News
Karl Morris: The Golf Doctor
20 July 2010
For the first time this year Karl Morris can mention Tiger Woods in his golf clinics. Although he’d be on the first plane to Florida if Tiger called him in the morning, Morris couldn’t really advertise his services as a mind coach using Woods as a selling point. Not while the world’s greatest golfer was embroiled in the sport’s greatest scandal writes Brendan Coffey (Sports Editor, Kildare Nationalist)
“Was it addiction or just opportunity?” Morris says to his class of golfers at a clinic in the GUI National Golf Academy in Maynooth, Co Kildare. Morris is getting ready to play a clip of Woods speaking about the ‘40-second sanctuary’, the zone Tiger enters before he plays a shot. It’s nine months since Woods crashed his car into a fire hydrant, the day the golfing world started to learn that the game’s greatest player lived an incredible double life.
Morris has been mind coach to Irish stars Darren Clarke and Paul McGinley but in just over a month he has seen two of his clients claim back to back majors.
McDowell’s win at the US Open showcased his mental resolve on the final day at Pebble Beach while his playing partner, Dustin Johnson, collapsed.
Even down the final hole, McDowell had to keep his cool as he held onto a one-shot lead.
But now it’s Louis Oosthuizen’s win at the Open at St Andrews that has everyone talking about the mental side of the game, thanks to the famous red dot on Oosthuizen’s glove. The dot was Morris’ idea and yet it was only a month ago that he met with the South African for the first time. Like in the clip that Morris shows at his clinics – Tiger speaking about the 40-second sanctuary – what he finds is that most golfers are all over the place when it comes to their pre-shot routine.
“Most golfers just do not understand how important and how vital it is that you get your routine right,” he says.
“Concentration is one of the most misunderstood aspects of golf and life. Nobody ‘loses’ their concentration they just allow themselves to put it in the wrong place.
“One of the difficulties about golf is that there are no outside agents that help you focus your concentration as for instance football, where the referees whistle will trigger the mind to focus on the game. In golf it is essential that you create your own ‘concentration trigger’.”
For Oosthuizen, the red dot became a trigger point before his shots, hence the zen like, almost hypnotic state that he seemed to enter every time he approached a shot. But the red dot wasn’t just vital for Oosthuizen when he was playing shots, it was crucial for the time in between shots too.
“In five hours you need to be able to ‘switch on’ and ‘switch off’ to be able to maintain your focus at the right time,” Morris explains.
“Did you notice how Louis actively seemed to be smiling and enjoying himself? This was a specific step we discussed. The red dot became the focus point to play the shot and then he would ‘come out’ of that trance in between shots.”
Morris, who has worked with snooker players, cricketers and most recently the coaches from the English rugby football union, took an interest in the mental side of golf more than a decade ago. A professional golfer, the furthest he went was the European Challenge Tour, so he focused his career on coaching. After studying sports psychology, hypnosis and NLP (neuro-linguistic programming, which became famous in the US because it has been used by men to attract women in speed seduction clinics), Morris started working with England’s Philip Archer. Archer shot 27 under at the European Tour qualifying school after he started working with Morris and the mind guru then went on to work with Darren Clarke, a few weeks before the Ulsterman famously beat Tiger at the WGC in Akron in 2003. He has since coached Graham McDowell, Lee Westwood and Paul McGinley and Oosthuizen.
Morris hosts golf clinics up and down the UK and regularly comes over to the GUI National Golf Academy in Maynooth to bring his programme, The Mind Factor, to an Irish audience.
“I overheard Harrington talk about the one percents. I say to golfers, ‘what’s the value of one shot?’ Because one shot in a round of golf doesn’t seem an awful lot but it can be huge. One shot when you make four instead of taking five, it’s the effect that that has on you after that. What most golfers are doing, the only place they’re looking to improve is the swing, which is obviously a big area but there’s other things they can look at. 90 per cent of golf isn’t golf. It’s the only sport like that. Most of the time that you’re out there (on the course) you’re not actually playing. That has to have some impact on what’s happening.”
And it’s because the game of golf is so different from the way that it is practiced, golfers often can’t understand why the wonderful things they do on the range don’t transfer onto the course.
“In practice you can just stand there, hit a bad one and there’s another one there straight away. You hit a bad one out there (course), you’ve got ten minutes to think about it before the next one comes along.”
Morris tells his clients that golf is the only game where ‘every shot has a consequence’. It’s from that idea he has devised games like Par 18, where you practice getting up and down nine times, using three easy positions, three medium and three difficult. By keeping a log of scores, the player can see his game is improving, simply because par 18 is much closer to the real thing than just lashing drives off the range.
“One thing I work on is practicing better, simulating a bit of pressure. Hitting balls on a range, anybody can get good at that.”
Because if anybody could just get out and play there wouldn’t be a Tiger Woods.