"Playing Cool Mad"

Letting your temper take you over, I saw, was a mistake. When you give in to anger, you lose control. A man who stays cool mad will beat you every time.

In golf, the trick of developing just the right mixture of heat and coolness in competition was one of the most difficult I had to learn. The game turns lots of pros and everyday players into club-throwing maniacs. There's hardly a locker-room door left in the country without dents in it, and the number of clubs thrown or smashed gets bigger all the time. The number of first-rate amateurs and promising young pros who've let their dander rise up and ruin their game is more than you can count. On the face of it, the calm, quiet player should have all the advantage.

This so far from true that I'll make the statement that any golfer who misses a shot and starts whistling is one of the easiest guys in the world to beat.

You've got to have that fire, that thing in you that sometimes makes it absolutely necessary to relieve your feelings - the thing which made Eben Byers and Jesse Sweetser two of the world's greatest amateur champs prior to Bob Jones's time. Byers, Sweetser, and Jones all filled the air with clubs. Bad shots drove them wild. Chick Evans was another who got red-necked, and in modern times Byron Nelson could pretzel a club or beat a bush to death with the bet.

When Doc Cary Middlecoff first joined the Grapefruit Circuit of the pros, he was described in a newspaper as `cheerful and placid of temperament" - until the Atlanta Open when Doc 3-putted and slung his club half a mile and howled like a hurt wolf. Tommy Bolt has become famous for his rages. I've gone through all this and been as guilty as the next man, so that I've formed some strong convictions on the subject.

Show me the fellow who walks along calmly after topping a drive or missing a kick-in putt, showing the world he's under perfect control, yet burning up inside, and I'll show you one who's going to lose. This boy is a fake. His nervous system won't take what he's handing it. If you bottle up anger entirely, it poisons your control centers.

But if you go all the way in the other direction, the practice of kicking tee markers, abusing shrubbery, and wrecking equipment can become such a habit that it also spoils your muscular reflexes. Mad golfers keep their blood boiling and agitated all the time for a reason. Deep down, they look forward to tearing their hair. Without knowing it, they get to hoping they'll butcher a shot. We're all show-offs at heart, and guys who break up locker rooms enjoy every minute of it.

Doctors and mind experts go around explaining that it's perfectly OK to explode on the course because it releases your built-up tensions. They don't tell you though, how you can rave like a wild beast and break 90.

Good golfing temperament falls in between taking it with a grin or shrug and throwing a fit. I believe you should blow up, at times, if it helps, but only if you can still keep your wits about you. I couldn't beat any pro if I didn't get my temper outbreak over with fast, then start thinking out the next shot. It's like opening a steam valve for a moment, then shutting it. An old-timer in Scotland once said to me, "Make your game as storm proof as you can, " by which he meant that when everything went wrong, I should be capable of producing my best shots, regardless of my frame of mind.

Which is about as easy, if you don't work at it, as scratching your ear with your elbow