The Inner Game of Golf

The Very Good+ dust jacket illustrated with gold ball. Edge wear along upper edges, price clipped. A mylar dust jacket has been added. The Fine binding is black paper over boards, red cloth-backed, silver lettering on spine. Light spotting to outer page edges. The binding is tight and pages are clean. The book measures 9.5" tall x 7.6" wide. About the book (from dust jacket) Hundreds of thousands of readers are familiar with Tim Gallwey's name; his three previous books on tennis and skiing have sold over half a million copies in hardcover alone, and his Inner Game concepts have been accepted not only in many sports but in other areas of life as well, Now, in answer to repeated requests, he applies Inner Game theory to golf, perhaps the most demanding of all sports. For years the author played once or twice a year with his father, averaging a score of 95 or more. By using Inner Game pts, without taking a single lesson, and, like most weekend golfers, playing only once a week (though with occasional forays to the driving range and putting green), in little over a year he knocked 15 strokes off his game and now breaks 80-proof that the Inner Game really works for golf People would generally agree that one's mind, emotions and confidence play a much larger role in golf than in almost any other sport. For example, in tennis the player is hitting a moving ball over and over again on the run, and in skiing the skier is hurtling down a mountain, so their reactions are much more instinctual than intellectual. But in eighteen holes of golf, the player actually hits the ball for no more than three or four minutes during a four-hour round, and it is the time between shots that is the bane of the average player. Whether he is brooding over having flubbed his last drive, dreading his next shot from a sand trap, or trying to line up a tricky downhill six-foot putt, he is constantly grappling with self-doubt, anxiety, fear of failure and tension. Clearly, few of us are capable of whacking a 275-yard drive straight down the middle of the fairway the way the pros on the PGA tour do consistently, but there is no reason why we can't hit an accurate drive for 150 yards. Moreover, virtually half of a golf score consists of chipping and putting, and even an eighty-year-old player has the physical capacity to sink a 20-foot putt. It is in these areas that the Inner Game approach can make an enormous difference. When Mr. Gallwey is giving an Inner Game lesson, his approach has seemingly wrought miracles within the space of a few minutes. But there are no miracles; his method is simply to help players to observe what is (for example, a persistent hook), to quiet the mind, to control anxiety and to think positively. Readers of this book who take the author's precepts seriously and practice them with an open mind will discover that they can lower their handicaps substantially. There are no gimmicks, no "tips" here; it is simply a matter of trusting your body, of practice, and of relaxed concentration. About the author (from dust jacket) Ever since TIM GALLWEY missed a heartbreakingly easy volley on match point in the National Junior Tennis Championships at the age of fifteen, he has been fascinated with the problem of how human beings interfere with their own ability to achieve and learn. His search for practical ways to overcome the mental obstacles that prevent maximum performance led to the basic discoveries first described in his best-selling classic, The Inner Game of Tennis. The principles and methods of the Inner Game were next applied to skiing, and Inner Skiing revolutionized the approach to the teaching of that sport. With the completion of The Inner Game of Golf, which Mr. Gallwey calls my most difficult Inner Game challenge," he is spending most of his time, in the Los Angeles offices of the Inner Game Corporation, developing an Inner Game approach to such diverse fields as selling, management, stress, diet, music and quality of work.…