how
(20:43):
do we reconnect them with the reason they fell in
love with golf? That's really the goal, and keep that
connection strong.
Speaker 4 (20:51):
I thought Rory fell apart because he went to different clubs.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
The Nikes never mind, so he.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
Got well there's more than that conjecture, but certainly that
was part of it. Yeah, you know, breaking up with
a girlfriend and being under the spotlight of the media,
and I think there were a lot of things that
were a lot of new challenges and and if Rory
didn't play well, I'm sure Nike wouldn't have come to him,
you know, with a very lucrative contract. So that's all
(21:18):
part and parcel.
Speaker 4 (21:19):
And I frequently am asking questions about these young phenoms
that are coming up and if they can you know,
because golf is so mental, and even on the tour
it's got to be so mental, especially the stress of
a Sunday, that how can these kids handle this kind
of pressure and still you know it's not just hitting
the ball farther than everybody.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
Well, I mean, you know they you know, it's a
little like training Navy seals, you know, the really good
ones really learned to you know, how to how to
deal with that pressure and get a playbook if you will,
and I like, I like in my book to that
you know, it really has answers and suggestions. You know,
(22:01):
we go out and play golf and you know number
sixteen at my course has a lot of water on
the left, and you know ninety percent of the people
up there are aiming to the right and having really struggling.
Very few of them. You know, know what an anchor
thought is in ways to deal with our human nature
when our mind drips. So recently I had a web
(22:22):
dot com player, Camillo Betedetto, really a fine player, come
visit with me, and you know, he, like many players,
you know, had had good concentration, but really didn't have
kind of a playbook. So in certain situations, you know,
on the seventeenth or eighteenth hole, you know, to make
(22:43):
a cut or win an event, you know, what do
I do when when these thoughts come up? So I
think at almost every level, you know, we know a
lot about the golf swing. Most players know how to
do that, but most most players don't know how to
think in certain sitution situations. And that's one of the
main goals of the book to really teach some of
(23:04):
those parents.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
There are so many distractions on the tour.
Speaker 4 (23:15):
They go along with that level of competition, you know,
from the corporate outings, but then you've got just the
travel alone and the food, and the people who want
your time, and the women who want to go to
your room, and there's just so many different things that
can be distractions. How is it possible that these guys
(23:37):
are able to eliminate those thoughts once they step up
to the tea box, And how can we get a
shred of that to distract what's going on in our lives,
which you know, we it's great if we can get
time to go out to the golf course because there
are so many distractions and we don't get time to practice.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
We just want to go out and play because there's
so so many things in our way. How are we
able to do that? How can we get rid of
all that?
Speaker 1 (24:04):
Well, they're kind of two questions in there. But to
talk about us a regular golfer, you know, I suggest
for people to say, hey, you know, you have a
very busy work life. I know for me, I'm a physician,
and when I go to golf, I look at it
as my sanctuary. And that's what I encourage people. Let's
(24:25):
turn off the darn cell phone, you know, let's look
at the beauty of the golf course and for a
few hours, you know, let's really honor this experience. I
think for for a lot of average golfers, that's very,
very refreshing. Now they don't have all the distractions of
the tour player. Now taking a look at the tour player.
(24:47):
I mean, I can remember one of the guys I've
worked with. I won't mention his name, but it was
in the final group on Sunday at Riviera at Los
Angeles Open, and on Saturday night I met him and
he's on his third cocktail, and you know, we have
to go through the metabolism of alcohol, and that's not
really a very good thing because you're going to have
some alcohol, you know when you tee off tomorrow and
(25:09):
your blood. So needless to say that particular golfer, he
really struggled and you know, autographs and let me get
you another drink. Now we take other golfers, you know
that have been very successful. You know, you don't see
Steve Stricker doing that too much. You don't see Jim Furick.
You certainly didn't see Tiger, so I think you know
(25:32):
many of them have.
Speaker 4 (25:33):
Oh boy, yeah, come on, Tiger was seen. He was
seeing it a lot of bars and places.
Speaker 3 (25:39):
But he made I've been drinking but.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
He was, yeah, well we'll go there too much. But
on Saturday night, I would say he's very very disciplined.
I mean, I can tell you a great Tiger story
about Matt Gogel. They were playing in Florida and Matt
went off the back nine and Tiger the front, and
long story short, it was an arduous day and at
the end of the day and Matt had to do
(26:02):
a lot of local media Tiger did all the international media,
and the end of the day, Matt meets his wife
at the bar having a beer, and he's so exhausted
and his wife is all bright eyed and he says, whoa,
you look in great spirits? Where were you? And she said, well,
I just came back from the gym. And he goes, oh, okay,
what was that like? And he goes, well, next to
(26:23):
me for forty five minutes, Tiger was running sprints and
Matt just shook his head because Tiger had just had
the same eight hours prior as Matt did, which was,
you know, playing in bad weather on and off, super tired.
And the difference is Matt, like most guys you know,
wanted to go relax a little bit, and you know,
Tiger goes to the gym. So I don't think in
(26:45):
any way Tiger's work ethic is every question, and I
don't really know him to compromise, you know, himself right
before something very important now outside of the golf world,
and what he does in other domains is really beyond
the scope of this conversation.
Speaker 3 (27:02):
Fred, Okay, I'll buy into that. I'm fascinated.
Speaker 4 (27:05):
You mentioned a lot of players and Tiger is just
a one, you know, he's one name that makes sense.
But of the other players you mentioned Phil, tell me
about your relationship with Phil, and we're talking about Michelson
of course.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
Yeah. Well it's funny because you know, about eight years
ago I was helping Tim Micholson as a coach for
the USD golf team. Here. Now Tim's in Arizona.
Speaker 3 (27:30):
That's Phil's brother.
Speaker 1 (27:32):
Yeah, Tim Micholson. Sure, And and I used to play
a lot of table tennis when I was young. I
played competitively and Japan and Europe, and long story short,
Phil likes cable tennis and a lot of the tour
players love table tennis. They actually fly in a ping
pong table to the President's Cup. And Tim had said
(27:53):
to me, hey, Doc, you know my brother. Christmas is
coming up, and you know, I want to get my
brother something good. But he has everything and everything he
doesn't have that he wants, he just buys. But he
loves table tennis and he thinks his serve is really
good and he can beat me. But I know he's
not that good. So would you come and play with him,
(28:15):
you know, give him a lesson and that would be
his Christmas present. So I said sure, and then, needless
to say, a month or so later, I was actually
helping Na cating with the Chargers and I was going
down to the stadium. I got a call to meet
Phil and it was very funny. I was in blue
jeans and I started to think, well, maybe he's a
(28:38):
really good player. I mean, he's number five in the
world of golf. And then I pulled up to the
gate at the bridges and before I said anything, the
gate man said are you here for? Are you doctor Lardon?
Are you here for the match? And I go, guy's
getting scared. And they brought me into a private gym and
it's like a little basketball court. The stands and somebody
(29:01):
greeted me. And then the next thing I know, Phil
came with a little entourage of folks, many of which
were worked for Callaway or Tailor Made. Their factories are
near here. And the next thing you know, he and
I are playing table tennis and he gives the serve,
and needless to say, the serve, if you're a professional
(29:22):
table tennis player, is an easy serve to you know,
loop kill and I did that and Phil said wow,
And then I serve some and when we serve we
throw the ball up high. It's called the high toss,
and the ball comes out, you know, pretty fast, fifty
miles an hour with a big curve and kind of
curved around Phil's racket. And he said, wow, if you
can teach me that, I'll teach you the short game.
(29:43):
And I laughed. I said, it's too late for me.
Maybe you could help my brother. And then I started
playing them in a chair and giving them nine points
to eleven playing in a chair, teaching him footwork in fact,
and we had that interaction and that was quite fun.
And then right before the Houston Open in twenty eleven,
(30:06):
he engaged me to help him with golf and we
had a really good session and that's where the Mental
scorecard was named that day at the Bridges, and then
he won that week in the Houston Open. So that's
where it started. And it's been very fun to work
with Phil. He's very bright and curious and soaks up
information and his talent is, you know, legendary. So we've
(30:30):
had a nice relationship.
Speaker 3 (30:32):
And in the book you talk about.
Speaker 4 (30:35):
Mindset of growth versus fixed and Phil fit into that
very well versus a lot of other players. Can we
cover that for just a moment because I thought that
was really fascinating. I found myself on the growth side.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
Right. Well, that's good, Fred, that's good. That's where we
want to be. And I think an important thing is
if you have a fixed mindset, you can actually learn
to transform it into a growth mindset. And whether we're
talking about sport of golf as we are now or
really in life, the concepts are very important. So example,
(31:11):
if you kind of want to use Phil, Phil loves
when Tiger plays so rather than being threatened. And if
we think back to Tiger's heyday, there used to be
the Tiger effect. There was a great article in Sports
Illustrated and that showed and this was some years back
before two thousand and eight that when he played, the
rest of the field actually shot like almost a shot worse.
(31:35):
And what does that tell us? That tells us cumulatively
the rest of the field, you know, was intimidated by
Tiger and didn't play as well. In contrast, Phil and
many other great players, they are inspired when Tiger's out there.
And actually Phil has a very favorable head to head
record against Tiger. It gets them pumped up. You know,
(31:58):
he wants that a little like Federer and Nadell and
Jovachak and tennis. They have a wonderful growth mindset, those guys.
So it's a really important concept.
Speaker 4 (32:16):
You're kind of downplaying your level of achievement in table tennis.
Let's give us a background on that and how you
found yourself in the zone. And now that we're able
to give it to all of us.
Speaker 1 (32:32):
To make a long story short, when I was young,
I got involved. The Chinese table tennis team came to
Madison Square Garden in nineteen seventy two. Nixon and table
tennis diplomacy and those that are our age or my
age at least might remember that. But fast forward, I
got involved. It was the second it is the second
(32:53):
largest sport in the world. Participation at the Olympics in China.
It was actually watched more than the finals of the soccer,
if you can believe. But neither here nor there. I
ended up being trained in Japan by the world champion
over there, and I came home and I was in
the finals of the United States Junior Championships and it
(33:15):
was a three out of five And when we started,
I was in the zone where the ball that moves
at ninety miles an hour started to come in slow motion.
I could see it as big as an egg. And
I won the first couple of games handily. And then
at the break where you go to the other side
(33:35):
of the table, one of the coaches had said, and
the winner was going to get their name on all
these table tennis rackets distributed in Hermann's Sporting Goods stores.
I don't know if they have them anymore, but kind
of like golf smith a big change. That was a
big deal, and the coach said something like, oh, this
will be an amazing upset. I think I was seated
(33:56):
twelve and I was playing the perennial best player, multiple
national champion, uh. And the next thing, you know, I thought, wow,
I'm going to have my name on all these rackets.
I'll be the national champion. As soon as that happened,
I lost the next three and the rest is history.
It spawned my career as a sport you know, sport
(34:19):
psychology doctor.
Speaker 4 (34:23):
But you said that table tennis was the second world's
most popular participation sport. I've got three or four in
my head that could be first.
Speaker 3 (34:31):
What's first?
Speaker 1 (34:33):
Uh, soccer?
Speaker 5 (34:35):
Okay, yeah, and actually there's some data now that table
tennis may even rival it. But really, Yeah, Matt Matt Rudy,
the Golf Digest writer who helped me with my book,
he researched to find table tennis number one, But I'm
I'm not one hundred percent sure, so I say number two.
But when I was young, I played in the German
the German Professional League.
Speaker 1 (34:55):
I lived in Sweden. The Swedes are great players. They
beat the Chinese and have won the Worlds a couple
of times. So outside of America, it's a lot more
than you think. In fact, Freddie Jacobson, who is the
Swedish golfer, when he comes to Tory Pines, he and
I always have these great matches and we have a
lot of fun.
Speaker 3 (35:15):
Well that's awesome. Oh that's so cool.
Speaker 4 (35:19):
So let's talk about the scorecard and a little more
to wrap this up and making it a motivation to
purchase the book, which we will have available in our
Golfers mart In our book section, along with your first
book as well.
Speaker 3 (35:36):
We'll have them both. But I'm curious when you say
a number of shots that.
Speaker 4 (35:42):
Qualify in the middle scorecard system, what do you mean
by that qualify?
Speaker 1 (35:47):
Well, if if in that shot you you took the
second or two or five seconds to figure out I'm
really going to hit a seven iron, and you're not ambivalent.
You make your best choice. You have met the first
criteria of the shot. The next criteria is, you know,
to make sure you sort of feel the shot. You know,
how's it going to feel if you put right? You Now,
(36:09):
when we put we kind of walk halfway and this
is the feel of it. That's the feeling part. And
then you get in and hit it. And it's that simple.
And if you do those three things regardless of the result,
because we're only concerned with everything that happens before the
ball leaves the club face, because after it leaves the
club face, there's not a lot we can do. But
(36:29):
if you do those three things, that SHOT's a one
for one. Now, if you don't do all of those
three things, you do not get the point, and it's
a zero for one. And again that's independent of the result.
So you got one hundred shots, you know, only fifty
of them did you do it? The other fifty you
were smoking cigars, chatting. If you apply this very simple concept,
(36:54):
it's hard not to, you know, increase your percentage to
sixty or even more maybe, and that really will have
a huge impact in the average golfer, you know, the
tour players, the margins are so thin, but for the
average guy. We just have an email that came in
and we're going to get it posted on Amazon. And
(37:14):
the guy thanked me. He said, I'm a twelve handicapper.
And I went out and I shot seventy three, my
lowest round ever. And I didn't even know I shot
seventy three as I was focusing on, you know, your
pre shot pyramid. But my mental scorecard was what eighty
percent or something, he said. So that's a great case
in point. And we do give real examples. There's one
(37:37):
in the book of a web dot com player, Scott Fawcett,
who went from a club player to making theweb dot
com and almost a full tour card, you know, and
he was one of these guys that is into statistics,
and when we started, he went from sixty percent to
ninety percent, and sure enough, his level of play, you know,
was dramatically better. So to give you just a little
(38:00):
that's the application piece, and that's part two. And I
think that in and of itself would have a tremendous
impact on the average golfer.
Speaker 4 (38:09):
I recently played with a friend of a friend. I
went out with a friend of mine. He brought a
friend with him, and his friend is a three or
a four.
Speaker 3 (38:17):
I'm excellent golfer.
Speaker 4 (38:18):
And afterwards he said to me, well, you know, you're
a pretty good player. You know, you didn't have your intention,
wasn't there for every shot? And that kind of like
a bit a bit bit what wow? And that really
had an impact on the way I approach each shot.
Speaker 3 (38:36):
Now, I was kind of taken aback by that, but
I loved it.
Speaker 1 (38:41):
Well, it's probably a great observation. And I think of
like the tour players, they're great at hitting really hard
shots because they'd really concentrate. And I mean, I think
of my work with Rich Beam over a decade or so.
Give him a really hard shot and you know, he
was impressive. The ones that I worried more about for
him was, you know, a nine iron with a you know,
(39:03):
just an easy pin at one hundred and thirty yards
because sometimes the easy shot it's easy to space out.
And at tour level, all you need is one bad
shot and you can miss a cut. So I think
that happens a lot you know, with average guys, it's
more than one shot, it's more than a nine iron,
and even good players, even three or four handicappers. So
(39:27):
it teaches us just like we want to make a
good swing, we want to have a good mental framework
for each shot when we play. Now what we do
between the shots we talk about it in the book.
You relax your attention. You know, you can't grind and
concentrate for five hours straight. That's suboptimal. So you pulse
your concentration. And Jack Nicholas would talk about concentration with
(39:50):
the metaphor of an accordion. So the accordion squeezes in
as you do your pre shot and hit the ball,
and then once you've the balls left your club face,
you relax and you know, feel the grass, look at
the trees, and as that next ball comes towards you,
we start to get our attentional focus. We do our
calculations our left brain, our right brain until we hit
(40:12):
the ball shot again, and then we relax again. So
concentration is something that you know, you have to know
how to work with and if you don't, and minds
of muscle, so you have to practice it to get better,
and you have to have good habits, and I think
the book really helps, you know, teach people these good
mental habits.
Speaker 4 (40:31):
And on the top of the pre shot pyramid two
words here and one inside of the other, the now
the no mind.
Speaker 1 (40:40):
Well that is a love. Yeah, that's a triple on tondra. Okay,
so no is spelled ken a k n ow, which
is really to no knowledge. So if you have the knowledge,
you use no mind and no mind. You just look
at the n O in there, which is we don't
(41:00):
want to be thinking when we're hitting the ball. We
want to hit with no mind. We want to hit
with instinct if we can. Now we say that if
you can't get that bad thought out of your head,
you can use an anchor thought. An example, Billy Casper
used to talk about just finish high. Now that's a
non technical thought when you're a golfer. Finish high doesn't
really take you know, any of the mental energy reserve.
(41:23):
But what it does is it keeps you from thinking
about the water. Now we're in the zone, we just
hit it. We don't even think at all. But sometimes
we're in a tough situation and we need an anchor thought.
So but the ideal state is not to be thinking.
That's no mind. And then buried in the know is
the word now. And you want to be in the present.
(41:43):
You want to be the power of now. So you
want to have knowledge. You don't want to be thinking
when you're hitting it. And that's the There's an old
saying those who know do not think, and those who
think do not know. So that's how we stay immersed
in the present. And that is the top of the pyramid.
You know, just hit it, don't get too cerebral.
Speaker 3 (42:05):
Awesome again.
Speaker 4 (42:06):
The book is called Mastering Golf's Mental Game, Your Ultimate
Guide to better on course performance and lower scores by
the table tennis Wizard. He's a ping pung wizard, must be.
We're gonna rewrite the words to that song for you, right,
doctor Michael T.
Speaker 1 (42:23):
Larden.
Speaker 4 (42:24):
Mike, thanks so much for coming back on the show.
I really appreciate it. And best of luck. I'm sure
you're gonna be selling a couple of copies of the
Golf Smarter Community.
Speaker 1 (42:32):
Great and Fred, thanks very much. I love your podcast
and as always, it's great chatting with you.
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