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By Sandy Dunlop — Better Game Golf
When people ask me about Rory McIlroy's Masters mental game, they usually want to know about the shots, the putts, the moments of brilliance on camera. But I believe the greatest achievement in last year's Masters was something you couldn't see with your eyes. It was the skillful management of pain, crisis and failure. As Rory walked to the first tee with a two shot lead, his temporal lobe was almost certainly firing relevant memories at 300 milliseconds... the 2011 collapse from four shots up, Bryson DeChambeau winning at Pinehurst, Cam Smith's magical putting at St Andrews, Greg Norman's six shot meltdown nearly 30 years earlier. If given free reign, these memories would have tightened the body, shortened the breath, and made the brain cease to function as effectively as it needs to work. What Rory did internally, the inhibition of those memories, was the inner victory. That is the victory you don't see and can't see.
There's a part of the brain that tends to be active at moments of high stakes in golf, and it's the temporal lobe. This lobe works in a particular way. It sends messages via the ventral perceptual visual stream to the brain very quickly, in 300 milliseconds. And the way the temporal lobe works is it recalls relevant memories and known facts. That's what it works with. You don't choose these memories. They arrive uninvited, fast, and loaded with emotional charge.
Think of Rory's memory bank that was stimulated at that moment. He had the four shot lead he held in the 2011 Masters, double what he had this year. He had the playing partner, Bryson DeChambeau, who had managed to win the US Open at Pinehurst the year before. He would have had memories of St Andrews, where Cam Smith came back from four shots with his magical putting in the final round of the British Open. And if he wanted to move outside his own experiences, he could recall that Greg Norman had come to this same position with a six shot lead and managed not to cross the line. That's a lot of painful, relevant data arriving in a fraction of a second. For a deeper look at exactly how this neuroscience played out, see my companion piece Inside Rory McIlroy's Mind: The Neuroscience of Winning the Masters.
If these memories are given free reign, the consequences are predictable and devastating. The body tightens. The breath shortens. The brain ceases to function as effectively as it needs to work. This is not theory. This is what happens in the nervous system when threat memories fire. The sympathetic nervous system activates, cortisol floods the system, and the golfer's fine motor control deteriorates. This is the mechanism behind choking in golf, and it is the same mechanism that produces the putting yips.
What makes Rory's situation particularly intense is the sheer volume and relevance of the memories available. Every one of those stored experiences carried a specific emotional signature of loss, collapse, and public failure. The temporal lobe doesn't distinguish between "useful information" and "psychological sabotage." It just delivers what it has. And what it had for Rory was a catalogue of the most painful final round collapses in modern major championship golf. The golfer who lets these memories run unchecked is the golfer who tightens, shortens, narrows and falls back on habitual responses. That is the default. What Rory did was the opposite of the default.
In the initial Alexander Technique, which forms a core part of my work in The Golfing Bodymind, there is a concept called inhibition. It sounds counterintuitive. You say to yourself, "I am not hitting this shot." You say this even though you absolutely intend to hit the shot. FM Alexander, who was an actor, observed himself tensing excessively even as he began to think of speaking, and the tensing cost him his voice. When he told himself not to speak, the tension melted away.
The same principle applies in golf. We get a stimulus, whether it's fear on the first tee, a hole we don't like, ponds or trees, and that thought translates into electrical pulses at a neurological level before we are even aware of it. We tighten. The body shortens and narrows. We fall back on habitual responses. Inhibition is the first critical way we can use the prefrontal cortex. It stops the unconscious actions that occur before we are even conscious of them. Brian Libet's famous experiment showed that when we are about to move a finger, the brain has already decided to move that finger before we are even aware of it. The same applies to the tightening that precedes a golf shot under pressure. If you want to understand why your best golf happens when you stop trying, inhibition is the starting point.
I think the greatest achievement in last year's Masters was not something you can see with your eyes. It was how Rory managed to inhibit and not let these memories affect him. It was the skillful management of pain, crisis and failure that were part of his human experience, navigated so successfully under the most intense pressure imaginable.
This is not about positive thinking. It is not about trying harder. Those are top down, boss led uses of the prefrontal cortex that in my experience simply don't work. Trying harder might be fine if you have a high level of competence, but exhortations can just tighten things up and have the reverse effect of what's intended. What Rory demonstrated was something far more sophisticated. He demonstrated the capacity to receive the stimulus of those memories, those relevant and painful memories, and not let the habitual response take over. He stayed in what I call the green zone, the competitive zone where thinking is minimal and the golfing body mind self-organizes. This is the zone state that separates peak performance from choking. The significant thing about Rory is he did it, and he did it when it mattered the most. That is a superb internal victory, a victory for the inner golfer.
Tony Jacklin, the two time major winner and Ryder Cup captain, spoke of a "cocoon of concentration." He said, "I'm living fully in the present, not moving out of it. I'm aware of every half inch of my swing. I'm absolutely engaged, involved in what I'm doing at that particular moment... I'm invincible." There's a clear, instinctive sense of what's going to happen in this state of mind. In short, a sense of victory.
This state is what yoga psychology would call Ekagra, the crane mind, a state of one pointed focus on a single object characterized by deep concentration. Or at its most profound, Niruddha, the lotus state, where the mind is under control like a lotus flower that grows on ponds and lakes, a symbol of thoughts completely still. Joyce Weatherhead, the great woman golfer of the 1920s, was putting in the English Ladies Championship at Sheringham in Norfolk when a train thundered by. She holed the putt. When asked if the train distracted her, she said, "What train?" That is Pratyahara, the deliberate withdrawal of attention from external objects. What Rory achieved in the final round was his own version of this cocoon. He entered a state where the memories, the history, the weight of expectation simply did not penetrate. If you want to explore how to develop this capacity, I recommend starting with how to trigger flow state before a round.
For the rest of us, on the matter of the management of pain, crisis and failure, you can learn things you can do. In my work with golfers over decades, what I've found is that the hierarchy model of the brain, the idea that the prefrontal cortex is the boss issuing instructions to the body, is no longer seen as correct by the scientific experts. We actually have a whole brain body intelligence network. The enteric brain, the belly brain, has even more synaptic connections than the cranial brain. It controls rhythmic movements like breathing and walking and plays a huge role in the movements of the golf swing.
We're in the age of networks, and this is what really works in the golfing body mind. It's a total paradigm shift. Getting out of the way and letting natural processes unfold is fundamentally different from issuing instructions to your body. Hierarchical, centralized control isn't effective when it comes to the mastery of the golfing body mind. Rory's final round was a demonstration of this principle at the highest level. He did not think his way to victory. He inhibited, he let the network self-organize, and he played from a place that most golfers only occasionally touch. You can explore the full landscape of golf flow states and how to access the zone across our mental game articles.
The good news is that the skills Rory demonstrated are not reserved for elite professionals. Every golfer can develop the capacity to inhibit the habitual tightening response. The starting point is awareness. You must first notice what your body does when you receive a stimulus, whether it's first tee nerves, a water hazard, or the memory of a previous disaster.
Try this on your next round. Before you hit a shot that normally triggers tension, say to yourself, "I am not hitting this shot." Hold that for a moment. Notice what happens to your body. Does the tension soften? Does the breath deepen? You are not abandoning the intention to hit the shot. You are interrupting the neurological cascade that fires before you are even aware of it. This is the front door to the entire Alexander Technique approach to golf, and it is remarkably powerful once you experience it. Combine this with the breathing exercises and the concentration work I teach in Better Game Golf, and you begin to build a golfing body mind that can handle pressure instead of being destroyed by it.
Real change in golf is not an event, it's a process. It's a journey. Change is about a journey of informed and guided regular practice, both internally and mentally and on the practice ground. You've got to want to put the effort in. What I recommend is a minimum of 30 days, but 60 to 90 is what really gets the results. During this period, you will go through what systems thinking calls a false start, where things get worse before they get better, because you are letting go of old coping mechanisms before the new ones are embedded.
This is why most golfers give up too early. They experience the discomfort of the transition zone and retreat to what's familiar. But the harder you push in the old way, the harder the system pushes back. The easy way out usually leads back in. These are laws of systems thinking that I've found extraordinarily accurate in golf. If you stay with the process, something emerges that is qualitatively different from what came before. Your golfing body mind self-organizes at a new level. You begin to stop overthinking your golf swing not through force of will but because you have genuinely internalized new patterns. That is the path Rory walked over years of painful experience, and it is the path available to every golfer willing to do the work.
In previous years, Rory's temporal lobe would have been delivering the same painful memories, the 2011 collapse, the near misses, the historical precedents of others failing, and those memories would have been given free reign. The body would have tightened, the breath shortened, the brain ceased to function effectively. What was different in 2025 was his capacity to inhibit those neurological responses. He did not try to think positively or force confidence. He demonstrated the skillful management of pain, crisis and failure at the precise moment when the stakes were highest. This is not something you can see on television. It is the inner victory, and it is what I believe was the single greatest achievement of the entire tournament.
The temporal lobe recalls relevant memories and known facts, sending them via the ventral perceptual visual stream in approximately 300 milliseconds. Under pressure, this means a golfer receives a flood of relevant memories, many of them painful, before they can consciously process what is happening. These memories trigger tightening in the body, shortening of the breath, and a cascade of sympathetic nervous system activation. The golfer does not choose these memories. They arrive automatically. The challenge is not to prevent the memories from arriving but to inhibit the habitual physical and emotional responses they trigger. This is the core skill that separates the zone from choking.
Inhibition, as I use the term, comes from the initial Alexander Technique. It is the act of saying "I am not hitting this shot" before you hit the shot, even though you fully intend to hit it. This interrupts the unconscious neurological cascade that fires in response to a stimulus, whether that stimulus is fear, a bad memory, or a challenging hole. FM Alexander discovered this when he observed himself tensing as he merely thought about speaking. When he told himself not to speak, the tension disappeared. In golf, inhibition prevents the tightening and narrowing that destroys the swing before it has even begun. It is counterintuitive, but who cares if it works.
Absolutely. The skills of inhibition, awareness, and working with the golfing body mind as a self-organizing network are available to every golfer. The difference is that amateurs typically have to develop these skills consciously over a structured period of practice. I recommend a minimum of 30 days of daily work, combining breathing exercises, concentration practice, visualization, and on-course experimentation with inhibition techniques. The path from conscious competence to unconscious mastery takes time, and you should expect a period of false start where things feel worse before they improve. But if you stay with the process, the results can be genuinely transformative. You can start with the exercises available in how to stop the yips in golf, which address the same neurological mechanisms.
Positive thinking, trying harder, and instructing the body to relax are all top down, boss led interventions from the prefrontal cortex. They don't work because they interfere with how the golfing body mind naturally operates. When you feel into the body and try to force a particular change, you create tension in that area while remaining unaware of all the other parts of the body that haven't changed and are still working in old habitual ways. The cure can be worse than the disease. The golfing body mind is a self-organizing network, not a hierarchy that responds to commands from a boss. What works is getting the conscious mind out of the way, using techniques like inhibition and externally focused drills, so the natural intelligence of the system can do what it already knows how to do.
The inner victory is my term for the achievement that you don't see and can't see. It is the internal work of managing the pain, crisis and failure that are part of every golfer's human experience. When Rory McIlroy walked onto that final round with a two shot lead and a head full of memories that could have destroyed him, the victory was not the trophy. The victory was that he inhibited those memories from taking control, stayed present, let his golfing body mind self-organize, and delivered when it mattered most. For the rest of us, the inner victory might be smaller in scale but identical in nature. It is the moment you face a shot you've always feared and your body stays soft. It is the putt where the memory of missing doesn't tighten your hands. That is the inner victory, and it is arguably the biggest reward you can have in golf.
The skills Rory McIlroy demonstrated at the Masters are learnable. Inhibition, awareness, working with rather than against your golfing body mind... these are not mysteries. They are practices. Start your free 7-day trial at bettergamegolf.com and let Sandy's AI caddie walk you through these concepts on your next round.