  Michael LaBrutto, PGA Head Professional Greenacres Country Club
Golf Can Be Positively Simple: Lessons from My Session with Dr. Bob Rotella by: Michael LaBrutto, Head Golf Professional at Greenacres Country Club, Lawrenceville, New Jersey
“It will only hurt you if you let it.” This was a quote from my wife Julie while she was caddying on the first hole of my first professional golf tournament in Florida January, 1997. My six-iron approach finished four feet from the hole. I went to sink the short putt, but my hands were pumped with adrenaline and excitement, and the ball exploded off my putter and lipped out. As I walked off the green disappointed, my wife Julie, who has her masters’ degree in psychology, delivered that profound statement.
I was new to sports psychology then. I had just read Golf Is Not a Game of Perfect by best-selling author Dr. Bob Rotella, one of the most recognized sports psychologists in the world. Julie wanted to help me prepare for my new professional playing career, so she bought me a three-day session at Rotella’s home, in Charlottesville, Virginia. This incredible experience has helped me become a better person, a better player and a better golf instructor.
Rotella reminded me to keep my thoughts as simple as possible, to cultivate a quiet mind. As an instructor I follow that same ideology, often telling my students “minor adjustments will make major improvements.” In most cases I don’t need to perform major surgery on the lesson tee. Players should not have to feel like they need a long recovery period before playing well again.
But there is no doubt that golf is a high-maintenance game and requires a lot of time practicing both your mental and physical skills to become successful. The mental game of golf demands the self-discipline to stay totally attentive while doing the same old simple boring things constantly. But you must keep the potentially complicated things in golf simple. Rotella wrote “It is difficult for intelligent people who are prone to analyze and judge almost everything they do to have the discipline to play golf in a passive, quiet, simple and non-judgmental mindset…an acceptance that this is necessary and is the crucial first step.”
It is certainly important to think positively when playing golf. It never ends—every hole, every shot and every day you must choose to think positively. Rotella writes, “Positive thinking means focusing your attention on what you want, and refusing to ever play a shot while thinking in any other mindset. …you want to play great, you want to win. … As long as golfers’ minds are focused on what they want, they will be thinking positively.” He also reminds us that we cannot always control all the events in our lives or the bounces that our golf ball takes during a round but we can control our response to them. When Julie made that comment to me after I missed the short birdie putt on my first hole, she reminded me of that positive, forgiving mindset. I went on to finish at even par for the tournament, a respectable 8th place finish.
During the final night in Charlottesville, Virginia, Rotella gave me an assignment. He wanted me to listen to an audio file, which contained excerpts of the commencement speech given by Jack Nicklaus at his son Gary’s graduation from Georgia Tech University. Although I was completely moved by Nicklaus’s speech, it was his answer to a question during the Q&A session after the ceremony that awed me. One graduate said, “Mr Nicklaus, you said that you never missed a putt that you needed to make on the last hole of a tournament, but I remembered a putt you missed, a putt on the 72nd hole that would have got you into a playoff ….” Nicklaus replied, “Son, I made that putt. It just didn’t go in.” What an incredible example of the positive mindset of arguably the greatest golfer of all time.
Remember to keep it positive and keep it simple.
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