Momentum in golf is everything. Both good and bad. It can drag you down to the depths of despair as you miss five straight cuts and ultimately relinquish your playing rights. But it can also help you scale heights you once thought unimaginable. Just ask Chris Paisley.
Paisley knows more intimately than most what momentum can do for a professional golfer. After turning pro, he cut his teeth on the Alps Tour in 2011. His debut season was fruitful to say the least as he won three times to earn his Challenge Tour card for the following season.
Riding a wave of confidence and momentum, the Englishman found yet more success on Europe’s secondary circuit. A win at the English Challenge and four other top-10s was enough to nail down full European Tour status for 2013. A dream start to life as a Tour pro indeed.
And then, as so often happens in this fickle game, momentum swung in the opposite direction. Five missed cuts in his first six events left him with his back against the wall. Though there were weeks of encouraging play, they were far too sporadic. In the end, 14 missed cuts sealed the fate Paisley must have been dreading as early as February, a return to the Challenge Tour.
To his credit, he bounced back pretty quickly. A solid showing at Q-School in 2014 paved the way for a return to the big leagues and presented a chance to show that he did in fact belong.
Over the next three years, while there were glimpses of the golf Paisley was capable of, evident by seven top-10s in that period, inconsistency plagued him. A mediocre scoring average of 71.31 owing to wayward drives (ranking outside the top-100 in driving accuracy) and shoddy approach shots (ranking outside the top-140 on Tour) left him amongst Europe’s also-rans and clinging to his card for dear life. Twice finishing outside the top-100 on the Race to Dubai in those three years must have been frustrating for a man who consistently finished inside the top-30 in the total putts per round category.
It’s often said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Clearly whatever Paisley was doing in practise wasn’t translating into good play on the course. Something needed to change if he was to claim that elusive first European Tour title.
Believing his practises lacked the element of pressure associated with tournament play, Paisley ramped up the difficulty of the drills he’d carry out in practise and perform what he termed “forfeits” if he failed to execute them properly. These “forfeits” involved push-ups and sprints.
For the self-proclaimed “shy” 31-year-old, these drills bore fruit almost instantly. Beginning the 2018 season at the SA Open with his wife on the bag and early-season rust likely, Paisley tempered his expectations.
Paisley’s ball-striking was exemplary throughout the week at Glendower. At 81.9% Greens in Regulation, his approach shots belied the lukewarm displays he had grown accustomed to. Going head-to-head against home-favourite and the much more fancied Branden Grace would have been too much for most trying to win for the first time. Paisley though, didn’t flinch as he flung the monkey from his back with a three-stroke win.
With the mental shackles of his past failings broken, Paisley has shown that it was no flash in the pan. A T-5 finish at the Abu Dhabi Championship followed by a solo fifth at the Dubai Desert Classic is indication enough that he belongs on the European Tour.
It is amazing what a difference a year or change in practice regimen can make. This time last year, Chris Paisley would have been content with merely holding onto his job for another year. Now, he has his sights set firmly on trying to qualify for golf’s biggest events, the World Golf Championships and Major championships.
Momentum in golf is everything. Both good and bad. It can make you doubt whether you are good enough. But it can also help you catapult more than 200 places up the rankings as you scale heights you once thought unimaginable. Just Ask Chris Paisley.
Photo: Warren Little/Getty Images
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