“Of all the hazards, fear is the worst.” - Sam Snead.
I love a quote, always have.
I have them lying round in my wallet (remember wallets?), written in chalk on a board in the kitchen, and if I were a generation younger than I am, I’d probably get a few of them drawn on me in ink, as is the fashion these days. I find good quotes inspiring, but so powerful are the incessant distractions of modern life that even having some golden nugget of truth etched on my knuckles wouldn’t preclude me from forgetting to heed the wisdom. If they were inscribed on my eyelids, I might stand a chance.
So when yesterday I stumbled across this from one of the greats of the game, it was swiftly captured in the digital note I have for such examples, labelled “The Jar of Awesome”, in tribute to the podcaster and author Tim Ferriss, who has a physical jar of that name for storing the special things. He and his guests are always talking about fear, and I found, as I pasted Snead’s words into the next card, one of Ferriss’s own beside it - “What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do”.
Fear has certainly been a big part of my golfing makeup over the years. I recall fluffing an approach putt at a critical point in a Club Championship scratch knockout in the early 90’s, playing against the habitual winner of that event. By all reasonable measure, I had no business playing the 17th hole alongside him; I’d expected a short walk in from perhaps the 11th, but had played ok, and he was having a bad day. But over the putt - which was far enough from the green that anyone in their right mind would have chipped; see below - I was choking mentally, fearing three-putting when two looked like enough to take a lead down the last. I took four putts instead, three of them stopping short of the cup, and so lost the hole despite his unusually woeful bunker shot - he probably never goes in them - finally surrendering on the 19th, a sad end to my last serious match.
I wrote another piece (here) about pitching, and the fear around that has lasted as long as the pain of the above collapse, and if you work in golf as I have for two decades, you don’t have to look very far to see people openly terrified of putting, their awkward claws grasping the grip as if it were an instrument of torture, which for most of us it is.
Ferriss’s quote strikes a familiar chord with many of the extraordinary people he interviews, and this theme of fear being, as he describes elsewhere, “an indicator” of where a feared challenge or “stretch” might be helpful or fruitful keeps coming up. For those engaged in the difficult, personal practice of the creative arts, such as writing a book, “The War of Art”, by Steven Pressfield (another Ferriss guest) is invaluable, and that whole book is about fear and its disruptive effects.
He talks of The Resistance, personifying that ancient, inner wiring for homeostasis as the voice on your shoulder that will always tell you you’re wrong, a fool, a lousy writer. Not that The Resistance is bound to just the creative arts; Pressfield expects these fears and doubts to surface in all areas of life - my favourite of his all-encompassing list of objectives that will be derailed by it is number five: “any activity whose aim is tighter abdominals”. I think he’d like Snead’s line, too, as his first successful work was a golfing novel, later a film (“The Legend of Bagger Vance”), over which he’d procrastinated for years on end, paralysed by fear, by The Resistance.
In golf architecture, we talk about the relationship between risk and reward, and if you are lucky enough to play a well-designed, strategic golf course, you will face these choices as you play. Go tight to the corner of the dogleg and you might be rewarded with a shorter, better line in, but get too greedy or cut it too fine and you could find trouble. If you play too safe, though, you will not find the line that can get you close enough with your second. The best holes are often open and wide, the challenges and choices laid bare in front of you. The tricky and interesting bit is working out how risk-averse you are, and this factor is often, perhaps almost always, based around fear.
There’s a hole near here I must have played a few hundred times, but despite the vast acreage of the fairway, I’ve had enough failures there (though never a competitive 4-putt) that the tee shot fills me with dread, in person and occasionally in my sleep. I know how best to play the hole, and there is nothing blind or hidden about it, but my body feels the ghost of every past failure as I walk out of the rhododendron-lined pathway onto the tee, and, hampered by a mostly subconscious fear, routinely hit either a huge, doomed cut into further, mature foliage, or the low duck-hook into that parallel drainage ditch. Either way, the hole is over, and between those two familiar spots lies a fairway you could build a Walmart on. That’s what fear does to you.
But without facing up to our fears, without having the guts to follow our dreams, these marvellous fairways we get to walk (or routinely miss) wouldn’t even exist. For it is in facing up to and dismissing what Pressfield calls The Resistance that anything worth doing gets achieved. Without moving beyond fear, no creative work is done. No one would even build golf courses like Rye or Swinley Forest, no one would write about them to bring them onto our radar, and even if they did, if you let fear rule your decision-making, you will never try for that green in two, and have that rare feeling, when the ball is bang on line a foot shy of the hole, that this will be an eagle. The reward follows the risk, each and every time.
And it is like this with the rest of life. If you listen to the voice on your shoulder, you’d never ask out the lady on the train, or apply for this or that job, or decide to take that trip you’ve always wanted to do. You’ll not have any problem thinking of excuses if you let your mind have a free run at it. But now and then, if you take a risk, ignore the fear, you’ll find you thank yourself for it later, as the message comes back positive, and the job or the date or the article or the new golf course development come to pass.
If you can give yourself the space to dream and then have the courage to try and make it happen despite all of your concerns, the worst case scenario is that you can look back and honestly say you tried. Gave it your best. That must be what the great architects did - listened to the voices urging them not to dream big, then just got on with it. Stepped into the ring. Now we get to interact with the living masterpieces they left behind. Their risks now reward us; what a legacy.
I’ve taken a few risks over the years, almost all in the distant past, but my natural bias is probably towards caution, and this is both an inherited trait and a sensible position for someone with a family to look after. But, thinking again about Pressfield, it is around writing that my most deepest, most profound neuroses sit. I recall talking about writing for a living before I’d even hit the age of twenty, yet it took a global pandemic for me to finally try and put a few words in front of another human being.
That was eighteen months ago, under a non de plume, and since then my practice has slowly developed, studying this strange craft in the dark candlelight of the early mornings. A month ago, the kind people at Cookie Jar Golf agreed to feature a short post of mine on their wonderful platform, and I felt utterly naked, terrified of the opinions of other people, and that I would be thought a deluded fool. The jury is out on that, of course, but given this exciting window in which to display my rambling efforts, it made me finally sort out the blog I’d been procrastinating over so professionally for months on end.
People have been kind in reading my posts since then, and some sharing and encouragement has taken place, but I am not sure anyone can talk about “imposter syndrome” until they have outed themselves as “a writer”. I could write for ten more minutes about my self-talk regarding this (“who do you think you are?”; “what could you possibly have to say to the world?”), but facing that blank page each morning is at once the most terrifying and incredible experience I know, scarier than that 6th tee down the road, but full of promise and potential at that stage.
One thing that is obvious to me is that, in order to write something that people might wish to read, you need a subject that you are passionate about. I have two such strands on the go at the moment - golf, that game I fell for aged eleven but had neglected of late, and writing, that dream that I’ve hidden away like a guilty secret for almost as long. And, while I have a little of that most precious resource of all on my hands - time - I can use them in tandem. Writing about golf gives me plenty of reason to fall back in love with the game, and a gentle audience, and pushing it out to an audience flexes that muscle of stretch, of taking a risk, cutting the corner of the dogleg for a change.
I don’t know whether any of this will lead to anything of value, but at the moment, I don’t really mind either way. I am back in touch with the spirit of this game I love, and it feels like I am also back in touch with the person I always meant to be, and along with “writer”, “golfer” is once again part of that being. To have these words drop out into public still makes me feel naked, fearful, but it also feels good, wholesome, worthwhile. It makes me feel alive, as does the “essential research” I will do this afternoon on the frosty heathland.
If in time this writing thing drops away, and it is all proven to have been a pipe-dream all along, well that is fine by me, too. I’ll have stepped beyond many years of a private, misguided fear, and found that on the other side is something different. It’s called hope.
Time to close the laptop down and pick up my clubs. Oh, and the message on my eyelids? The quote I mustn’t forget out there on the course or in my life? That one is easy. It could even be a distant cousin of Slammin’ Sam’s quote, where we started today.
“Never up, never in.”
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