The Four Foundations of Golf, by Jon Sherman

The Four Foundations of Golf, by Jon Sherman

The Four Foundations of Golf is squarely an instructional book, pitched ever-so-slightly more at established golfers than beginners, but it’s a mentalitee favourite nonetheless. What makes it quite unique in its field is that one of the four foundations – the very first, in fact – has a clear mental aspect. In Managing Expectations, Sherman makes a plea that echoes throughout the text: whatever your objectives are when playing golf, number one should be enjoying yourself, and everything you do when trying to improve your technical skills should be in service of this, or else what is the point?

And it’s no lazy instruction to ‘be happy’. Sherman suggests where happiness lies: in the space where our abilities and expectations overlap. He argues an honest appraisal of our current skill level will help us set more realistic goals, and given we’re more likely to achieve realistic goals we can continually replace them with newer ones –  more advanced, but still achievable – and end up in a positive cycle of incremental improvement. How many of us could do with applying a little of that logic to our daily lives and set kinder objectives for ourselves?

Sherman is a big advocate of applying the wide range of modern technology available to us, be it <launch monitors>, <range finders> or <GPS game tracking systems>, but explains which nuggets to look for in the mountain of statistics they can quickly bury us under. His second foundation, Strategy, is reliant on us finding out how far we hit each club on average, and if (when?) we hit it slightly off our intended target, does the ball generally go left or right? This is so we know which club we should confidently pick in any situation, and ties back to us keeping track of our own skill level as a guide to setting expectations.

Sherman’s third foundation, Practice, is very much in line with mentalitee’s outlook. He makes the case for a more playful approach at the driving range rather than grinding away, focusing on every tiny mistake, because this should be as much fun for us as any other element of the game. And we were always going to love his fourth foundation being The Mental Game, although on balance the guidance he offers in this closing section is more relevant to golf than daily life.

Although parts of The Four Foundations of Golf could slightly overwhelm a genuine newcomer, the book is all about establishing positive habits, and the sooner players both new and established do that, the better. All in all Sherman is mapping a route to greater contentment through golf, which is what we’re all about, too.