The Art of Gamesmanship

The Art of Gamesmanship

How golf allows opponents to get under your skin, and stay there

· By JOHN PAUL NEWPORT

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With the possible exception of putts on super-fast, U.S. Open greens, gamesmanship is golf's most delicate art. A good gambit must be fine-tuned to the psychology of its victim, but also avoid being perceived as gamesmanship. Plausible deniability, as a friend of mine says, is the key.

Take, for instance, the storied episode on the first tee of the 1971 U.S. Open playoff at Merion Golf Club between Lee Trevino and Jack Nicklaus. Moments before their tee time, Mr. Trevino, aka the Merry Mex, pulled a three-foot rubber snake from his golf bag, held it up wiggling for the gallery and tossed it at Mr. Nicklaus's feet.

Great fun, right? Both men laughed heartily (you can find the video on YouTube), and Mr. Nicklaus won't call it gamesmanship. "I asked him to throw it to me," he told me this week. But a few seconds later, as he fleshed out the incident, Mr. Nicklaus also said, "Of course, you have to ask why he had that snake in his bag in the first place, and why he pulled it out when he did."

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Rob Shepperson

In other words, maybe it was gamesmanship, maybe it wasn't. In either case, Mr. Trevino won the playoff. (Mr. Trevino, through a spokesman, said the snake was in the bag as a toy for his daughter.)

Most gamesmanship gambits are more subtle than a rubber snake. That's what makes them so delicious. The classic stratagems involve mentioning, in all faux innocence, things that your opponent will be unable to banish from his mind. You might casually ask, "Do you ever notice your shadow when you swing?" Or advise helpfully, "Whatever you do, avoid the water on the left." The desired results of these comments, naturally, are for your opponent to think about nothing but his shadow when he swings and for his next shot to fly directly into the water on the left.

The seminal work on golf gamesmanship, published here in 1968, was "Golfmanship" by the English author and satirist Stephen Potter. It was Mr. Potter, in fact, who coined the word "gamesmanship" in his 1947 book by that title, and "one-upsmanship" in a later volume.

"When 'Gamesmanship' made its first appearance, golf was the setting chosen for many of the first crude experiments," Mr. Potter writes wryly in the opening chapter of "Golfmanship," "and it was found that of all games golf was the most susceptible to gamesmanship for two reasons. First, it is a still-ball game ('the less violent physically, the more vulnerable psychologically'). Second, the players are in close contact ('the smaller the orbit the more potent the ploy'). A well-timed failure to smile at an opponent's joke or to react to his sporting gesture is ineffective if the two of you are separated by the length of the tennis court."

The book is essentially a taxonomy of common golfer weaknesses and neuroses, with advice on how to exploit them. For instance, if your opponent is on a hot streak with his driver, Mr. Potter suggests a comment such as "I see how you're doing it. Straight left arm at the moment of impact, isn't it? Do you mind if I just stand here and watch?" That should be sufficient, he asserts, to throw your victim off his game for the rest of the round, if not the season.

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Another of my favorite Potter ploys is called "Simpson's Statue" after a man named Ronald Simpson, who supposedly perfected the technique in the 1940s. The sequence involves moving distractingly just as your opponent is about to swing, apologizing profusely, and then freezing in an exaggerated manner.

"Golfmanship," unfortunately, is long out of print. But in 2000 Jon Winokur, acknowledging his debt to Mr. Potter, advanced the discipline with a kind of sequel entitled "How to Win at Golf Without Actually Playing Well."

The core gamesmanship concepts, in my reading and experience, fall into four categories, all of which prey on a golfer's lonely vulnerability. Implanting irrelevant or otherwise distracting thoughts deep in a player's mind is the most time-honored tactic. "Are those butterflies bothering you? I can try to shoo them away," one may offer. Unwanted instruction is also a perennial: "Are you doing that old business of forgetting to grip with the third and fourth fingers?"

The next category involves deliberately becoming an irritant. Matching your foe's brisk pace of play with a snail's pace of your own is hard to defend against, especially for Type As. Voicing political opinions known to be anathema often produces splendid results. Boldly repeating shopworn expressions -- such as "Never up, never in" when someone leaves a putt short -- is guaranteed to get under anyone's skin.

Next, and less sporting, comes active physical distraction, such as standing just a tad too close, or absent-mindedly jangling change. Mr. Winokur describes The Mangrum, named after former Tour pro Lloyd Mangrum, who was fond of wearing bright white shoes and, while standing just inside his opponent's peripheral vision, crossing his legs at just the right, or wrong, moment.

I myself was haunted for years by something similar: a frequent playing companion who started to walk a beat too soon when I was putting, usually just as I was beginning the forward stroke with my putter. Eventually, after several conversations about the matter, he reformed, and I'm still not sure whether he was gaming me or was just naturally impatient.

Finally, there's the trickier matter of misleading an opponent. Knowingly delivering false information about the course, such as "There's no out-of-bounds on this hole" when you know that there is, though not technically a breach of the rules of golf, could justify disqualification from some tournaments. Lesser gambits would not. For example, you stand on a tee box with a driver in hand, to influence your opponent's club choice, even though you plan to lay up short of the cross hazard with a long-iron. Similarly, after leaving a putt short because of a poor stroke, you can tell your partner or caddy (loudly enough for your opponent to hear) something like "Wow, I really belted that one." This may sow doubt in your foe's mind about the green speed.

But is that cricket? For that matter, is golf gamesmanship in general cricket? It used to happen at the pro level more than it does now. Sam Snead arguably lost the 1947 U.S. Open at St. Louis Country Club because of a gambit by Lew Worsham, with whom he was tied on the final green. Both men had three-foot putts remaining, but Mr. Worsham waited until Mr. Snead was about to make his stroke to call him off, questioning who was actually away and thus had the right to putt first. It turned out Mr. Snead was away, by one inch, but the delay unnerved him and he missed. After Mr. Worsham made his putt, he took the trophy.

In those days, with skimpy purses and a vagabound lifestyle, the pros expected such behavior, and Mr. Snead was famous for giving as good as he got. These days, insists Mr. Nicklaus, "ridiculous" exploits like that don't happen at all on the Tour. That seems to be true at the elite amateur level, too. "It never happens," said Buddy Marucci, the reigning U.S. Senior Amateur champion and captain of the 2007 U.S. Walker Cup team. "Anyone who tried it wouldn't last long."

But don't expect coddling should you find yourself in a big-money game in Las Vegas, and you can certainly expect needling when playing for a few dollars among friends. That's what friends are for.

Plus, you can always counter with your clubs. "Of all the problems which face the golf gamesman," Mr. Potter wrote, "the problem of pure good play is the most difficult to fight."

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