Anger is a Fault
Every time you play or watch golf you see the effect of anger.
There’s always someone prepared either to blame their equipment, bad luck or anyone in sight when things go wrong but these golfers must learn to accept more responsibility for their efforts and start to be more tolerant.
Perhaps Ben Crenshaw in the 1987 Ryder Cup showed one of the most famous results of anger when he broke his putter – incidentally the best tool in his bag – and then had to putt with his three iron and lost the match.
More recently Ernie Els started this years Masters with an opening score of 10 shots (which is the worst in the competitions history) missing 6 putts from less than 2ft many of which were in temper and without patience and control.
You so often see players throwing their clubs about and stamping their feet and some of these players are the elite of golf and it would seem that some of them still do not understand that they are making the pressure of playing golf so much more intense for themselves.
Feeling pressure is bad enough without making it worse or impossible to deal with.
Anger is the worst fault in golf and often costs the golfer more lost shots than the yip or the shank and which invariably interferes with the next shot, in many cases destroys the rest of the round and often reduces a player to become very bad company.
Of the ‘angry’ brigade, the ones who blame themselves are not too bad to play with although you can suffer from the ‘atmosphere’, but the ones who blame others for their mistakes are a pain in the neck, just as much to themselves as they are to others.
All golfers must understand that the greatest challenge in golf is personal control and they must learn to be more patient with themselves and more tolerant of others because their scores and general enjoyment of the game will then,surprisingly, improve.