Most of us are not blessed with the physical capabilities of the modern tour pro, but those limits don’t exist as much on the mental side. There is nothing preventing us from thinking like the best players in the world.
Adopting an elite performance mentality takes practice and discipline. Before you dive in, you need to learn how the best players think on the course, where you are going wrong and how you can change your mindset to play to your potential.
Scroll on for the complete recording, as well as our key takeaways and a full transcript of our Happy Hour.
That’s why we’re excited about this Golf Digest Happy Hour: How to avoid the mental ‘landmines’ of golf, with Dr. Bhrett McCabe. Dr. McCabe is a licensed clinical and sports psychologist who works with a number of golfers on tour, including Jon Rahm, Nick Dunlap, Sam Burns, Billy Horschel and others.
Did you miss our recent Happy Hours? Watch the full recordings of our webinars with course-management expert Scott Fawcett and college golf recruiting expert Dr. Katie Brophy Miles.
Dr. McCabe is also the author of Golf Digest’s most recent cover story, where he unpacks the mental strategies that 20-year-old Nick Dunlap used to become the first amateur to win a PGA Tour event in 33 years at The American Express earlier this year.
Dr. McCabe spoke to Golf Digest+ members for an hour about a variety of topics on the mental game, including the five most common "landmines," and how we can avoid them. We also discussed how to take your range game to the course, how to learn to play with what you have, why par putts are seemingly easier than birdie putts, how to build confidence and much more.
You can watch the complete Happy Hour with McCabe below, as well as read our key takeaways and the full transcript.
Key Takeaways
- The five mental landmines that ruin our scores are:
1. Expectations
2. Believing your best is the standard
3. Pushing when in trouble
4. Trying to hit the right shot vs. playing your shot
5. The myth about controlling emotions - A key difference between how the best players think on the course and how many golfers think is that the best players embrace who they are that day, whereas we often try to find what we don't have. The best players might only have 78 percent of their skills or swing on a given day, but they are focused on maximizing that 78 percent. Often, the rest of us focus on trying to find the 22 percent that is missing.
- The reason you struggle to take your range swing to the course is because there is no pressure and fear on the range. Pressure and fear is natural, and instead of fighting it, you should embrace it and learn how your body reacts to them.
Transcript
Drew: All right, Bhrett, let's get started. Thank you everyone for joining this Golf Digest Happy Hour on the mental game and how we can avoid some of those common mental pitfalls that ruin our scores. I'm Drew Powell and associate editor at Golf Digest. If you've joined previous Happy Hours, welcome back.
And if you're new here, this is our live webinar series where we bring a guest whether it be a coach, a pro or other industry insider and have a Q and A with Golf Digest+ members. So tonight I'm excited to be joined by Dr. Bhrett McCabe. Bhrett is a clinical and sports psychologist who works with a bunch of tour pros, including our latest Golf Digest cover star, Nick Dunlap.
Bhrett actually wrote the cover story for this issue came out a few days ago, last week actually where he dives into the mental keys that Dunlap used to become the first amateur to win on the PGA Tour in over 30 years earlier this season. In addition to his work with tour pros, Brett is the sports and performance psychologist for the University of Alabama's athletic department where he works with every team including the top ranked football team.
He's written four books on psychology and sports psychology. And the most recent one is titled kick anxieties ass. So tonight we're going to dive in. Yeah it's good, right? What did you, when you came up with that, what was You must've been pretty proud.
Bhrett: Actually, I didn't come up with that.
So my daughter and then got an office another guy by the name of Bhrett, I wrote it as my working title is I'll be a little aggressive, but my daughter who does a lot of marketing stuff and, is a, like me, a very nice sufferer of anxiety was like, dude, you got to just say kickings on his ass.
Anybody with anxiety, it's not breathe it away. It's man, I want to face this thing. That's kicking my ass. Start kicking his ass. The problem with it is you can't advertise on Amazon with it because it's got the word ass in it. Some of those things. So we can do it, but the book's been great.
It's my own personal journey through some anxiety and panic attacks that I've had and things I suffer with on a daily basis. And then really I don't want to say normalizing anxiety, but giving people a platform on how to tackle it head on instead of trying to repress it, push it back and act like it should go away.
Drew: Sweet. I guess in a way we're going to talk about golf anxiety, at least some sorts of it. In this talk on the landmines of golf, which is what you call sort of these common mental mistakes that balloon our scores. So we're gonna have a pretty informal Q and A over the next hour. We encourage you all to participate.
So at any point, just throw your questions in the Q and A section and we'll be we'll try to get to as many as possible. And don't worry about remembering everything. We'll have a full recording available to all Golf Digest plus members after the webinar. So Brett thank you for joining us tonight.
How are you doing?
Bhrett: Yeah, I'm good. I'm nervous of, I know who your first guest was and we have a running debate and challenge against each other. I didn't get a chance to see the second one, but I almost sent out like. A thousand free memberships just to be able to beat Scott Fawcett.
Drew: So a little friendly competition.
Bhrett: Scott and I have been around a long time.
So I think what you guys are doing here is great. My goal always is to try to bring the mental game into a more relevant and everyday conversation. And I want it. I want to provide as much free content as we possibly can on this, because, there are a lot of people who wonder what the mental game is.
It's almost like this mysterious thing. And then you hear things like have fun out there. Put your hand in a meat grinder. It's not fun. Kicking your shins against the bicycle pedals are not fun. Falling off of a bike's not fun, but landing the trick is golf is probably 80 percent not fun, 20%. A static moments of just glory.
And it's those little things that keep us going. And so I just think it's cool to come on here and have a conversation. So I don't know if you tapped into to get me on here, but you're probably gonna be like, Oh my God.
Drew: I love talking about the mental game and trying to work on my own mental game, because at least for me, it feels like it's a skill that we all can get really good at with the right practice.
Whereas maybe technique, we're not going to. Get our technique to bear, to be where tour pros are. We don't necessarily have the physical capabilities or the time, but correct me if I'm wrong with the right strategy, the right approach, we can have a similar mental outlook on the course as tour pros with the right practice.
Bhrett: Can we? Think about it. Let's go back into most recent history. Scottie Scheffler winning the players championship with a bad neck and kept chopping away. And next thing he's up there. Scottie, we've often times talked to what Tiger Woods did mentally. And we know the story of his dad training him and shaking the, the coins in his pocket, a lot of meditation.
But Scottie Scheffler is probably the most, and I say this out of just utmost respect, the model that most people should be studying because Scottie gets the most out of what he has each day. And yeah, okay. He's a world class ball striker, but he takes responsibility. He fights and he works. And here's the guy in the Players Championship, trying to be the first guy to ever repeat is having to get yet treatment on the course.
But it wasn't that it was the fact that he was having to hit 80 percent drivers, couldn't follow through. Didn't complain about it. Didn't bemoan it just found a way to keep chopping away. And then the next thing, and what was interesting is one of my players told me today, he said, do you notice that when he posted that score, the people around him started making bogeys, other words, it was like, Oh goodness, the giant has shown up.
Drew: If he can shoot that score with his physical state, he's got something up there that we might not have.
Bhrett: So I agree with you. There's all skills that we can do to learn mentally. The problem is that the mental game is really three major buckets. In my opinion, it's self image, the way we train and the way we execute under pressure, a self image.
We, a lot of us have a very inflated sense of self when it comes to golf. Because we tend to anchor on our best days. And that's one of the landmines we'll talk about later. But we all tend to remember that great day. And it's like what we look at with our vacations. We look back and think, man, that vacation was the greatest week of my life.
But you forget that you were, the service at one restaurant was terrible. You had an average food. The travel day was stressful. But we tend to remember the highlights because it was a positive experience. So when we have a score that we like, we tend to look back and think, man, that was great.
And you forget that there are times that you probably overcame a little challenge, got a good break, whatever. The way we practice, we don't practice. Effectively, golfers tend to golfers are the worst practicers in the history of sport, bar none. There's no athlete that practices worse, but it's really the only sport now that has a place where you go pay money to practice.
Drew: What are we doing wrong?
Bhrett: You're using yesterday's results to fix a problem, to try to make sure it's never going to happen again. Okay. It'd be like going to ride a bike and then practicing how you balance versus going and riding it more. You look at basketball. Do you ever see basketball players stand on the sidelines, practicing the shot in between timeouts?
Never. But that's what golfers do. You see them walking down the fairway and they're always trying to get an angle and they're always trying to get a certain position. And the reality is the brain's not built for consistent motor movements. It's been, it's built for variability because if we have consistent motor patterns, we're really good prey for a predator.
Drew: Is it because the golf swing is seemingly an unnatural move? I was actually talking about this with a colleague today. We're like a lot of other sports, it's like pretty natural. The way you throw a ball, where you catch a ball, all of these different things, whereas trying to hit a static ball on an inclined plane is maybe not a natural movement.
So we resort to these technical thoughts.
Bhrett: We're in those technical thoughts now because we can measure it, right? And we have models for it and we can look back at cybernetics and all that other stuff and be, and it'll be mesmerized by how Guy Berger swing or whoever that was, but they also, the other factor is think about the neurophysiological miracle of hitting a golf ball.
Robin Williams is a very classic piece on this, right? But the truth is you stand parallel to your target and you take a stick. A shaft with a piece of metal on the bottom. That's in a lying and you take it away from the target, you reroute it around the body and you fire it as hard as you can down that line to a target 300 yards away, and you're pissed off if you're 45 feet offline, like it's truly remarkable.
Okay. And we think that we should do it all the time. We know that the game is actually a game of variability, and I like to have players look at the game, like it's playing that old ABC game show wipe out. Everyone thinks it's gonna be this great day where you're gonna go out there and everything's gonna work your way and the reality is you're running along us a trap door.
Okay. And instead of going Oh my God, a trap door. I'm suck. I'm terrible. My swing broke down. Okay, how do I get back up after the trap door? Because what's an acceptable number of bad shots to hit in a good round of golf? For you, you're exquisite player. So what's what's, what are you?
Drew: Plus two.
Bhrett: Okay. Plus two. Okay. So for you, what's an acceptable number of bad shots in the course of around
Drew: Really bad shots?
Bhrett: Bad shots. I didn't say really bad shots, because you're saying bad shots are also bad shots with what bad outcomes. But bad shots, let's not put the outcome part in there.
Drew: I'd probably let five or 10 slide before I got really worried. Okay.
Bhrett: But why then do we react when we come out of the gate and hit two bad ones? If we know that we're going to hit five to 10 bad ones that's standard, right?
Drew: It's almost the worry of, is this going to be the whole day of me hitting terrible shots and what's the what's going to happen if I do continue to hit these bad shots.
Bhrett: So our negative emotion is more about fear of the future that we can't handle it.
Think about it. And then we get mad at ourselves. Somebody said on my Instagram feed earlier, because I didn't practice enough. But if he had shot a great score, he wouldn't get mad. He didn't practice enough. The problem with golf is that we are the owner of our content. We're the owner of our blame.
We're the owner of our whatever. And we think that we have more control. The problem with golf on the course is the way we practice is nothing like how we play. Basketball players, scrimmage a lot. Football players are hand to hand combat all the time. Baseball, like I did. I was going against hitters. Okay.
And I was practicing and then I went out and the game was different, but it had a lot more similarity. I got to a driving range. I'm hitting ball after ball with unbelievable control, but absolutely zero consequences. But then I go to a golf course. I have zero control and tremendous consequences.
It's a mismatch. There's no in between. And I wish I could sell a course right now on how to practice better that actually worked. But we're like, if I said you and I, Hey, look, we got a big, we got a US Am qualifier coming up. You and I are just gonna go out and play golf. We're going to be on our phones.
We're going to be listening to music. Drink cart comes by. We're going to grab a drink. Yeah, you're not going to do that at US Am qualifier. And you and I may have gotten to the first tee 10 minutes after we just got off a phone call from work. US AM qualifier. We're going to go out there two hours early, stretch, eat right.
Go to sleep early. And probably play terrible. And that's the truth. That's what happens, right? Because we build up all this. And so the reason why golf is hard, if we started taking it and started looking at golf, like an obstacle course or a puzzle versus a, it's not a racetrack. It's not a drag race where we're in control of all the events.
It's really chaotic and it's four and a half hours of mental exhaustion to stay in it.
Drew: Think that's a good way to tie in some of these landmines that I know you want to get into. Perhaps it's understandable with everything you're discussing that we fall into some of these landmines, considering how tricky the game can be.
So this first landmine I know you want to get into revolves around expectations. How expectations impact performance. Is it okay to have expectations?
Bhrett: Okay, you're the writer. What is an expectation?
Drew: It's what you think might happen or want to happen. What you think might happen.
Bhrett: Use that word expect. Not that you want to happen, you plan for it. Do we ever know what's going to happen in the game of golf? So what happens is when we naturally have anxiety, see, whenever you're competing, there's an uncertainty.
Once you enter the competitive environment, there's an uncertainty of the outcome. There's an uncertainty about feeling in control. No athlete wants to feel out of control in a competitive environment, right? If you ask any pitcher in Major League Baseball, or, when I pitched, what's the worst feeling is feeling like you're on the mound with no command.
Awful to be on the golf course with no feeling a command of your shots, but we expect and we hope to play them. So expectations are a tad bit of hope driven philosophy. That's really driven by fear and doubt. Because if you truly, if you ever think to your best rounds, And you think, how did I play? You expected nothing.
Let's just say you were, had too much to drink the night before, food poisoning, or you running late. You expected nothing. I didn't get to warm up and I went out there and shot 2 under par. Because your expectations were low. You weren't, what happens is we start trying to force it, force the game into our believed process and progress.
And then what happens is because that fear and doubt and that hope is there, we start getting more and more frustrated and you can watch a scorecard of a junior golfer. Let's use juniors for a minute. I get this call a lot from parents. My, my kid practices a ton, plays great with his friends, goes out on his own, shoots on and he goes out and plays in a tournament and it's over by the first nine and I'm like, okay, let me guess what the scorecard is.
Par, hard par on the first one, maybe a bogey and probably a par on the second. Then blow a pull, and then limps into the nine and then is out of it. And what do they usually do on the back nine play? Great.
Drew: Yeah. They steady the ship. Yeah.
Bhrett: Yeah. And what happens when you ask them, they're like the score was already out of whack.
So I just tried to play my best from then.
And that's the problem, right? Look, every one of us drives to the golf course and hopes today's a day that we get to post one of our best rounds. Which is our second landmine.
Drew: Before we get into it real quick, cause this was a question that came in that kind of relates to what you're talking about is to somewhat some rounds, I start strong say even par after seven holes, and then I start thinking about an end score and what I can shoot.
So then I go 10 over on the next 11, for example, how can I stay present? That cliche that everyone says and not think ahead of what could be.
Bhrett: You're going to think ahead. Okay. Because you've got things to risk at that point. And even though you're like, Ooh, I can do this, the risk is higher. because we want it.
We're emotionally invested to it happens to a lot of us, right? And there's all kinds of different ways that a golf round gets posted. One of the things that I see with players in that kind of scenario is they have a little bit more anxiety early on and their expectations are lower. They're smarter.
They play the game as it comes to them. But then once they're sitting in a spot now, it's like I can't miss in this area. I can't miss in this. And also it's if somebody goes, man, you haven’t three putted today. And you got a 45 footer. I can guarantee you it's going to be eight feet short. Because it changes our scope because now it's don't three putt versus play the shot in front of you.
I don't also like it. I don't like it when people say honey, don't keep score. We know the score. We always know the score. Okay. But the thing is, I like to break down competition into how many times can you get the ball within 20 feet for birdie or better, or if you're a bogey shooter far better.
Okay. And you look at that and you think, okay, can I get the ball in position? I don't have to be super great to do that. I don't have to be hitting it flush. I don't have to be trying to hit every ball. Perfect. I just need to get the ball in position and we're going to play the, we're gonna play the odds game.
We're going to try to get the odds in our favor more. And so when you're sitting there at seven and even through seven, you're like, man, I've got a good start. Don't screw this up. Hey, look, I don't know how it's going to end, but I'm going to fight all the way through it. But what's important is this eight tee shot, not to protect, but to stay.
But it happened to me this week. I was, I hadn't, I haven't been playing much because I've been working so much. I put a new driver in the bag and I doubled the first hole and I eagled this third hole and then I barred in and I'm like, wow, that was a good even par around part 10 and then I part 11 and I was like, okay, it's not bad.
And then I went and I bogeyed four out of the next six holes. Because I was hanging on for dear life. And this is what I teach. This is what I do for a living. The mind naturally tries to predict the future and it's trying to predict risk and risk is screwing up for some of us. So you're better off to say, okay, look, first seven holes are really awesome.
But the eighth hole just got harder because I just was aware of it. So what's the shot I know I can hit here. And by the way, can I be vulnerable? Can I mess up? Can I come in and be. I remember I played in our club match play a couple of years ago and 18 whole match played a guy, pretty much straight up and I was four up with five to play.
Now, in my mind, I'm thinking, got it.
Drew: And this is you, Dr. Brett McCabe. Sports psychologist.
Bhrett: Oh yeah. I'll tell you another funny story about that in a minute. But so I get up on the next hole. I just made birdie. I'm like clicking boom. Like I can feel this guy.
Like all I need to do is step on his throat and it's over. And we go to the next hole, brutally tough hole for me. Okay. And, but anyway, so I hit a shot and I pull it down the left and I'm like, it's in a hazard. It's okay. Whenever I go down and I drop and I hit my shot up on the green and I pull up in my balls right there.
It was not in the hazard loss. That'll go to the next hole. I'm like, face it, pump it right down the middle. I'm in a great spot, dude. Holds out from 125 yards out. Okay. So now maybe there's a hole in there. Now I'm going to a par three down the hill. I'm one up, so I'd lost another one in there.
I'm one up, and I lost that hole. Now we're on a par five, and I lost that hole, and I lost one down. And I'm the psychologist, I'm like, whatever. And I'm like, it hurt. It hurt terribly. But golf is hard, and I always tell players that are in match play, when the guy, when your opponent is on the ropes, they swing for the fences, and they usually connect.
And it's really hard to finish. So what happens is, in my mind, I was thinking I was going to drive in after 14 holes. Man, I dispatched this guy like it was nobody's business and I got trucked, right? And now I had to answer all that stuff.
Drew: So what should you have done instead?
Bhrett: I should have expected the fact that it was hard.
I didn't know the guy was, Oh, by the way, on the ball that he hold out, I hit it to an inch on the next shot. Okay. But now I had to, I had nothing to lose, right? I should have gone in there and said, I'm playing the next hole to the best of my ability. And it is hard. But if I can go out there and do my job with the ball in position, honestly, he's got to make birdie to beat me.
That's what I should have done. And I didn't know he's gonna make an eagle, but I was playing, I was, my mind was racing about not making a mistake. And so I needed to go ahead and embrace it. It's what's the worst that happens. I come in and everybody knows what I do, but we were playing in the member guest one year and we have a money match on the practice round day and I had won it the year before and it's a lot of money and I thought it was awesome.
The next year I go in there and I'm thinking I'm going to win it again, right? 150 players, what am I thinking? But anyway, so I go out there and I have four plug lies and bunkers. And finally on the 18th hole, I was a little frustrated. I took my lob, which I slid it to the cart. And I may have had a little bit more of a downward angle to it, more than a parallel angle, but let's just go with the story here.
So I don't win that day. I probably played okay, but I had a lot of lies driving me nuts. And so we're sitting in the shootout on that Saturday, a couple of days later, sitting in our cart, having a couple of drinks, you got your sandals on cause you didn't make it, but you're out there supporting the brand and talking a lot of crap.
And the guy pulls up to me, and this is before I was this was 10 years ago. So this was before a lot of people knew what I did. And he pulls up to me and goes, Hey, you're that golf psychologist. And I'm like, yeah, he goes, man, I heard you got pretty ticked on the 18th hole the other day and threw your club.
And I'm like first of all, I didn't throw my club. He goes, shouldn't you be better than that? And I said, yeah, probably. I said, what do you do for a living? He's I'm a financial planner. And he said I said, did you buy into the Calcutta? He goes, yeah. I said if you're a financial guy, you should know better than that too.
Look, we're all human, right? We're all human. We make mistakes, nobody's perfect in the mental game. So the fact is the mental game, just like the physical game to your original point, it's really hard to master it. It takes Tibetan monks, 30 something years of living in the woods by themselves to master their mind.
You're going to get angry. You're going to get ticked. You're going to lose your focus. You're going to have negative thoughts. You're going to have fears. You're going to have doubts, but just continually pivot, reset back to what you're doing right now.
Drew: That's a great segue into. Another one of these landmines, which you say explicitly is how can we better control our emotions?
So not controlling our emotions is one of these landmines that you talk about. And a lot of people get worked up on the course. Like you said, you did. Why wouldn't it? Is that ever okay? Is that always is that always a bad thing or, people talk a lot about Jon Rahm and how he gets really fiery and it's his personality and then it's okay as long as he stays focused on the next shot or he regroups himself.
Is that ever okay?
Bhrett: But why does everybody use Jon Rahm and nobody uses Tiger Woods? Wasn't Tiger known to drop some pretty strong language out there when he was playing.
Drew: There's some good YouTube videos out there.
Bhrett: Yeah. He used it to channel himself to fire himself up. Okay. Okay. Caitlin Clark, everyone's all up in arms right now by Caitlin Clark, trash talking, give me a break.
It's awesome. Here's the deal before we used to play every game at LSU baseball, my coach would pull us together and say, guys, you represent the university, your family, your teammates, this university and your maker. Don't do anything that embarrasses them, but give it everything you got. We're in a competition and people are always like, I can't believe they showed emotion out there.
Really? Why not? They're fighting hard. They're trying hard. And Billy Horschel was one of my clients and Billy did something on a, YouTube thing, and he said, you're catching me at my work where I'm giving it everything I have. So people need to understand that. I don't go to your office.
When somebody gets a bad call and slams the door and storms out to the coffee machine and sits there and is all frustrated, I'm just on a bigger screen, right? And he's I don't want to show my emotions, but my emotion, I'm playing, I got to play at that razor's edge. I remember when Jon first came out, we'd get those questions about Oh, Jon is so fire.
I'm like, he's a Spaniard who's got emotion. Okay. It's passion, right? And Jon and I had long conversations about it. I'm like, Jon don't change who you are. If you're angry. If you're happy. If you're gonna make a double eagle, you're probably gonna be excited. But here's the difference.
We have two kinds of emotions. We have primary and secondary. The primary emotion is our natural reaction emotion. You stub your toe on the bed, you're gonna get mad. Someone is going to cut you off in traffic. You're probably going to have an emotional reaction. You win the lottery. You're probably gonna get excited.
What we have to prevent is the next emotion, which is the next emotion is usually judgmental of what we're experiencing. So I always make that mistake. Oh no. That's not about the shot. You just hit, see, you brought in the past to try to make a point about yourself in a highly emotional state.
See, that's where you got to stop it. You got to, as Viktor Frankl says, you got to put space between those. So what we try to do is we try to stop the judgmental, condescending, self driven emotions, and we try to hold them back. So if you're ticked, you miss a putt. Fine. Miss a putt.
God, man, you always miss these short ones. You suck at these. Whoa. Okay. Always? Don't shit on yourself. Don't, kick yourself in your own shins. Realize it's hard. So I'm fine with emotion. We never wanted emotion to guide a decision in that situation. We want to try to let the emotion flow, but the harder we try to control them, the harder we try to suppress them, the worse it gets.
And I don't know where in the golf world. that everybody starts believing that you have to be a robot out there and show no emotion. Some of the worst advice ever.
Drew: Is it right for some people though? You see someone like Scottie Scheffler, a lot of tour pros are kind of flatliners, but then you got the Tiger Woods and the John Rom.
So is it part of it? You just have to adapt to your own personality.
Bhrett: Yeah, a hundred percent, but they're flatliners. and how they express it. But there's no way in hell they're flatlining inside. Okay. There's no way that Tom Brady at the end of Super Bowls was truly flatlining. He was feeling it.
He just had it channeled very well. His demeanor, his disposition was that way. I think there's five types of personalities in golf and in sport. Number one is the hype up guy, guy, girl, you need to hype yourself up. You need to trash talk yourself. You need to tell yourself you're not that people doubt you all that.
That was kind of me. I had to do that when I played because I needed that adrenaline. I needed that emotion to fight. Number two is what I call the tactician. The tactician is the person who's, who. In the face of emotion, we'll rely upon their process, their A, their B and their C. I had an offensive lineman like that.
He goes, I don't care how much trash you talk to me. I'm going to get my hands up, my ankles back and my butt down on every snap. Okay. Number three is what I call the chameleon. They can be what they need to be each and every day. If they're playing in a fun group, they can feed off of that energy. If they need to separate themselves, they don't try to force it.
Anyway. The fourth one is the worrier. That's the one that's Oh my God, I'm going to play terrible. It's going to be terrible today. And they puke all everyone else's shoes, but then they play fine. And then the last one is the let go, let God, which is, I do everything I can. I just free it up and I just let it rip.
And you have to know who you are. And most people will say can't I be a couple? There's usually a prominent one. If you need to be hyped up when you play. Go out there and think that you got to track, truck down every single person you play with. If you're a tactician, it's look, I go through my one, twos and threes before I do anything.
And that's okay. Just be who you are. But we all have different dispositions, right? And some people get flustered. Some people, get excited. Some people are calm, but the reality is be yourself. We all have our own psychological fingerprint. So we need to be in those moments.
Drew: What about this next landmine that believing your best your career round, whatever your best performance.
That's the standard. Why is that? Why is that a landmine?
Bhrett: I've had a, the band leader at the University of Alabama a couple of years ago came on my podcast and he was talking about how we all measure ourselves against just stupid standards. And he said, we often listen to great musicians think they're flawless and the reality they're not, they're selling it.
They make a mistake and they sell it, right? They play it off and the average person can't even hear it, but an elite musician can hear it. And he said, when you're practicing and you're practicing, you want to be your absolute best. But best is a once in a lifetime experience by definition.
So do you want to blow it today? Do you want to have the best round of your life tomorrow? Probably not. But what we do is we know that's our best and we're constantly trying to live up to it. If we're constantly living up to our best, would that be our average? See, I want our average to be better.
And our average, we've already said is five to ten bad shots around, but there's some days those bad shots go out of bounds. And now that costs us more strokes and other times, the bad shot is a chunk shot that hits the front of the green and rolls up to 25 feet. See, that's where we think we have a lot of control.
Now you say, but shouldn't that be, shouldn't you do better than that? If I know that a certain number of shots are going to happen bad, yeah, I'd like to reduce them and I can reduce them by our approach, our focus, our mindset, our process. Our preparation or training, but I also know it doesn't matter.
I, even my tour players are going to have five to seven bad shots around. You just hope that they get away with it. Oh man, you'll cut it that three wood, but it's right in the middle of the fairway.
Drew: How should they be thinking if, as we were talking earlier, maybe they have 10 bad shots on the front nine.
So they've already exceeded the five to seven that they're allowing themselves mentally to start the round. Where do they go from there?
Bhrett: I'm not gonna tell you how they should think, because I can tell you what they do think is Lord Almighty. This is awful. We need to fix it. But what I'd like them to think is we'll work on it later.
I'm still in the midst of it. And one bad nine holes never really destroys a person on tour. We think it does. Now you say they shot 45. Okay. I'm not talking about extreme. I'm talking, they shot, let's say at the Players, the winning score was 20 under par 19 under one, nine holes. They may have shot 37 or 38.
It's two over. There were plenty of birdies out there. Valspar, a lot of mistakes. This week is Houston. There'll be mistakes. The rough is high, whatever. And so what I want people to realize is that you can still, if you put the ball in position enough, you're gonna, you're gonna play right.
If the odds are in your favor, the reason we eat at high end restaurants is usually because their odds of production are very high. Can you have a bad meal? Of course you can. But their standards are so high. Their processes are so high. They source their meat. If you do the work, then you're increasing the odds of your success.
So we all have a, a natural curve, a bell curve to some degree. Tiger, when he was at his best, his bell curve looked like that. Ours kind of looked like this. Okay. It's not really easy to pick, but what's so funny is if you ask a player and you say, okay, you're a five handicap, so you're going to shoot between 75 and 85 on any given day.
And you're going to ask somebody who's a five handicap. What should they shoot? They're going to say 73, 74, anything less than that. Worse that they're frustrated, but there are five handicap. Do you break part every single time you play as a plus two? Not at all. Yeah. Yeah. But then there's a series of really good bang, bangs that are good.
And then you may have some other, ones that are so good. PGA Tour players win 80 percent of their annual income in five events a year. Now it's the 80 20 rule for all our business nerds out there, but that's really what happens, okay, is that there's 20 to 25 events a year that they don't play great.
Now, somebody like Tiger or Scottie, when they're winning four and five times a year there are their four or five wins, right? Scottie's on a pretty epic burner. Okay. And I think we need to look at that as this is pretty unprecedented stuff that he's doing. We haven't seen it so much since tiger.
And that was just ridiculous. That was tiger's the greatest outlier in the history of sports.
Drew: What strikes you just real quick, what strikes you about Scottie's mental game specifically?
Bhrett: Dude, he just takes what he has every day and plays it. Now he's really a ball striker. I've watched him in practice rounds hit shots that you're just like, geez, wow, that's just stupid, but he does it his way.
He does it his way. But his short game's great. He's working on his putter. He never blames anybody. Does he get frustrated? Yeah. But he's also very gracious. And I think there's a lot to that.
Drew: I want to jump in here with another good question in the Q and A before we get to the next landmine.
It's something I'm curious about too. Why are par putts seemingly easier? To make, or at least easier to focus on, or maybe not focus on than birdie putts. And so we make a lot more par putts than we do a birdie putts. All right. So there was a,
Bhrett: There was an article that was written probably 15, 18 years ago in a economic journal, and it was two or three university of Pennsylvania Wharton business school professors.
And the title of the article was, is Tiger Woods loss averse? Why does he make more par putts than he makes birdie putts? So it was shot link. Now we can look at this a lot more. Okay. But statistically, in a statistical analysis, you can control for every factor you want. So people say par putts are easy because they're usually uphill.
No, we can control upslope, cross, down, grain, wind, all that. Players make more, Tiger Woods, greatest player ever, can make more par putts than they do birdie putts. From the same distance you control for all factors. So me and another statistician at the time, this was a couple of years later, I found this article and I challenged him.
He ended up writing the article in like on an online blog. I thought it was pretty cool, but I asked him, I said, what is it? So he went into shotlink data and he's, he looked at the data and he said, okay, we can't measure speed of putt of a made putt can't do it. Cause it went in the hole. But players tend to miss par putts.
What short or long?
Drew: Long. They're pretty aggressive
Bhrett: Players mostly miss birdie putts short for sure. So it's natural for the mind as you're walking up on, you have 12 feet for birdie to think I'd like to make the birdie, but what don't I want to have a three-putt. A hundred percent, but when you've got a par putt, you're a good player.
What are you thinking? I'm making this son of a gun all or nothing. And you tend to lock in and you reduce the amount of choices that are available on our decision. So it's a fact people make more power bus and they make birdie putts. So you're not alone at home feeling
Drew: And Tiger does this as well. Give yourself some grace.
Bhrett: Now, if you could look at a part, a birdie putt, the same way we look at a par putt, then we've cracked the code. We can't. Okay. And most people, if you ask even the best putters on tour, and Brad Faxon had an article many years ago that was like, don't worry about three putting, and I'm like, Okay, that's true.
But every time I eat raw oysters, I do think about four hours later, how do I feel? And I'm from Louisiana. I love good oysters, right? I just don't want to eat one that makes me sick. Okay, but it's worth the risk. Is a three putt worth the risk to make a birdie? That's hard to make a decision on because a three putt sure feels like you are the biggest idiot in the village.
Drew: And the stats are interesting with this as well. We, Scott Fawcett of course, was our first guest on the Happy Hour. And he talks about how speed is so important in putting and a lot of times. So if we theoretically had that. Par putt mindset with a lot of our birdie putts. We could be ramming 25 footers way by the hole three putting.
Is that correct? Should we be having a different mindset? Is it okay that we're having a different mind?
Bhrett: It's not really speed, it's intention, which is because if you ran it by the capture speed of the hole is a thimble. Great putters use gravity to make the ball go in the hole. I've been around some of the best putters on tour.
And it's so funny when you do practice turns, you watch them, the ball just gets really heavy as it's finishing. Okay. So it's when, but this is the same thing that led me to being a psychologist. I was pitching at LSU and I was struggling a lot and I was really struggling with what I was doing.
And I finally had to make the decision. Do I want to not walk hitters? Where I want to strike hitters out. And when somebody asked me that question early on, and I talk about it in my first book, the mindset manifesto, when I was going through that process, I was like if I try to strike out everybody I face, I'm sure as hell going to walk them, but that's not what happened.
What happened was when I accepted the fact that I'm facing you, I'm going to punch you out. And if you get off the hook, I'll get the next guy. See, we think if we lock in and say, I want to hit a shot to there, like that's all of a sudden, we're going to over swing, over hit it, whatever. No. Like I talked about it in the article on Nick, shoot to kill.
What's my target? Shoot it, hit it. Now I'd love to do that all the time, but I don't, I'm like I can miss it over there. I don't want to leave it in the water. The same thoughts up in my head. Look, even the Dalai Lama struggles with the mental game.
Drew: Amazing. What about this next landmine? We have two more to go pushing when in trouble.
Also something Scott was mentioning how golfers, we just try to push a little too far when we get out of position, how do we, how should we approach it instead?
Bhrett: So one of the problems that we do is when we're playing regular events with our buddies, it's usually a birdie game. So it's birdie or bust.
That's your skin's games. So we tend to take that mentality too far. One of the things that happens when we get in trouble. Is that our adrenaline gets popped up. So if you and I are in a fight, a boxing match, and you pop me and I get stunned, the last thing you need me to do is now try to knock you out.
You just hit me, stunned me. I'm not thinking clear. So I need to protect myself and then I have to work myself back into the fight without getting knocked out. And I hope that you overwork yourself. And in golf, if I'm out of position, what's the first goal? Get back in position. It's not hit a 40 yard draw around a corner and roll it up on their green.
Maybe at that moment, the best score you can make is a par, but how many times have we got chipped out in the fairway? Hit it to eight feet, made the par putt, then it created momentum on the round because we played really smart, we took our medicine, and we got out of our trouble. But instead, we try to do the hero shot, and now we start tacking on more.
If you're out of position, get back in position.
Drew: Something I have trouble working through mentally when I hit a really bad shot, especially off the tee, I hit it out of bounds, and I think, Okay, even if I keep my wits about me and play a really smart hole from here, I'm still making, likely, double bogey, which is You know, in theory, an unacceptable outcome or just a really bad outcome.
How can I come to terms to that? How do I approach that next tee shot?
Bhrett: If you play in your money matches, usually there's a double bogey max, right?
Drew: That's true. Yeah. Yeah. And in our handicap system, we all have a max but still, I know
Bhrett: All of a sudden it's wow, there goes that fun of that hole, it happens to me.
But the thing you have to look at it is, can I do anything to fix the ball that's laying outside the white stakes right now? Not a dang thing. And I'm sure is going to be a little frustrated with a six or double. Probably feel really good. If I made a birdie on that second ball, that, that's a really, like match play, you want to beat somebody in match play.
Make a five when you hit a ball out of bounds, right? Make a bow you and hit one out of bounds, but it's about building momentum again, and one step takes momentum. So we got to lock back in, play the next shot and we got to do the best we can, because if now you're mad and you're not caring, you think you're just going to start it back up on the next hole?
Probably not. And the hardest thing to do is to reconnect to what you're trying to do in that moment. Which is, I came out here, don't let a result or don't let a circumstance dictate the decision you make on a shot.
Drew: Alright, we've got our last landmine here, and then we're going to get into some of these questions that have been coming in the Q& A.
So keep sending those in. Trying to hit shots, or the proper shot, the right shot, versus playing what you have, playing your shot.
Bhrett: Yeah, I love that. Like people are like, I gotta cut it to a back right pin, but you've hit a draw all day long. Play your shot
Drew: Or the pros hit this high pitch shot in this situation, so I got to do that, but maybe you only have the low bump and run.
Bhrett: Then run with it. And more times than not, the players actually will hit the low bump and run. If that's all they have that day, Kenny Perry made a lot of money hitting draws. There's players on tour that hit the shots that they have.
And sometimes the course is set up where you have to attack it from a different way. It's not everything. This is not user on demand where it's like dictating your shot, play what you know, the best, very, the vast majority of us that are sitting on this call or watching this on replay, we don't do this for a living.
Okay. So play the shot. You have I was playing with a guy this weekend. Who's a 15 handicap. He's I was trying to cut that in there. I'm like, dude, we're lucky to hit the ball and play right now. Okay. And I'm like, we're not trying to cut it. Play your shot. That's completely fine.
Drew: Do pros always play the right shot?
Bhrett: One of the thing I give Scott a lot of credit for is he's been very adamant to play, hit the shot one way. Like I think some of the old school teaching is we got to do the nine ball drill or it's high draw low draws and all that. We got to hit the ball both ways to show proper ball control.
What is the golf course scorecard? Ask you, what'd you shoot? What'd you shoot? You get the ball in the hole. That's what matters to me. Do you get more bonus points cause you get the right shot?
Drew: Not really. I suppose that you could make the argument. It helps your confidence that you have different shots in your arsenal, but beyond that. It's not helping tangibly.
Bhrett: I like to eat a lot. Okay. Cheesecake factory is overwhelming. There's way too many items on the menu.
In and out only has two.
Drew: Right? It's better to have a couple of good shots, a couple of good items and do them well and be at peace if maybe they're not the sexiest shots.
Bhrett: Correct. Sometimes what it's funny, I'll stand out on the range on tour and the guy will say, I'm going to cut this.
And I look back at his constructor. I'm like that ball drew. And he's yeah, I know, but he thinks it's a cut. It's fine.
Drew: This sort of gets into Mike's question which is how can you transfer your play on the range, your swing on the range to the course? It's something we all struggle with. We can stripe it on the range.
Some of my worst rounds have come when I've had, when I've striped it on the range. And some of my best rounds have come when I've hit it terribly on the range. Why is that? And how can we that shouldn't be the case, right?
Bhrett: It's superstitious. And when I pitched, it was the same way.
You come out of the bullpen, you didn't have much, you had eight balls throw on the mound and you found something usually when you don't have anything, your expectations drop and you just play a segment to segment. Okay. The reason why your range game doesn't transfer to the golf course is that there's a little thing called pressure.
And I shriek when I hear people say pressure doesn't exist. It's saying altitude has no effect. We may go to Denver or go skiing and not feel like we have altitude, but you go up those stairs, you'll feel it. Our body's processing it. Pressure is any demand upon the body and uncertainty is a massive pressure.
Pressure changes the way we move. Every one of us. So you look so fluid and transition so good when you got 10 balls on the range. Now, listen, you got to hit that shot. The transition's quick. Okay. Or for me, one of the things I do, if I'm playing with a group, I really I tend to try to be slower because I have, I don't say I have a unique swing, but I, I hit it hard and I'm actually like seven down with my driver.
And usually when they fit me, they laugh, but I hit the ball just fine with my driver.
Drew: In other words, you're hitting down your club head is traveling down hitting the golf ball because people are trying to hit up on their driver.
Bhrett: Because I love that feeling. I love that feeling of driving through the ball and the ball takes off just fine.
Like I'll drive with anybody. But the thing about it is that we're trying to transfer what we did. So let's go into a simulator and drive, and then let's go drive in New York city. In Manhattan to two completely different experiences, right? So we try to simulate that. And then we think we should perform like we did in a controlled environment, but pressure change the way we move the way we think our processes and our decision making changes.
And then our attitude and our grit changes. So on the range, you're hitting to a green, but there's really no like penalty. You just pull the next one up and more than likely you're not going to do a full pre shot routine and everything. That's why it's not the same. So start embracing you have tools.
Not that your game transfers, that your tools transfer.
Drew: It would seem the way you put it that we would have two options then to approach or deal with this. We could either Try and make our competitive or our on course rounds feel like they don't mean anything like the range. Which as you describe seems like that's impossible just the way we're wired. Or you could practice simulate some of these emotions, some of these feelings that you feel on the golf course, try to simulate those as best as possible to learn how to deal with those.
Is that something you'd suggest, making practice more difficult?
Bhrett: Yeah, that’d be great if we could really do it, or we can venture in and stop being a total a hole to ourselves when we play the game and start learning how pressure in the moments impact us and start identifying ways to improve us, not fix us, improve us.
Drew: Would that be accepting that we're not going to be able to take our range to the course. And that's okay. Like they're supposed to be two different things. You're probably not going to be as good on the courses on the range. And that's okay. Correct.
Bhrett: Correct.
Drew: But it's frustrating because we know we have that capability and we know we can do it, you can do it in a different situation is what I'm saying.
Bhrett: One of the biggest concepts I teach is a concept called capability and capacity. We all are capable of something. Scottie, guys on tour, their capability is like this. They cross that white line and they go play. They're not going to have 100 percent of their tool set. They may have different wins.
They may have, they may be tired. They may have a group. They don't like, they may be hitting it so good that their yardages are plus three, three yards and it's disconcerting. So if you could put your finger on a scanner and it said, all right, you've got 78 percent of your abilities today. Most people would say, Ooh, man, I hope I have my driver.
Okay. I hope I have that. Okay. Most players are trying to find the 22 percent that's missing. They're out there messing with their swing. They're trying to find it grooved. The best players are saying this is the 78 percent I have, and they may downshift it into a fairway finder for the first five or six holes.
Drew: Wow. Yeah. So that's the difference.
Bhrett: That's the difference.
Drew: I want to get into pressure as you were talking about. Scott has a, as a really good question. He's preparing for the Florida State Senior Am actually coming up here. He says he's working especially hard on his mental state of mind to try to achieve a sense of calmness when playing in the stressful competitive situations.
So his question to you is what advice would you give to someone to help them settle their nerves, especially on the first tee and in a tournament setting, people walking, talking and there's just a lot of people watching you. How can you deal with that? Some of that pressure, we all feel that pressure on the first tee or different situations.
How do we deal with it?
Bhrett: So one of the things I love is to watch Augusta first tee or Ryder Cup or President's Cup. Because players will say, I don't even know how I hit the dang ball. Okay. And the reason is they're just, they're hype. I'm not trying to calm them down. I want them to take account of it.
What are you feeling right now? Man, I got to get off to a good start. I got to get it all. I got, Hey, what are we going to do? So I don't try to suppress those emotions. I let them come in. We experienced them and then we just let them pass. And I'm nervous. I'm stressed. What are people going to think? Trust me, everybody there watching is worried about their own game.
They ain't worried about you. Okay, what are we trying to do? You know what? I know I can hit a shot. My cut is my normal play. I tee it down just a little bit. That I practice. I'm hitting my fairway finder. I'm going to pick a clear target. I'm going to accept how I feel. But I'm going to verbalize the shot I'm going to hit to myself.
And I'm going to lean into it and let's go get it. Okay, and I'll deal with it and emotions. I don't want you to feel calm. I want you to feel connected to your process and your anchors because you're going to have a heart rate up. You're going to have excitement. You're challenging yourself. Okay, but I want to feel connected.
I want, as a fighter said that one time, I don't, I know I have butterflies. I just want them all flying in the same direction. That's how I want people to feel. Now, what happens is we're nervous. We don't eat real well. We don't drink real well. So if you're going to play a tournament, like the forested am try to eat every three holes, at least two bites of something.
Usually something of some protein and some, a little bit.
Drew: What happens cognitively, if we don't eat enough or drink?
Bhrett: We’re starving. We’re in starvation mode, which is the ultimate threat of the human body. Yeah. So we start preserving resources and we start being more aware of more threats. So people will be like, I can't focus rule.
Yeah. Because you're focusing on 15 other things. Or, and you remember the brain is controlling the swing. So when you're looking at the motor patterns and all the other stuff, and if the computer is running at a very low energy store, you think it's going to work fluidly, not a chance in heck.
Okay, so eat, feed it, try to do those things. I don't really care if you get eight hours sleep the night before. Sometimes we get too much sleep. Just do your normal routine. Go play, expect nerves, don't be flustered when they're there, but have an anchor that you go back to. That's Hey, I rub, when I lock in my glove, I'm in, rub my towel over my face.
I'm in.
Drew: So we'll go for another five or 10 minutes here. Thanks Bhrett for this great chat. I hope this has been really helpful to folks. And like I said, you can find a complete full recording of this chat. After we'll make it available to every Golf Digest plus member. Another thing I want to get into is this idea of confidence and self belief something mental coaches talk about as being super important.
We all have had feelings or moments of high confidence and low confidence. Why is it something you focus on with your clients? Why is it important? How can we improve our confidence? And also when we're struggling on the course, how can we maintain confidence? How do we not lose it when we're playing poorly?
Bhrett: So to me, belief is the greatest belief is I can handle anything, anytime. And I can work my way through it. Confidence leads to belief. Confidence is I know I can do it. Trust is the systems are in place to deliver a result. And a plan, the way we train develops our trust and our vision creates our plan.
So the question is, what do we want to feel? What do we want to do? I want to believe in myself. What's the work we're going to put in to do it? And if you can believe that you can face the good and the bad and the ugly, and you have a tool that you can utilize, belief will pick up more times than not, we latch into this idea of confidence as a feeling that just hits us 10 to 15 percent of the time.
And I don't like anything to be a byproduct. I want everything to be something that we've worked and trained ourselves to do. But the next answer to that is, then why is it, our question is, then why in what I'm playing good are the results not showing? Because we're not in total control of the outcome.
Golf, we probably are in control of the outcome 50 to 60 percent of the time. So there's a lot of variability there. So let's work on belief, which is I can handle it. I can find my way through. If I don't have my swing, I have a B game I can revert to. And so one of the things I do with my high level players, I have them write out what their A game is, their B game is, and their C game.
And they're seeking, maybe, I, I choked down, I hit three quarter shots around the green. I don't try to hit flop shots. I'm trying to hit sand wedges versus lob wedges and stuff like that, because they don't have it that day. And there's days you have your D and F.
Drew: Is it possible to have confidence without having the results? Can you, can someone, they're playing terribly. Is it understand, is it possible for them to have confidence?
Bhrett: If they focus on the right things, which is their systems and processes. Yes, you can have building confidence, but I'm not naive to think that good results don't validate our process.
But on the flip side of result without a process. It doesn't build belief.
Drew: I think a lot of times we think that, Oh, I'll just get the confidence once I have a few good rounds.
Bhrett: No, because I got to do it again. And I don't really believe in what I'm doing or, I can't be confident until I have the results to show for it.
Drew: And it's a tricky cycle to get out of.
Bhrett: It is. And that's why golf is such a finicky game because we're not, it's such an intermittent. It's like going to Vegas and pulling on slot machines.
Drew: Here's a really good question that came through. What is the biggest misconception about how tour pros think on the golf course?
Is there any myths or misconceptions that you can think of that people think tour pros are thinking?
Bhrett: I think we think that they're always confident. I think we think that they're bulletproof. They're just like us. They're just really good at it. The difference is they played tournament golf for a long time.
And I had a senior tour player, a Champion's Tour player. One time, tell me something I thought was brilliant. It says, you got to think of us like poker players. What do poker players do? They play a lot of tournaments. Why? They've seen it all. They've seen bad hits, they've seen bad flops, they've seen bad beats, but they play so much that they get the odds in their favor.
The biggest misconception is that players are always confident, they've always got it together. The reality is they're always working on their graft and their game. And I would say great players, pretty tortured souls because they put their hand in that fire a lot and they just keep coming back.
And I'm like, dude, they love it. And they love that feeling of they, I can tell you they met when they walk away, like I did when I walked away from baseball, I missed butterflies in my stomach more than the agile adoration of success. I'll admit, I don't. Remember the successes. I remember the fear in my heart and soul before I went out and did something and willing to walk into that fire.
Drew: So golfers should embrace that feeling. Sometimes we think that's a bad thing. That feeling is that feeling of anxiety before a round or a shot is bad.
Bhrett: It's not bad. It's human nature.
Drew: As we wrap up here, Bhrett, thank you again for taking the time this hour. It's been super fun. One last question.
If you could change one thing about the way most golfers think, what would it be?
Bhrett: Let me say this first. If I could change one thing that's been horrendously communicated in the mental game forever, is this old theory that the mind doesn't know what don't means. Have you heard that? Don't hit it in the water.
All you need to see is water.
Drew: It only things in positives. Yeah.
Bhrett: That's complete bogus. That was made up by a hypnotist many years ago. Okay. Complete bogus. Okay. So we can say, don't hit it in the water to ourselves. And then the next question is why? It hurts. Then where do I want to hit it?
If I could change one thing, I wish every play, if I could snap my fingers and take fear away from you as a player, how would you play a lot better? Yeah. Hey, if I could change one thing is I wish I could get rid of fear, but I can't. We have to play within the realms of what fear does to us and be willing to face it.
I always tell players, be willing to pull your sword in front of the dragon. And you, at least you have a chance to get them.
Drew: Yeah. It's like the idea of playing on the range. We don't have any fear on the range but there's going to be some fear on the course and that's natural. Can you tell folks where they can find you and your content?
Bhrett: Yep. You can, the best way to find me is at my website at Brett McCabe.com. That's spelled B H R E T M C A B E or on all the social media platforms, Pat, Dr. Brett McCabe, love for you to chat. We try to do Instagram lives that are free contents and I'll probably do one Wednesday night of Augusta if I'm not busy.
Drew: Amazing. And Also be sure to check out his cover story this month with Nick Dunlap, the amateur who's now professional. But won as an amateur earlier this season. It's how his mental approach has shaped him as a golfer. So that does it for us tonight. Our next happy hour will be next week, actually next Thursday night, April 4th.
And it will be Masters focused to get you ready for the Masters, which will be the following week. We'll our guest will be longtime New Yorker writer David Owen, who is a preeminent historian on the Masters and Augusta National. He wrote a book, The Making of the Masters. It's a fantastic read.
It's on the history of the tournament and the club and that, that will be a lot of our chat next Thursday, I'll be talking about all things, Masters history. Have your questions ready and come and ask those. And we'll be looking forward to seeing you there. So Brett appreciate the time.
Thanks so much. Everyone have a great night out there. Thank you.