PLAYING WITHOUT LIMITS BY DR BOB ROTELLA
R
ory and I never talked about win- ning the Mas- ters. No, we
or define your day. Instead, you must embrace how you respond to those mistakes. You must own how you respond to all of it – the ex- pectations, the disappoint- ments, the moment. To have free will means you get to choose how you think about yourself and your golf game. Frankly, I thought Rory won the tournament on Friday morning. He had a choice after the poor way his Thursday round finished with double bogeys on two of the last four holes. He could have felt sorry for himself. He could have said, “I guess it’s never going to happen for me. I can’t get a break. Nothing ever goes my way with this tournament.” Instead, he got more decisive, more determined to bounce back and come back stronger. We sat down that morning in the caddie
room just off the practice range and talked about how there’s still time. Let’s turn this into a great comeback story. That’s a choice he made, how he owns his mind at every step of the journey. Every time we’ve talked, we’ve talked about patience and acceptance. The real- ity is guys don’t win majors the way they dream it up. In most people’s dream, they just pure every shot, hit it to a foot. While Rory may have won a few tournaments early in his career almost that easily, he had to realise that wasn’t normal. He had to be willing to say, “I have no idea how this is going to unfold,” but also have the peace of mind, the blind faith, to fully believe that it’s going to happen. That belief carried him through Sunday when he lost his lead not once, not twice, but three times.
Rory has faced incredible scrutiny few prodigies in any sport have ever faced. It’s dramatically more difficult for someone that gifted to accept mistakes, so he must have an even stronger mind and better attitude. Rory has learned how to cherish his potential. I said, “Let’s have a ball and see how far you can go with the gift you have.” In the end, for Rory and anyone else, it comes down to playing without putting any limits on what you can do. Now that Rory has won the Masters to com- plete the Grand Slam, it’s almost like the world thinks, “It’s over, he did it, he can rest now.” No, it starts all over again next week. The great thing about Rory is he’s excited about whatever the game throws at him. I am, too. – WITH MIKE STACHURA
talked about all the things you need to do to win the Masters. Really, we spent our time talking about what you must do to find out how good you can get. That type of self-belief is what makes a great and unique player like Rory unflappable in the most trying moments. Because he is as excep- tional a competitor as he is a person, Rory embraced what the game was asking of him, what others were expecting of him, but mostly, what he was expecting from himself. One of the early things we talked about was how golf is not about playing perfectly. You must love that golf is a game of mistakes, but those mistakes can’t be the focus
GOLF DIGEST SOUTH AFRICA 53
MAY 2025
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