Consciousness is often fatal in putting, and it is the conscience making
a coward of the man that makes him miss his putt. To hole a three-feet
putt over a flat piece of green is really one of the easiest things in
the world; there can be no doubt about it. But while there is one
ridiculously easy way of doing the putt, there are about a dozen more or
less difficult ways of missing it, and these dozen are uppermost in the
mind of the golfer when he comes to his effort. Thus the missing of the
short putt represents the greatest triumph of matter over mind that is
to be found in the whole range of sport, or, so far as I know, in any
other pursuit in life. But why should a man be given to these morbid
thoughts of the ways of missing, and why should he not be of hopeful,
courageous disposition, and attack the hole boldly and with confidence,
instead of remembering these dozen ways of missing? That is what
non-golfers ask.
It is an easy question to set; but there is another factor in the
situation that has to be mentioned. There is the sense of
responsibility, and this sense of responsibility is probably greater in
a man when he is making a putt of from three to five feet than it is in
the case of any other man at any time in any other sport, because he
will never, never have the chance again that he has got this time. If he
putts and misses, the deed is irrevocable, the stroke and the hole or
the half have been lost, and nothing that can happen afterwards can
remove the loss. If a man makes a bad drive, or if his approach play is
weak, he can atone for these faults by being unusually clever with the
subsequent stroke in the play to the hole, and he thinks he will. But
the short putt is the very last stroke in that play, and if it is missed
there is no possible atonement to be made. Thus there is something of
the awful, of the eternal, of the infinite about the putt; the man is
awe-stricken; he knows it is easy, but he is conscious of those dozen
ways of missing. So he misses. I have put the question to a number of
the best-known players of the day as to what were their precise
thoughts--if any--when they came to making the final putt of a great
match, which in many cases gave them a championship. Their answer almost
universally was that their thought was, “What a fool I shall look if I
miss this putt!” Thus they knew that they ought not to miss it, but they
were burning with consciousness of the fact that they were terribly
liable to do so. So matter triumphs over mind.