With all the snow around I've had a chance to do lots of reading over the past few days. I've just finished Golf at the Top by Steve Williams - Tiger Wood's caddy. I've bought a lot of golf books from Amazon so I was really surprised that this one was never recommended to me - and if you look at the Amazon pages the book doesn't have too many reviews.
I'm really surprised about this because you'd expect a book written by the caddy of the best golfer of our generation to be more widely read! If Neal Granville hadn't recommended it to me I don't think I'd have ever found out about it.
Buy on Amazon.com
Buy on Amazon.co.uk
As for the book itself - it is a great read. It covers the mental side of golf and how you train your mind to achieve the things you want to in golf. It is around 180 pages long which is a good size to read over the weekend. The main idea behind the book is that your golfing mind is like a computer. For a shot you retrieve the swing from your hard drive and how to manage smaller details such as the wind from RAM. Our subconscious should be able to use this information to execute the shot perfectly - but unfortunately our imagination and conscious self gets in the way and puts all kinds of self doubt and things in the way. The way to stop our imagination and conscious self getting in the way is concentration, and the way to improve your concentration is to have long and short terms goals to keep working on.
Wow I've think I've managed to condense the book down into a paragraph! I've taken a lot from this book - and have a number of things to do:
- set long term goals - extend the goal I have set for just 2010
- set short term goals (1 week - the issues we need to work on to achieve the goal set for this year)
- create affirmation (something to say to yourself each day to build confidence)
- commit to a pre shot routine - I kind of already did this but need to ensure to use it even at the range.
This book is staying on my Read Again shelf to make sure I refer to it again in the coming months. Recommended for golfers of all abilities and I think it is a real shame it isn't a better known book.