It seemed to me that the precision required to play good golf demanded much greater mental discipline than was necessary for good tennis. The reason for the low margin of error was not hard to discover: the speed of the club head that is necessary to hit the ball a long distance. The speed of the golfer’s arms on the downswing is not much greater than the speed of the tennis player’s arm on the serve, but because of the greater length and flexibility of the golf club, the club-head speed is much greater than that of a racket. If a club head traveling over 100 mph contacts the ball with a face open a mere degree or two, the ball can be sent off target many tens of yards. With those odds, it’s amazing that the ball ever does go exactly where we want it to. In tennis, the serve is the only shot in which the player initiates the action, whereas in golf he does so on every shot. It is interesting to note that if you miss your first serve in tennis, you get another try. Golf is not so forgiving! Further, in tennis a much larger surface hits a much larger ball a much shorter distance. Moving from tennis to golf was definitely going to require some fine-tuning of my concentration. The greater precision required in golf is also reflected in the manner in which the player addresses the ball. A tennis player can be pretty casual, or even a little flamboyant, as he sets up the service line, bounces the ball a few times, and serves. Most professional golfers display much more self-discipline. They seem to approach the ball in the same controlled, almost ritualistic way every time. Even their dress seems more meticulous. (I’ve often felt I could pick out the golfers from the tennis players at a cocktail party.) Meticulousness has never been my strong suit. There isn’t a family picture of me as a boy in which at least one shoe wasn’t untied. I could usually solve
American sports coach
W. Timothy Gallwey (born 1938 in San Francisco) is an author who has written a series of books in which he has set forth a methodology for coaching and for the development of personal and professional excellence in a variety of fields that he calls "the Inner Game". Since he began writing in the 1970s, his books include The Inner Game of Tennis, The Inner Game of Golf, The Inner Game of Music (with Barry Green), Inner Skiing and The Inner Game of Work. Gallwey's seminal work is The Inner Game of Tennis, with more than one million copies in print.
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So there is more to skiing than learning parallel turns. For the skier who recognizes the further possibilities his sport offers for learning how to learn, for overcoming fears and self-doubt, for gaining concentration and appreciation for nature, skiing becomes re-creation in the original sense of the word: an opportunity to discover something important about oneself and to learn skills that improve not only one’s skiing but the quality of one’s life.