by Steve Elling, CBSSPORTS.COM
LEMONT, Ill. — Granted, it’s a subjective list.
When it comes to the power of relentless positivity, the first guy who springs to mind is Gary Player, a Hall of Famer who has invented an entire language of euphemisms to avoid saying anything remotely negative.
Matt Kuchar is in the same oxygenated orbit.
When he first came out on the PGA Tour in 2002 and won early in the season, he picked up the nickname Joker, because of the ever-present grin on his mug.
His swing coach, Chris O’Connell, put a new twist on an old golf cliche to describe his most famous PGA Tour client.
“On the golf course,” O’Connell said, “he’s his own best friend.”
Even a case of laryngitis couldn’t keep the unsinkable Kuchar down at the BMW Championship on Thursday, when he shot a 7-under 64 to take the lead after the morning wave at Cog Hill.
Kuchar, in the midst of a career year and showing no signs of slowing down, croaked out a few happy comments after his round, which included six birdies and an eagle on one of the longest tracks of the entire year, then retired to rest up for the remainder of the FedEx Cup grind.
Things are sailing along so well, even Kooch is speechless.
Kuchar is on such a ridiculous stretch right now that he leads the tour in earnings and FedEx points, has 10 top 10 finishes, and will be front and center as a rookie member of the U.S. Ryder Cup team in three weeks.
Really, what’s not to smile about?
Hard as it is to believe based on his exterior, he hasn’t always been as full of sunshine, lollipops and rainbows on the inside and traces some of his incredible trajectory of the past three years to a seminal moment watching, of all things, Wimbledon.
Kuchar and his wife, Sybi, a former tennis star at Georgia Tech, were watching the matches on TV a few years ago and then adjourned to the court to whack a few balls around themselves. Matt had been struck by some of the antics of the male players.
“A lot of people after they miss a shot, are yelling at themselves — what a stupid shot, something like that,” Kuchar said. “I am thinking, ‘Man, that’s just what golfers do.’ As you get to see it on TV, you see how bad it is.”
Kuchar laid the whole anecdote out while doing a sit-down video with his golf psychologist, Gio Valiante, after winning The Barclays two weeks ago. Matt Kuchar interview by Dr. Gio Valiante
As Kuchar was playing a singles match against his wife, he started talking to himself in an experiment of sorts. Somewhere in here, there is a valuable lesson for anybody who has ever hit a ball with a stick or heaved it through a hoop.
“I decide I am going to do the complete opposite of what I have seen on TV,” he said. “I am going to talk positive self-talk to myself the whole time. Tell myself how great I am serving, tell myself how great and volleying.
“As I am doing this, I am playing better and better tennis and my wife is getting terribly frustrated and I end up beating her. It’s not something I would do [aloud] on the golf course, because it’s a little over the top, but at least you can do it inside your own head.”
His wife vaguely recalls the day.
“He just pretty much realized that beating yourself up doesn’t do you any good,” she said. “For some reason, it just struck him that day.”
He’s struck the little white ball pretty well ever since.”
“I have kind of converted that over,” Kuchar explained. “It’s as little as making a 3-foot putt that you really want to make, and you hit a great putt that goes right in the middle. “You say, ‘that was a great putt.’ Just those little reaffirmations. To sink those inside your memory bank is an important thing.”
At this rate, his real bank is about to receive a $10 million cash injection. Kuchar, who also played at Georgia Tech, gets to play a de facto home game in two weeks at the FedEx Cup finale at East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta. He’s trying to get his head around the dollar figure.
“I had somebody call up, one of my friends just call up jokingly saying, ‘What recession?’” Kuchar said last week, laughing. “‘This is the best economy for you ever. You’ve got to love Obama. He’s a fantastic president.’
“I have to agree. This year I’m grateful to have a job, and the job that I have I love, and it’s paying me a ton of money. The $10 million would feel like I must have fulfilled a dream to be a basketball player or a baseball player or some completely other sport. It would be just kind of a crazy figure that I’d have no idea what to do with. I’d probably just tuck it away and try not to look at it.”
You don’t have to look hard to find reasons behind Kuchar’s upward spike over the past three seasons. He’s hitting the ball better than ever, but has been incredible from short range.
“The guy just doesn’t make bogeys,” O’Connell said. “And if you don’t make bogeys on the PGA Tour, you are going to be in pretty good shape.”
Only the latter part of that sentence is an understatement — without ugly numbers, you are going to be in a garden spot. Not to get too caught up in the data, but Kuchar ranks seventh in putting and first in scrambling. In the latter, he is getting the ball up and down 66.5 percent of the time when he misses the green, a full nine percentage points better than the tour average.
So, given that he’s T14 in greens found in regulation, that means he doesn’t miss many greens, and when he does, he saves par two-thirds of the time. He doesn’t have a three-putt green over his past 265 holes, the longest active run on tour. Deadly stuff.
“It’s all about the dispersion,” O’Connell said. “When he misses greens, it isn’t by much, and when he does miss, he generally gets it up and down. Pretty simple.”
Kuchar, 32, has finished in the top 10 in six of his past nine starts and climbed to a career-best No. 11 in the world rankings. Last week in Boston, in what amounted to an off-week of late, he finished 11th after a comparatively flat weekend.
When finishing 11th constitutes an off-week, you can afford to grin like you’re on hospital medication. As for the Joker tag he picked up eight years ago, nowadays, it’s not just a mask.
“I don’t think he’s happy because he’s in first place,” Valiante said Thursday. “He’s in first place because he’s happy.”
Subscribe to Posts
