I made a valiant effort to sift through today’s twelve player transcripts from the first round of the Humana Challenge in La Quinta, California. I got through eight of them looking for players talking about the principles of mastery as they understand them, but the questions they were asked pretty much pushed them towards stock answers about what clubs they hit into what hole.
Patrick Reed did have one great quote that wasn’t enough to build a whole post on. He was talking about how he went from gunning for every shot to learning that scoring comes from being measured in your approach to your shots. It’s a sign of his maturity as a player:
My confidence is as high as it could be and the main thing is just not getting ahead of myself and not really being over confident where I take too many unnecessary risks.
I felt like I did that really well today. I wanted to pull driver or go for a shot that I didn’t really need to and I geared back and gave myself a good chance of birdie. I just made a couple and missed a couple.
It had resonance for me because I find myself being more pragmatic in my approach shots too. Instead of shooting for every corner of the dogleg and every pin, I now give myself margins unless I’ve got a great yardage to a sitting duck pin. It seems to take a lot of pressure off the shot which allows me to make better ones. I felt that Reed’s brief comment deserved to see the light of day, but as I said, it’s not a post.
So hunting and pecking around for other resources, I came across this Patrick Reed interview with Brian Wacker, “Confidence personified.” I’ve become a big fan of Reed in his domain and Brian Wacker in his. I’ve linked to a number of Wacker’s stories and this interview is another nice piece. (Funny, I sat next to Wacker in the media center at last year’s Waste Management Phoenix Open and told him how much I enjoyed his work. But that was about the extent of our communication; he was constantly writing stories.)
He coaxes some very interesting responses out of Reed, the measure of which not only their honest insight into Reed’s thinking, but also the fan’s positive comments at the end of the story. And he also gets into the story of his wife, Justine’s, episode with a seizure.
It’s a good read.