Saturday, September 10, 2016

Psychology of Confidence: Tiger Woods and the Curse of Extraordinary Talent


Golf is a game that is played on a 5-inch course - the distance between your ears.
-Bobby Jones

For those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.
-Matthew 23:12

"Golf is Damn Difficult"


Golf is a funny game. Within it, a stark dualistic contrast exists between the beauty and serenity of the external factors versus the entropic inner turmoil that resides within each golfer’s mind.

Many have derided the golf course’s place with regard to its 

"natural beauty", however one need only view Pebble Beach's 18th,
flanked by Northern California's majestic pine forests and Carmel Bay's curved ocean shore, or Augusta National's 12th, featuring its lush hues of green foliage, placid glassy creek traversed by a quaint, cobbled bridge, finally giving way to a perfectly-manicured green and picturesque backdrop of the pink and violet azaleas, in
order to concede that, though engineered, golf courses can offer us some incredibly stunning scenery. 

For many of us amateurs, the beginning of the round represents the day’s apex, with a blank scorecard offering limitless amounts of hope and delusional ideation of how the round will unfold. A picture of a cool, crisp start in the morning with a mist rising from a nearby body of water tends to confound the dramatic irony that every golfer is either consciously or sub-consciously aware of…the club-throwing and cursing chaos that is soon to blemish the pretty trees and their puffy little cloud-friends on the Bob Ross canvases sketched within our minds. The dew that gently rests atop each blade of fairway grass is as a siren of false promise, and will in time, much like the golfer’s confidence, have evaporated into thin air, into the place where dreams lay waste to reality…the reality that golf is damn difficult. 


It’s a mental game. You hear that idiom uttered often in sports, and as cliche as it may sound, its overuse doesn’t make the phrase any less true. But if it were ever true, in its truest sense, then it would have to be true foremost of golf. Anyone who has ever played knows this, because no game toys with the mind like golf does. On any given 400-yard hole, you may have four shots or so (and that’s if you’re pretty good) with all the space and time in the world between them to either dwell upon your last shot or fret about the one to come, right up until your backswing.

The speed of other sports necessitates that the players react to what is happening through instinctual mental processes and muscle memory. Think about Klay Thompson’s catch-and-shoot from the three point line. Think about Tom Brady reading the defense and quickly firing a pass as the pocket collapses around him. Better still, think about a baseball player trying to hit a baseball. Is there a better example of making a million computations in one’s head while not even having the time to really think about it? Hitters literally have a microsecond once they see the baseball leave a pitcher’s hand to answer a whole host of questions: There is the ball. But where will it end up? How fast is it traveling? What is the rotation and movement? Will it be a strike? If it is a strike, is it a strike that I should swing at, or is it one I should pass on for a better strike later in the at bat? These are all questions a hitter needs to process in order to make the ultimate decision - do I swing, or don’t I? - paradoxically without ever truly having time to think.

Not so in golf. In golf, there is an abundance of time; it becomes an exercise of meditation. You are hitting a little stationary white ball that sits there on the grass with a seemingly wry smile, mocking you the more and more until the instant your club collides with it, implicitly insisting that this should be the easiest thing in the world. But then, you swing, and the shot that follows often betrays the lie the ball just telepathically conveyed. Sometimes if it’s bad enough, the ball might vanish into oblivion - a disappearing act that no amount of squinting can reveal the secret to. Sometimes the orb sails left, and when you line up right the next time in order to correct its waywardness, it then spasmodically curves even further right. Sometimes you get under it, and the ball is popped up and hardly advanced (once I literally hit a ball behind me, for negative yards). Other times, you top the ball, and it sputters down the fairway thirty or forty yards, with nothing but its topspin to give it any kind of distance. Yet still, sometimes the heavens open and anoint a well-struck shot, with the head of the club flush to the ball and the plane of your swing perfectly aligned. The ball goes straight, and it goes far, and seeing the beautiful shot that ensues is euphoric. You may have a handful of those amidst the hundred you shoot all day, but their memory is enough to make you love the game (while of course still maintaining hatred for its far-more-consistent insolence) and return to it again and again, with hopes of improving that ghastly ratio.

Even the semantics of golf’s scoring seem derisive. “Birdie” - or one under par, is innocent, sweet, and whimsical, just as it symbolizes something difficult to catch. “Par” is the insidious word used to indicate an unreasonable standard for how one “should” score on any given hole. Par for the course is the mainstream phrase meant to convey that something is normal. But every golfer knows that actually achieving par is challenging, and for most amateur golfers, uncommon. Inevitably when you don’t reach par, the word is there serving to mock you and your incompetence. “Bogey”, coincidentally the slang Brits use for boogers (as anyone who has read Harry Potter is well aware), describes one over par. Personally, I’d be elated if I had eighteen boogers in my round of golf.

The Tragedy of Tiger Woods

Taking everything about the game into account, golf is certainly not for the mentally weak. This brings us to our case study, Tiger Woods. Everything I just got done describing applies to earthlings.
Woods is for all intents and purposes from another planet.

He began learning golf before the age of two. At age three, he shot a 48 through nine holes.That’s better than I can do presently, which makes me want to dramatically throw myself off the beautiful cliffs of Torrey Pines. By age five, word of his precocious skill had already made him a child star, finding himself putting with comedian Bob Hope on The Mike Douglas Show, and featured in Golf Digest magazine, as well as on ABC’s show That’s Incredible. He would go on to win the Junior World Golf Championships six times. He first defeated his father, Earl Woods - a skilled amateur golfer in his own right - at the age of eleven, and would never lose to him again. At age thirteen, Woods played in a national junior tournament that featured pairings with professionals. In the final round, he was paired with Jon Daly, who would eventually go on to become an extremely successful golfer, albeit mercurial off the course in his own right. Daly had to birdie three of the last four holes in order to beat Woods by just a stroke. In 1994, Woods would go on to play golf at Stanford, where he was voted Pac-10 Conference Player of the Year.
He turned pro in August of 1996 and won his first major championship, The Masters - perhaps golf’s most iconic tournament - in April of 1997…by twelve strokes (that’s not a typo). It was his first of fourteen majors he would claim during an eleven-year stretch between 1997 and 2008 - an average of 1.3 major championships (there are four of them) per year. With well over 100 professionals entering tournaments, along with the capricious nature of golf (unlike a predictable sport such as tennis), that is simply remarkable. Since his fourteenth major championship in 2008, however, Tiger has failed to win another.

That is just a cursory glance at Tiger’s meteoric ascent, but as you can probably surmise, that ascent didn’t feature very many dips. Since his birth, Tiger’s life arrow had trended only in one direction - up. Up and up and up.

Tiger Woods was different; for so many reasons he was different, and he quite simply changed the game of golf. Sometimes in life, the perfect combination of nature and nurture in a human being’s genetic code and development collide to produce someone transcendent in their respective niche. What Shakespeare was to writing, Thomas Edison to invention, and Martin Luther King Jr. to orating, that is what Tiger Woods was to golf. He was a savant. To me, a golf club is a cold, titanium object, both terrifying and volatile. To Woods, it was as reliable an appendage as his own feet and arms. He was unlike anything we had ever seen before. For starters, in an Anglo-originated sport dominated by the White upper-class, Tiger represented a break from that homogenous mold. Previously, golfers had been thin and ordinary in terms of stature. Woods was tall, svelte, and powerful, and his drives of over 300 yards proved the merits of his rigorous work out regimens. He was cool, too. Whereas golfers before him largely adhered to the “gentlemen’s game” persona of a stoic and reserved behavior, Woods broke from that mold as well. He was fiercely competitive and unapologetically demonstrative on the course. He injected youth and style into an otherwise stale game for the middle-aged. He appealed to everyone - White, Black, old, young, rich, or poor. You wanted to emulate everything about him, from his chic black Nike hat with the white swoosh, to his signature fist pumps after
drilling a long putt. All of that, combined with how otherworldly good he was at golf made an otherwise boring sport suddenly compelling to watch…the same way you might feel compelled to watch any event in which one human being is so far superior to the rest of the field - like Usain Bolt running, Simone Biles jumping, Michael Phelps swimming, or Lance Armstrong cycling. I didn’t give two shits about the Tour de France before Armstrong, but I started paying attention because every year I expected him to do something spectacular…something that would push the bounds of human capabilities.

Along with his special ability and unique attributes, Tiger also became rich. Heavens to Betsy, he was rich. Of course he became plenty wealthy from his earnings on the course, but the bulk of his worth came in the form of endorsements. Tiger Woods became the most marketable athlete on the planet. Beginning with his ascension to the professional tour, Woods began to endorse General Motors, American Express, Buick, TAG Heuer, Gillette, and Gatorade. If you wanted your product to sell, all you had to do was slap Woods’ winsome smile next to it. He was most known, however, for his relationship with Nike. Although Nike was not a major player in the world of golf before Tiger Woods (far from it, actually), they had the prescience to recognize that the first brand to become associated with Tiger would win the sweepstakes. Indeed they did. The swoosh and Tiger Woods became an unbeatable marriage, and Nike Golf became a veritable juggernaut in the sport largely because Tiger made them appear legitimate. In 2000, Tiger signed a 5-year, $105 million contract extension with Nike - the largest endorsement deal signed by an athlete at the time. By October 1, 2009, Forbes had declared Tiger the first athlete billionaire.

During 2001’s British Open Championship, Woods was introduced to Swedish
golfer Jesper Parnevik’s model-nanny, Elin Nordegren. Nordegren was apparently the apple of many single golfers’ eyes, but Tiger, the alpha male of the bunch, went on to win her and her hand in 2004. They instantly became an endearing celebrity couple and would go on to have two lovely children together - daughter Sam in 2007 and son Charlie in 2009. Even Tiger’s personal life appeared to have a Midas touch.
But Tiger’s wholesome persona was in reality a house of cards, ready to topple at any moment…

On November 26, 2009, Woods and Nordegren were hosting Thanksgiving with Woods’ mother at their home in Windermere, Florida. The newest edition of the National Enquirer had just been released, with a headline that read Tiger Woods Cheating Scandal. The story chronicled what was ostensibly a months-long affair between Woods and a New York City night club hostess Rachel Uchitel. Woods denied the accusations and even put his wife on the phone with Uchitel for a half-hour conversation, in an attempt to placate her. Astonishingly, the strategy would prove to be ineffective.

On Thanksgiving night, Woods, an insomniac, had taken an Ambien sleep pill and some Vicodin, and had passed out asleep. Meanwhile, Nordegren confiscated his phone and began to scroll through the contacts. Posing as Woods in order to catch them in their lie, she texted Uchitel, writing, “I miss you. When are we seeing each other again?” Uchitel wrote back immediately, expressing surprise that Woods was still up. Nordegren then called Uchitel, saying, “I knew it was you. I know everything.” “Oh, f—k”, Uchitel replied, and promptly hung up.

At this point, Nordegren finally lost her stoic Swedish cool and began screaming, waking up a stupefied Tiger in the process. She threw the cell phone at him, chipping his tooth, and proceeded to chase after Tiger with the nearest weapon she could find - ironically, a golf club. A dazed and petrified Woods then bolted to his Escalade and attempted to extricate himself from his ballistic spouse, who was in hot pursuit in a golf cart - again, ironic…and hilarious to picture.

Now, I’ve taken Ambien once in my life on the night my dad passed away. It is a gnarly thing. It doesn’t just make one incredibly drowsy; it causes vertigo as well. I remember turning off the TV in the living room and stumbling upstairs to my room. The effects must be similar to what the immediate aftermath of a concussion feels like. Needless to say, driving a large vehicle while under the influence of this powerful drug would be ill-advised.

Woods did just that and pulled out of his driveway, quickly accelerating to thirty miles-per-hour, proceeding to hit about everything he could have - a nearby hedge, the curb, a fire hydrant, and finally, a tree. Not Tiger’s finest moment.
The neighbors would go on to call 911, and Woods was admitted to a nearby hospital in “serious condition”.
It wouldn’t be long before news of Woods’ domestic incident became a ubiquitous storyline and Pandora’s Box would be opened on his personal life. It would become clear that Rachel Uchitel was not an isolated incident; she was merely the first domino to fall. Following Uchitel, fourteen other mistresses came to the fore with allegations of having ongoing relations with Woods. He would eventually admit to being a sex addict and confessed to sleeping with over 120 women, for which he checked himself into rehab for.

The reality that a super wealthy and famous sports star would be so promiscuous was not the surprising, nor appalling storyline. One might say precedent had already been set for that, with Hall of Fame basketball player Wilt Chamberlain famously bragging that he had slept with over 20,000 women. No, it was Tiger’s infidelity as a married man at the pinnacle of “The Gentlemen’s Game” that turned his sexual exploits into a full-blown scandal. National sports radio personality Colin Cowherd said, “The only thing that makes Tiger Woods any different from Derek Jeter are two words - I DO.”

The fallout for Woods was catastrophic. He went from being golf’s golden boy and hero into America’s villain. He was vilified by the media. His story was covered nonstop, which met the demands of a nation transfixed by good gossip. The paparazzi were incessant. The toll it took monetarily on Woods was also not insignificant. Just as his paramours came forth initially one after the next, so Woods’ sponsors began dropping like flies afterward. AT&T, Gatorade, General Motors, Gilette, and Tag Heuer all completely severed ties with him. Consequently, his endorsements dropped by about half. In his divorce with Elin in August of 2010, she was awarded over $100 million in palimony.

What happens when someone who has only ever experienced monumental success seemingly comes into contact with colossal failure for the first time? Tiger Woods had only known one feeling in the conquest that had been his life: unadulterated confidence. The dominance he exhibited in his livelihood no doubt inspired confidence in his personal life also. The victories of his personal life then yielded further success on the golf course. It’s a cycle of prosperity. Tiger Woods began to believe in his own invincibility - the proof of which lies in his impetuous decision making of the time - decisions that men who understand well the limitations of life tend to steer clear of.

Money, fame, talent, and good looks can cover a multitude of sins in the celebrity relational world, but they cannot supersede the conventional rule that if you cheat on your spouse, there will be hell to pay. His image suddenly tarnished and his family slipping away before his very eyes, Woods now had several chinks in his seemingly unbreakable armor.

To that point on the golf course, Tiger Woods had been known as the consummate closer. Entering the last day of a tournament, if another golfer was tied or slightly behind Woods on the leaderboard, playing out the last day was a mere formality. For all intents and purposes, the tournament was over. In those moments of primal mano a mano competition, Woods would reach down deep and find his very best. As with all of humanity’s transcendent competitors, Woods would rise to the occasion, rather than shrink in it. The more that was at stake, the greater Woods would channel his unparalleled determination and focus. In those moments, he was very much the predator, whatever poor bastard he was paired with the prey.

On August 16, 2009, shortly before Tiger’s scandal, he found himself in the very familiar position of possessing a lead on the final day of a major. The tournament was the PGA Championship, and his foe this time around was Y.E. Yang - a relatively unknown Korean golfer. I remember watching that day, waiting with eager anticipation for Tiger to continue separating himself from the pack and never look back en route to victory. But that never came. Woods would shoot a +3 on the day and go on to lose to Yang, thereby assuming the perplexing title of runner-up.

Since then, Woods has by and large failed to contend in another major tournament. His golf game has become unsightly at points…a far cry from the golfer who was widely proclaimed as the greatest ever. Jack Nicklaus’ record of eighteen major championships, which prior to 2009 seemed all but imminent, now seems impossible.

Professional life affects personal life, which then affects professional life again. Only this time, the inverse occurred - the cycle of destruction.

Recall on that infamous November evening that his wife chased after Woods with a golf club. To be sure, it’s ironic, but it’s also symbolic. When Tiger Woods’ personal life imploded, so too slid his professional career. When Elin wielded his golf club, the tumult of Woods’ personal life invaded his golf haven.

The Pillars of Confidence and How They Turned on Tiger

1. Unrealistic Optimism

Optimism and performance appear to be inextricably linked. Researchers Shelley Taylor and Jonathan Brown have concluded that “overly positive self-evaluation, exaggerated perceptions of mastery, and unrealistic optimism are characteristics of normal individuals, and that, moreover, these illusions appear to promote productive and creative work.” (2004). An individual who approaches a pursuit with unrealistic optimism is likely to outperform someone with correct perceptions and realistic expectations. Overly optimistic ideation results in the individual taking on more risky endeavors - often things they “should not have”; however, paradoxically, within that risky endeavor, they have a higher probability of success because of their perhaps unwarranted sheer and indomitable belief.

Unrealistic optimism is a euphemism for overconfidence, and it takes a very large ego to incubate the kind of mindset that our society’s largest risk-takers possess. That is why some of the most arrogant and narcissistic pricks enjoy the loftiest rises and also experience the steepest of downfalls. For such people, it’s win huge or don’t win at all, and their legacy ultimately is chiseled by the results while the rest of us look on and judge them from the ivory tower of prudence. We venerate them when they succeed; we cast stones at them when they fail. We call the behavior bold when it works and reckless when it doesn’t. But there is no mistaking that we are fascinated by them and the things we would and could never do.

To say that the greatest golfer in the world was overly optimistic seems a little ludicrous. We’ve been through his laundry list of successes on the course. But who is to say that Tiger, before he was the greatest golfer in history, didn’t innately exhibit this kind of unrealistic belief in himself that propelled him on early in his development towards victory after victory? No golfer in the world could have believed in himself more than Tiger Woods, and belief is a powerful success agent indeed. Tiger Woods the golfer took more risks than the field, and because he was so otherworldly talented and believed in himself so unwaveringly, he more often than not succeeded.

At what point Tiger’s brash confidence began to manifest in his personal life would be impossible to know, but it is clear that Tiger took many risks in his personal life also. Each extramarital rendezvous was a risk - a reckless decision, we might say, and Tiger’s risky behavior caught up with him that Thanksgiving holiday in 2009. And the same way the feeling of invincibility had traversed his professional to his personal life, the feeling of mortality also crept into his golf game from his injured love life.

Unrealistic optimism devolved into realistic parameters. Cut Tiger, and he actually bleeds.

2. Mood

As obvious as it may sound, mood is a key contributor to confidence, and by means of association, success. Mood affects performance, quite literally. Research conducted on test subjects reveals that when a negative mood is induced, the subjects become physiologically slower, and consequently, score lower on tests involving kinesthetic speed (2004). Conversely, mania, or a prolonged state of euphoria, is associated with ultra-productivity, just as it is with reckless and risky behavior.

True, moods are ephemeral and can shift like shadows, but anyone who has ever been through life’s ebbs and flows understands that mood is largely associated with whatever circumstances you find yourself in. Ergo, it is entirely conceivable that Tiger Woods, before his extramarital affairs were unearthed, was a mostly happy individual. But following those events, after Tiger had lost his marriage, his relationship with his children, most of his sponsors, and his public perception, he may well have been quite a sad chap. Mood affects blood flow. It affects body movement. It affects a whole host of our physiology. A sad Tiger Woods on the golf course is far worse than a happy one.

3. Inventory of the Past

Also affecting confidence is one’s perception of past empirical successes (or failures) (2004). Perceived success triggers confidence, while perceived failure triggers anxiety - one of the major mental road blocks to success. Whether or not we succeed in an undertaking informs our belief. If the first time I play a game of soccer I score a goal, I am likely to take inventory of that success, which will then inform my belief that I am good, and finally, inspire me towards confidence and commitment in becoming a great soccer player. In that sense, developmentally speaking, it can’t be overstated how significant our first experience with an undertaking is.

Tiger Woods’ inventory of golf success was silly. He had more reason than anyone by far to look at what he had accomplished in the game and allow the empirical evidence to inform him that he was fantastic. And he absolutely was. But in the 2009 PGA Championship, he took a two-stroke lead into the final day and wound up losing to Y.E. Yang by three strokes. That result had quite frankly never happened before, and suddenly, Woods had to work to reconcile that failure being a part of his past inventory. He has been conspicuously quiet in the world of golf ever since.

Unrealistic optimism, mood, and inventory of the past…they were all severely wounded that Thanksgiving holiday of 2009, and Tiger Woods has not won a major championship since.

Golf is indeed a mental game, whose success is bolstered by confidence - something that Tiger Woods had limitless reserves of. But on August 16 at the PGA Championship and Thanksgiving night in his own home, seeds of doubt began creeping into Woods’ seemingly impervious mind. And during those large spaces of time in between shots that make golf such a rich mental pursuit, the script running through Woods’ head may have changed - subtly at first, but noticeably. Instead of the ego that had always served in assuring him of his imminent victory, perhaps Woods began to wonder the thought: if my personal life can undergo disaster, perhaps I can miss this putt…bogey this hole…lose this tournament. In the preeminent mental game, confidence is not a luxury; it’s a necessity. A golfer without confidence is like Thor without Mjolnir. Perhaps Tiger, too, was unworthy to wield the otherworldly power bestowed unto him.

I’m not sure what exactly to take away from the story of Tiger Woods, or how exactly to wrap a bow around this blog. I’ve lambasted Woods in the past, but I can’t quite come to judge him in the present. I’ve never walked a mile in his shoes, but I’d imagine that being thrown into the cosmic gifting that he was allotted is a much more onerous position than I would’ve cared to admit. Is it a blessing or a curse to be given such incredible talent? In my experience, I cannot say. The first time I swung a golf club I shanked the crap out of it, and I'm beginning to see the silver-lining in that result.


References

Compte, O. & Postlewait, A. (2004). "Confidence-Enhanced Performance." American Economic Review, 94 (5), 1536-1557.