What Rory needs in my view is to focus his mind on problems away from golf, while he is playing golf. He needs to focus on any embarrassing things he may have done when he was younger and let these thoughts gnaw away at him, as he is playing. To stop him thinking about golf.
Enda referenced the terrible events in Gaza there. Maybe Rory could focus his mind on these terrible events as he is playing.
Perhaps Rory should constantly visualise himself missing three foot putts and spend his spare time writing satire which mocks himself missing three foot putts.
I recall snooker player Quinten Hann talking once about how he approached a final frame decider at the Crucible visualising how he was going to lose, that he knew he would lose, and then he won to spite himself.
It’s so long since he won one it’s like he never won one at all.
Like a lad winning an All-Ireland at 18/19 in his first year on the intercounty panel before soldiering on for the next 15 years and repeatedly losing big matches every year.
Youth. When you’re younger you think less. He was so good that he couldn’t help but win some majors, and he generally won them easily or from the front, and he was up against chumps like Rickie Fowler. When you’re up against Rickie Fowler, you suddenly become a mentality monster.
Then he got a bit older and started thinking more, and the Augusta monkey was still on his back, and before long it wasn’t just an Augusta monkey, it was an all purpose major monkey, and the monkey got heavier and heavier as it gorged on major failure after major failure, and now that monkey is obese, and now Rory will find it very hard to carry that monkey without breaking his back.
At the time, wasn’t he so far clear in terms of talent to those lads he just couldn’t not win. Those Yankee, frat boy fuckers have fucked his brain. Lookit, it could be worse, Justin Thomas can hardly even hit the thing these days.
He is a bit like Sergio Garcia I think, but I know nothing about golf really.
