The worst question you could ask a golfer when hoping to have a short conversation is, \u201cHow did you play?\u201d <\/p>\n
The answer is always more information than you need, and it tends to feature two consistent elements: <\/p>\n
1. It could have been better.<\/p>\n
2. But there was this one shot.<\/p>\n
There is always at least one shot, the kind that brings you back, as the saying goes. Last weekend, in a tournament while working through a series of swing changes, I played predictably poorly, but even then, I could cite a handful of occasions when a breakthrough seemed imminent.<\/p>\n
The phrase for this is \u201cshot euphoria,\u201d and as Greg Nathan, the executive director of the National Golf Foundation explains, it\u2019s one of the main reasons many of us ended up as golfers.<\/p>\n
The NGF is the body that tracks golf\u2019s overall health\u2014how many rounds are being played, who is playing most often, what drives golfer behavior. While the popular trope in golf is to \u201cgrow the game,\u201d Nathan prefers to frame it as \u201ccreating golfers,\u201d which means understanding what might turn someone who dabbles in golf into someone who wants to stick around. <\/p>\n
The NGF\u2019s research of experimental golfers who become regular players identified four contributing elements. The first two reflect golf culture: comfort in a golf environment and around other golfers. Another is about having enough ability to enjoy the game (which is not the same as being good). <\/p>\n
The fourth is shot euphoria.<\/p>\n
Although \u201cshot euphoria\u201d sounds less like a data point and more like a ride at Disney World, the NGF takes it seriously, and a golfer can probably understand why. So much of golf is around varying degrees of failure\u2014mitigating mistakes, playing the percentages. Good golf depends more on missing in the right spot than it does knocking down flagsticks. But perhaps because the game is so hard, we crave intermittent reassurance.<\/p>\n
\u201cHaving the ball travel in the air the way you imagine it in your mind or the feeling of a compressed well-struck shot, that is golf’s drug,\u201d Nathan says. \u201cYou and I spend the rest of our lives trying to get that little mini-high. If the shot called for a cut, or the shot called for a draw, you created it with your body what you imagined in your mind.\u201d<\/p>\n
This last part is important in understanding a golfer\u2019s mindset. Shot euphoria is not a product of divine intervention, but something you did. \u201cA window into your capabilities\u201d as Nathan says. For golfers like me obsessed with getting better, those occasional perfect shots suggest buried somewhere under the pile of self-doubt and inconsistency is the real golfer trying to break free.<\/p>\n
It’s natural to want those shots every time we stand over the ball, but golf is too stingy to oblige. Yet it usually gives us just enough to want to come back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The worst question you could ask a golfer when hoping to have a short conversation is, \u201cHow did…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":57048,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[16317,44,3481,588,21375,82],"class_list":["post-57047","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-game-plan","tag-golf","tag-low-net","tag-plus","tag-shot-euphoria-is-golfs-gateway-drug","tag-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57047","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57047"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57047\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}