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7 books for golfers and fairway fans

5. “Own Your Game”

  • By Ross Atkin Staff writer

By Dave Stockton and Matthew Rudy

Gotham

144 pages

(Dave Stockton won the PGA Championship in 1970 and 1976 and three major titles on the senior tour. He now is a top-ranked golf teacher.) 

“Jack Nicklaus could be a role model for a lot of different parts of the game, but he was particularly strong this way. In all the times I played with him or watched him, I never saw him get overcome by emotion – positive or negative. It always looked like things were going just as he thought they would.

“Negative self-talk is so devastating because it sucks your confidence away and makes it easy to string a series of bad shots together. When you hit a spectacularly terrible tee shot, the easy response is to get mad or disgusted – or to basically give up on a hole. And that’s when you go into the trees and try to muscle one out through a tiny hole in the branches, or you top another one and don’t get out of jail. The shot right after a bad one is when you need your most positive outlook and focus, and most people give it the least. They pile up mental mistakes on top of one another, then look down at the card on the next tee and see a triple in the box.”

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

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