The Tarheel Tour Interview with Dr. Bill Moore   

Dr. Bill Moore is on the faculty of the University of Oklahoma as an elite performance specialist. He is the president of Trust It Golf, and works with golfers of all levels on the mental side of the game. Dr. Moore played professional tennis for 10-years before moving into the world of sports psychology. He has worked with many of the top minds in the field including a stint with Dr. Bob Rotella at the University of Virginia. We spoke with Dr. Moore after one of his students, D.J. Fiese, won the Olde Sycamore Open.

Your method for teaching the mental side of the game is called Trust It Golf. Can you explain the concept of teaching trust, and why is it important for professional golfers to learn trust?

Dr. Moore: That is a great question and to be honest with you, it’s not just golfers that need to learn how to trust what they’ve trained and how to trust their instincts. Whether you’re in business or gymnastics or football or basketball, learning to get out what you already have in you is a very important part of performing consistently and at the best level that you can.

A big part of that is performing your best and consistently trusting what you have. The good news is that trust can be trained. You can train people to let go of conscious control and allow what they have in them to come out. In golf in particular, I spend a lot of time at the practice area in the short game and on the range showing golfers how to practice in ways that instill confidence and to increase trust in their swing. This transfers to performance on the course.

That’s done through specific drills. It’s one thing to put it in the system, and to learn and acquire skills. It’s another thing to get it out of the system and perform. It’s really apples and oranges. What it takes to put it in is completely different than what it takes to get it out. Unless you work on those kinds of performance skills in practice, they’re not going to show up in your performance. That’s where I find a lot of golfers fall short. You see a lot of guys’ self-monitoring correctness, analyzing cause and effect, and self-instructing. Those are three very important skills. But those three skills will kill you during performance for the most part. So the question is, what are some other mental skills that you can practice on the course, on the range, and in the short game area that will transfer to the golf course?

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You have worked with golfers at every level from the weekend warriors, to college players, to the top professionals. Are their any differences in what you teach amateurs versus what you teach to professionals?

Dr. Moore: There really isn’t. It’s surprising. The real criteria is age. You know with junior golfers it’s a little different. They don’t quite have the ability to stay focused and they’re not typically as disciplined in their practice. Collegiate golfers are somewhat similar. Being on a collegiate team lends itself to poor practice unless you have a really good team culture that promotes being precise.

But in terms of the general skills of teaching people with a club in their hand, it’s how do you quiet your mind, how do you trust what you have, how do you let it go, and what are some specific drills you can do to accomplish those goals? It’s very similar whether you’re a corporate CEO with a 15 handicap or a professional golfer.

There are definitely individual differences, but we all tend to be very perfectionistic. The golf culture itself is very technically oriented, there’s a lot of monitoring correctness in your swing, and a lot of conscious activity that is actually practiced during practice. This interferes with performance. Whether you’re a 15 handicapper or to some extent even if you’re a professional golfer.

What are some of the difficulties you face when trying to help a collegiate player become a professional golfer?

Dr. Moore: Every collegiate golfer wants to be a professional. I haven’t met one yet that didn’t want to. My biggest issue with college golf is the culture of practice. Golf is a very boring game for the mind. I mean if you think about what the mind seeks. The mind seeks complexity, it seeks stimulation, and it seeks competition to some extent. Golf, just on its surface, doesn’t have enough to entertain the mind. You are trying to do things that are very unnatural, quiet the mind, feel things instead of think things. It takes a lot of discipline to really learn the skills and approach your practice in ways where it can be efficient and effective and you get the most out of it. It transfers to performance; and unless you have a team culture that is very competitive, and guys are really into getting a lot better, there tends to be a lot of bad habits that develop in practice.

Almost all players seem to have difficulties dealing with nerves. Whether it’s trying to make a cut or trying to win a golf tournament. What advice would you give to players who seem to always come up just a little bit short?

Dr. Moore: Well you know the good news about the nerve thing is if you didn’t care, you wouldn’t be nervous. A lot of performers try to blow off pressure by convincing themselves that they don’t really care or they do things off the course that really keep them from fully investing in their performance. It’s a window of opportunity. You have a window of opportunity in your career to shoot every bullet in your chamber to try to make the PGA Tour.

I don’t think golf is all in your head; it’s a physical game as well. It has a lot of technical expertise that’s involved in the mechanics so the first thing I’d ask is, are you competing at a level that you can have success, and if you’re missing the cut by one or two strokes, you have it at the right level.

So now what happens? Are you getting so nervous that you are not playing as well as you’re practicing? You say, well I can do it in practice and I’m so much better at practice than I am on the course. Well, are you better on the first day than the second day? In that case it probably is nerves.

I would say for anybody, including the guys I work with on the Nationwide Tour, if you want to pick up two or three stokes, the first place to go is your wedge game. Are you really confident in your wedge play? Do you really have two distances dialed in for each one of your wedges? How good are you from 120 yards and in? If I have a player that was just barely missing cuts yet had the pieces in their game to play at a high level, I would tell him that everybody’s a little uncomfortable out there. So it’s not a matter of what do I need to do to be comfortable, it’s a matter of how can I be confident when I’m not comfortable, and how do I build in some margin for error? Wedge play is where you’re going to build that margin for error; and if you really believe you can get up and down from 100 to 120 yards, it frees you up to do so many good things. I work with DJ Fiese, and the week before he won he was hitting the ball really well. We spent a couple of days in Atlanta and he was technically sound and he was very confident, so we spent almost an entire day dialing in his wedges because he was at a point where we knew that he could go really low. He had so much confidence that regardless of where that pin was, if he had a short iron in his hand, he was going at it; and you know if you’re hitting it within ten feet of the pin for two days, you can kick it in and get to 10-under par.

Let’s talk a little bit about DJ Fiese. He opened the event at Olde Sycamore shooting 65-62 the first two days and led by five shots going into the final round. What was your advice to him about how to approach that final round, and how did it differ from what he was trying to do the first two days?

Dr. Moore: That’s a great question. It’s such an interesting concept. In golf, how many times during the course of your career do you enter into a final day with a lead like that? How many times do you have a chance to practice that?

In golf, unlike in other sports like tennis, you don’t get a lot of repetitions in winning when you’re ahead. There’s no question an individual athlete plays better when they’re down in score. It’s easier, you’re attention gets focused better, you’re much more decisive, you know what you need to do, you’re back’s against the wall; there’s no other decision. You just go. When you’re up in score, it’s much more difficult to be decisive and to be committed because you’ve got some options and you don’t have that sense of urgency that really gets your attention.

So a five shot lead is a very difficult thing. It sounds like it’s easy to people who don’t play a lot of golf. But for those guys who play golf it’s almost like a two shot lead is better than a five shot lead because at least you’ve got your attention. You know you have to go out there and shoot a good score.

DJ had to have respect for the difficulty of what’s about to happen. It’s going to be hard, you’re going to have a hard day and you’d better fight your butt off because your competitors are going to play better. The number one issue whenever you’re up in score like that is be decisive and be committed to the shot and to your game plan. Those are some of the things we talked about.

On that note, what is it about Tiger’s mental game that sets him apart from the rest of the players on the PGA Tour? How is he able to close so well against the best players in the world?

Dr. Moore: You have guys who are like that. You know Andre Agassi was like that, Michael Jordan was like that. I think some of that might be a gift, an ability to focus. It will be interesting to see if there is a genetic talent, an ability to focus intensely and quiet your mind at a time when your arousal goes up instead of being noisy when your arousal goes up. Obviously confidence has a lot to do with that. If you’re unbelievably confident, it’s a lot easier to quiet your mind.

What you need to do is watch Tiger practice. That’s the distinguishing feature. He sweats over every shot in practice as if it was worth a million dollars. That’s the difference between the PGA Tour and the Tarheel Tour. Just watch those guys practice. It’s unbelievable, they’ll take 25 minutes to hit ten balls, but those ten balls are just unbelievably concentrated and focused and meaningful.

Let’s look at the other end of the spectrum. What advice would you give to a player on how to move on after melting down in a big spot? Most people are expecting it to take Sergio Garcia months, if not years, to get over to what happened at the British Open. What would you say to him and how long do you think it’s going to take him to get over what happened at Carnoustie?

Dr. Moore: I would be surprised if it takes him very long. John McEnroe had one of the greatest quotes. He said, “Choking at 27 years of age feels just like choking at 13.” Everybody chokes. I don’t think he choked on that putt on 18. I think he hit a great putt, I think he trusted it, I think he hit his target, I think he did so many things right.

There’s no question that if you’re going to achieve greatness in anything you’d better have a vivid memory of all the good things you’re doing. I think that’s one of the big differences between guys who just keep moving on and keep going to the next level is they’re constantly remembering and visualizing the great things that they’ve done; and they don’t replay the embarrassments. Our failures are so much more vivid in our memory than our successes. If you are a professional athlete or if you’re a performer in any capacity, you have got to learn to continue to move those thoughts and images out of your head and replace them with the things that really make you special.

Obviously having a positive mindset is extremely important for a professional golfer. How do you teach a player to be confident and to expect success when he has a poor track record in tournaments?

Dr. Moore: Well I think you redefine what success is, and I don’t mean that in a soft way. I mean there’s no question that the bottom line is your score and the bottom line is what place you finish in a tournament. There’s no question that you measure it that way, everybody measures it that way, so let’s not kid ourselves. Winning matters, it’s important, your score matters.

But how are you going to evaluate your performance while you’re performing? If Tiger Woods’ confidence was based primarily on where his ball went….he ends up in places around the golf course nobody’s ever been in. Your confidence has to be based on something other than the outcome. If you’re confidence is only dependent upon how well you’re playing, you’re going to be in trouble.

So how do you define success while you are on the golf course? Well, what do you have control over? I mean you do not have direct control over your swing path; you do not have direct control over your ball flight. If you did you would have a great swing path and the ball will go wherever you want it to go. So we move our goals into something that we have more control over. You have control over your alignment. You have control over your swing tempo. You have control of letting go. If you control those three things on 80% of your shots you would play pretty darn well. You can get to that level if you practice correctly. That is how you move evaluation and success into something you have more control over.

You worked with Dr. Bob Rotella for a few years at the University of Virginia. How do your teaching methods differ from his and what did you learn from him about the psychology of golf?

Dr. Moore: I don’t think there is anybody that has worked with success as much as Bob has. He’s worked with high-level performers that are very successful in a variety of performance domains.

The biggest thing I’ve learned from Bob is to be open to learning from the people you work with. You can’t work with great performers and not learn something. I’ve learned so much. It’s amazing how much I’ve learned about golf in working with concert pianists. The tasks are so similar it’s scary, and golf has helped me with concert pianists as well. With both golfers and concert pianists mistakes are critical. In tennis you can make a dozen mistakes and still win a set or a match. In Golf you can never get it back. The same thing is true with music to some extent.

Bob is very much into helping people believe in themselves, he’s very much into helping them let go and trust what they’ve got. I think one of the differences that we have is that I do a lot more with drills. I do a lot more coaching in practice on how to get there. I show people how to do it in practice and let them feel what it’s like to trust it and let it go. Then I help them make the transition to performance.

What kind of tips or drills can you give our readers, whether they’re professional golfers or recreational golfers with a passion for the game, on how to improve mentally?

Dr. Moore: I don’t know that there’s a simple answer to that because it’s all very individualized. But there is one putting drill that I think would help everybody quiet his or her mind. It’s the target ball drill. What you do is find a straight four foot putt, you target distance and you target the back of the cup and once you settle in you take one look at the target and one look at the ball and then again, target, ball then you go. But what you do is you say out loud, “target, ball, target, ball” and then you stroke it. What you’ve done is you’ve created this metronome and it’s a sound of target ball. What that does is it quiets your conscious mind. So you’re only attending to target ball. That will help you get rid of those other thoughts related to mechanics or anything else. It just gets you focused on target ball. It quiets your conscious mind because of the rhythmic nature of that target, ball, target, ball.

That’s a good simple drill that I have guys doing out there. They do it every time they’re within four feet of the cup. When you get nervous your mind starts to act up and this is a great way to quiet your conscious mind while you’re standing over the ball.

Dr. Moore we appreciate you joining us and look forward to seeing you at a Tarheel Tour event or two before the end of the season.

Dr Moore: I appreciate it and hope to be able to kick around a few more ideas in the near future.