Tiger Woods is a Robot

If you blinked a couple weekends ago, you might have missed noticing that Tiger Woods is a robot. He won another tournament: the Dubai Desert Classic.

Ho hum. Just another day at the office for the player who looks more and more like a god (lower-case) every week. It was his seventh win in eight tournaments. 

Yeah, he’s better than you. He’s better than everyone. That’s why he’s a robot—he’s on autopilot. 

Tiger Woods is part-man, part-machine, created by aliens and sent to Earth to punish us mortals with his exceptional golfing ability; to slowly drive the human race mad so we’ll be easier to control when they invade.

He’s already up to $936,000 in earnings for 2008.

That’s right—he’s already won a million bucks in prize money from tournaments this year. In one month! How much have you made in ‘08?

There’s a lot of buzz that this might be the year he wins the Grand Slam. (That’s all four majors in one calendar year.) He’s already won what’s dubbed The Tiger Slam (all four majors in a row, but overlapping two seasons). 

Why do you think Tiger Woods is such a robot? It’s the mental game, obviously.

Plenty of golfers have a great swing, plenty are born with talent, plenty work hard and practice constantly. But Tiger has cornered the market on mental focus. You hear countless analysts and fellow pros talk about how easily Tiger shakes off a bad shot or a bad hole. By the next shot, he’s steely-eyed again, having put the mistake behind him to focus on the task at hand.

The mental part of golf will mess with your head. It’s why we’re all amateurs, struggling to make bogey on the ninth hole of our local municipal course. We can’t focus. Our shots, good or bad, stay with us the whole round.

There’s a new trend in golf instruction—the Mental Golf Profile. Endorsed by pros and instructors across the world, the Mental Golf Profile is like a personality test for your golf game. Using key indicators pulled from a series of questions, the Mental Golf Profile takes your “mental golf temperature” and shows you areas of your mental game that you probably don’t even know are tripping you up. 

We can’t all be Tiger Woods. We can’t all be robots. But we can all add some serious strokes to our game by coming to a better understanding of our mental game, specifically where we’re lacking.

Just thinking about the game of golf differently—and knowing how our thinking affects us—can make us more like our robot overlord.