Your 15th Club: The Inner Secret to Great Golf »

Any golfer will understand this:

You go out to the driving range, you warm up with your irons, everything is going right. You pull out your utility clubs, you are hitting great. Your driver — boom. The ball flies far and lands just where you want it. You head for the practice green...you drain every putt from 30 feet in.

Time to play with your friends. Eighteen delicious holes and you are going to show them how good you are. Your mind starts racing a bit. Am I too confident? Am I too relaxed? Thoughts starts creeping in, but you still believe. You line up over the first tee ready to drill it. Everything is going to be great....

Whack! You can't believe it — you spray the ball 30 yards to the right, short and in deep rough. You try to punch out to the fairway...only it goes to the other rough. And so on . . you end up quadruple bogey. Your day is shot...

It happens to every golfer. The mind becomes their worst enemy. It's not physical. It's all in the head. How do listeners get their brains back to practice range? Why did it change?

The preeminent golf psychologist Bob Rotella, whose counsel and knowledge is sought by hundreds of thousands, including the world's top players, has spent years trying to discover a way to get golfers to stay in the mindset that they can thrive in. In Your 15th Club, Rotella has done just that: come up with a plan to help golfers play at their optimal best. It is something that every golfer will want to learn.

Publishers Weekly

This is the sixth book by noted sports psychologist Rotella (Golf Is Not a Game of Perfect) focusing on the often troubled mass of gray matter between a golfer's ears. Since the rules of the game allow for only 14 clubs, the 15th referred to is a metaphor for a player's confidence. In the first 14 chapters, Rotella outlines what it takes for a golfer to develop mental strength on the course, prescribing a regimen of positive reinforcement through the following: understanding your attitude, cultivation of a confident outlook, acceptance of imperfection, forgetting poor play, positive spoken and written affirmations, visualizing success, becoming a cheerleader for yourself, and commitment to an excellent short game. The final two chapters focus on Rotella's close relationship with Irish player Padraig Harrington, his client who won the 2007 British Open. Rotella says the effort to build a confident mind, like exercise to strengthen the body, requires commitment. The book is a smooth read and easy to digest in a few sittings, but it has many familiar echoes of advice in positive thinking and sports psychology books, including Rotella's own, that have gone down green fairways before. (June)

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Foreword     1
Confidence-Plain and Unvarnished     3
The 15th Club     9
This Game Will Beat You Up     19
How Your Subconscious Sees You     31
Real Realism     39
Remember to Remember     49
Mental Gymnastics     55
The Problem with Perfection     61
What You See Is What You Get     67
Perception     77
Talking to Yourself     91
The Cradle of Your Confidence     101
Nip the Yips     119
Confidence and Competence     129
What I Learned from Padraig Harrington     135
Putting It All Together     153
Affirmations     175
Self-Development Exercises     185
The Thoughts of Confident Golfers     189