Keep Trusting Your Game, Kid

We’ve all been there: faced with a shot a little too long with a lot too much danger lurking at the other end, we decide that discretion is the better part of valor and lay up safely.  It’s part of golf and even the world’s greatest players have done it when they don’t think they’ll need a hero shot in order to secure a win.  Or if they are being honest, even the greatest might say they didn’t think they had a good chance to successfully hit a given shot and that taking it would have been unwise.  After all, you must believe in a shot when you are standing over the ball.

Yesterday, the announcers on Golf Channel were quick to criticize 20 year-old Rickie Fowler for doing exactly that, saying that he shouldn’t have laid up when he was faced with a 230 yard second shot to an island green on the par-5 15th at TPC Scottsdale.

Thing is, they don’t know Rickie Fowler’s game as much as Rickie Fowler does, and for his part, he said that he laid up because he thought it would give him a better chance for a much-needed birdie.  “I was a little farther out than I would have liked to have been to go for it,” Fowler said.  ” You know [...] if I was a couple back in that position and feeling that I needed to make a few birdies coming in, I would have gone for it. But being that I was at the time, I think, just one back, putting a wedge in my hand from 80 yards, a lot of times I do make birdie there. I played 16 well all week. I had a look at birdie there. With 17 being a short hole, there’s a birdie chance. So I felt that instead of bringing trouble into play, in a way which a lot of times I don’t play, I took the safe route, easy lay-up, and like I said, I had an easy wedge shot with soft greens. I just hit it a little soft.”

In other words, Fowler played a shot he thought would end up giving him the desired result, and while it didn’t work out that way, it shows me a self-awareness beyond his years.  At 20, most successful young men are full of bravado and exaggerated self-confidence, and many think that they are ten feet high and bullet proof.  Not Fowler.  Instead of a high risk-reward shot he chose a safer path that still gave him a shot at a birdie but also removed disaster (bogey or worse) from the equation.  That’s wise thinking, even if it wasn’t considered such by the color announcers on Golf Channel.  What they weren’t mentioning was that the green had water left, and that a pulled shot would be scuba diving, leaving Fowler gasping for a fourth place finish.  Sure, he might have potentially gotten an eagle, but then again, maybe not.

Just remember it is easy to swing someone else’s clubs for them.  Sitting in a climate controlled booth with nothing on the line,  a lot of golf announcers can second guess anyone — and many of them make a fine living at doing just that.

Of course, you might hear something like “winners play to win” or something similar, but again, a player knows his own game better than anyone. If you think you can get up and down for birdie after a layup and you know you’ve got the wedge game to do exactly that, then maybe laying up is a wise choice.  Especially when you are dropping the ball an average of six feet from the cup that week from the 80-100 yards out.

That in turn brings to mind a rather famous quote by Teddy Roosevelt, a man who knew a few things about the heat of battle:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. ”

- from ‘The Man In The Arena, April 23, 1910

That said, Rickie Fowler should keep on doing exactly what he feels is the right thing to do, no matter the second-guessing.  Even if in the future, he decides to go for the long shot and not lay up the ball, do it because he thought it was a good idea, not because a Monday Morning Quarterback is saying that’s what he should do.