Are you a ‘lucky’ golfer?

December 11, 2006 by aab180.

Have you ever played a Saturday morning twosome with your buddy and quietly watched in amazement as he or she would hit the ball in the trees time after time and end up in the fairway? Hit a ball so thin that when it rolled in the fairway bunker that it managed to run back out of it into a perfect position? Well I have! And its something I’ve been thinking about recently. 

When I started playing golf my Dad told me a quote that he heard Gary Player say which has stuck with me… “The more you practice, the luckier you get.” However I think that a golfers luck has more to do with how they use the luck and their attitude towards it. 

Some of us may feel that we simply aren’t ‘lucky’ golfers. “I always get bad breaks” which may happen to us every once in a while, but I think that the ‘lucky’ golfers are those who decide to choose an attitude that says “I do get good breaks and I take advantage of them.” 

This morning I watched the South African golfer Charl Schwartzel trying to catch a player in the lead of the Alfred Dunhill Championship with 4 holes to play. On the 15th his drive hooked left. It bounced out of bounds, hopped up on to a small stone wall about a foot tall, bounced two or three times and came back in bounds. Was this lucky? You bet it was! But what impressed me was how he went on to birdie this hole. With this momentum he then birdie the next. Had he not hit his approach shot to the par 5 18th hole in the water, a third birdie would have put him in a playoff. But I think in choosing to believe that he gets good breaks and using them, he had prepared himself for such an occasion and was ready for it when it came. 

Can you and I have that same ‘luck’? Its up to you. Make a choice.

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