‘In a world of complexity, it takes a smart player to keep it simple’

Tony: Karl, great to be here with you at La Grand Mare. You’re a performance coach. What does that look like? What does it involve day-to-day?

Karl: My original background was as a player – a failed player – and then as a PGA coach, a swing coach. What I started to notice in the early days was that I was just passing on to other people what hadn’t worked for me – I was great on the range but couldn’t transfer it to the golf course.

So I became obsessed with this problem of how you get golfers to transfer the skills they have on the range onto the course. Pretty much everybody says they practise better than they play, with a few exceptions. That was the driving force behind it years ago, and it’s pretty much what I still do with players today.

Most of the players I work with have tremendous skills, the question is what’s getting in the way of them accessing those skills when it really matters, in major events and tournaments. That’s the day-to-day work.

There are sports where people don’t do much training, just play in matches, and probably should train more. Whereas with golf, people tend to practise a lot but maybe not play as much as they should. Is that something you’ve found?

It’s really interesting, Tony. Golf is probably the only sport where a lot of people practise in an environment that has nothing to do with the environment they’re going to play in. They’ll just hit balls off a flat lie with the same club over and over again. If you’re playing golf and you hit 25 consecutive seven-irons, something has gone very wrong.

There’s a big shift in the dynamic from range golf to playing golf on the course. Modern ranges like this at least let you simulate some of the demands of the game – one shot, a unique location, a score involved. Unless your practice replicates the demands of the game, you’re going to have trouble with transferability.

We’ll come back to that. Let’s talk about your summer, because in terms of the players you work with, there was a real high point a few weeks ago at the Open, with New Zealander Ryan Fox winning his first major – someone you’ve worked closely with. Tell us that story.

We’ve been working together for seven years now. His manager, Ian Keenan, a very good player himself, is a member at the golf club where I coach in the UK, Delamere Forest. He got in touch with me about seven years ago and said, “I’ve got a promising player from New Zealand, but he’s struggling a bit to put scores together and fulfil his potential.”

We met up at Delamere and hit it off straight away, because I’m a sports nut – my favourite sport is cricket, it’s a pilgrimage to Lord’s every year, I love football and rugby too. And Ryan’s background – his father a legendary All Black, his grandfather on his mother’s side a famous New Zealand cricketer – meant there was plenty to talk about beyond golf when we first started, and that continues to this day.

He was very keen to explore different ideas and different ways of approaching the game, and releasing his abilities.

He went on to win five times in Europe, the biggest being the BMW at Wentworth. Got his tour card for the States. He struggled a little at first over there, adjusted to life on the PGA Tour, and last year won two events, including the Canadian Open in a play-off with Sam Burns. Sam Burns must be sick of the sight of Ryan Fox, I’d have thought, after what happened at the Open. So it’s not an overnight sensation by any means – it’s been a gradual progression over seven years, culminating in that week at Birkdale.

It was immensely special for me, obviously working with Ryan and seeing him win, but Birkdale is close to my heart too. I live 45 minutes away, played there a lot as a kid, so I know the course really well and have a lot of friends in the area.

After he’d won, we got a call telling us to come over. My wife and I went, and it was interesting going back when everything was quiet – we’d been there during the busy practice days, and now there was almost nobody around. I managed to park up close to the golf course, and there was one security guard. I thought, right, I’m going to have to negotiate this. Luckily I still had my badge from player support, told him the man who’d won wanted to speak to me, and he said, “Come on, go through.”

Inside there were a few of the Kiwis, the caddies, not many people, but he was there with the Claret Jug. We had some pictures taken, I had a drink out of the jug, it was a pretty special evening.

That’s incredible. What does the support you give him actually look like during the week itself? Is it a five-minute phone call the night before, a word in his ear as he walks out to tee off?

It varies – a few events a year I’ll be there in person. Birkdale is a good example. I spent the first three practice days, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, with him, walking nine holes each day, talking with his caddie and his swing coach, Marcus Wheelhouse. It was a team effort, and it was great for everyone to get together and come up with a plan for the week.

One of the nine holes we followed, we went out on the practice days alongside Scottie Scheffler – even for me, having been involved in golf for so long, that’s pretty special. You don’t often get the chance to walk around with the best player in the world.

Did you give him any tips?

He was telling me where I was going wrong! It was amazing to watch his ball flight and control, but also it would be understandable if you were a bit full of yourself as world number one, but he couldn’t have been more unassuming, chatting away with everybody. It was nice to see someone in that position retain that humility.

For someone like Ryan, now at the top of the game, it’s easy to assume sport gets more complicated the higher you climb, that there’s more to think about. Is it actually the opposite?

That’s the hardest thing in the modern world, in almost any sphere, is to keep things simple. We’re drowning in information, there’s so much knowledge and so many things available to us, and even top players get drawn into that.

It’s understandable – you miss a couple of cuts, someone says “you need to work on this”, and you can very quickly go down the rabbit hole.

Ryan Fox, like most players, is at his best when he’s focused on shots rather than swings. When he’s really in tune with the golf course and what he’s trying to do with the ball, and a feel comes to the swing as a result, that’s when he’s at his best. It’s very easy, when the ball isn’t behaving, to get too caught up in what you’re doing rather than what you want the ball to do.

I’ve never said the swing isn’t important – of course it is. But once you’re on the course, if you’re thinking about the minutiae of the golf swing, good luck putting a score together, because you need to interact with the golf course.

Birkdale set an amazing puzzle for the week, every shot a real challenge, and if you’re not paying attention to that, you’re going to miss a lot of what the course is asking you to look at. Long-winded answer, but in a world of complexity, it takes a smart player to keep it simple.

Without giving away trade secrets - what are the kinds of things you try to get players to think about, or not think about? And how do they do it?

One of the things we talk a lot about is attention. In the world now, everybody wants our attention – social media, adverts, calls to action – and I think everybody’s attention is more fragmented than ever. I find it harder to sit and read a book now than I would have 20 years ago.

One powerful tool with players is asking good questions. If I asked everyone listening right now, “What can you hear in the background?”, your attention would immediately go there.

Questions are powerful, and that’s something we’ve worked on a lot with Ryan – asking good questions around the shot that get him into the shot, rather than into what the shot means. That sounds simple, but at the Open it would have been easy to get caught up in what a shot meant, what it was all about.

Of course, the mind drifts there from time to time, but if you look at his final round, you could build a mental-game seminar around the last four holes – those white-heat moments where he kept coming back to the task of what he needed to do, in that moment, with that particular shot.

Is that something that applies to amateur players too?

Absolutely, 100%. Whoever you are, just starting out or a tournament player, there are two things you have to do. First, develop skill – putting, chipping, interacting with the ground, striking the middle of the clubface. Second, work out how you access those skills on the course, which comes down to where your attention is.

In a world where our attention is pulled everywhere, this lovely old-fashioned game demands that you pay attention to the shots you’re playing. I don’t think golf sells itself enough on this. I think golf could be the ultimate sanctuary from the craziness of modern life. When you go out there for three, four, five hours, it’s an opportunity to lose yourself in a lovely game that requires you to be present with it.

I’m not a fan of phones on the course – give yourself the chance to get away from all that. I think that in 10 years’ time, people will be saying the mobile phone has been as damaging to our health, in some ways, as cigarettes were in the 50s and 60s, before we understood what they were doing. I’m not saying phones are going away, but we all need to think about managing them better – and golf is a great way to do that.

In that sense, is it about approaching each shot and each hole as a puzzle to be solved – being more curious?

Exactly – that’s exactly the word I use with players. Depending on your ability, the golf course is going to give you somewhere between 60 and 90 puzzles to solve.

People love puzzles – that’s why we do crosswords, sudoku, why we enjoy quiz shows. If you approach golf that way, seeing every shot as a unique puzzle you’ve never had before and will never have again – because the wind will be different, the lie will be different – it takes on even more intrigue. It becomes easier to focus your attention there, because you wouldn’t try to solve seven across on a crossword while thinking about what’s for dinner. You need to pay attention to solve the puzzle.

A bit more active rather than passive?

Yes, it’s about engaging – as cliched as that sounds – engaging with the present.

This shot, right now, needs you to be there with whatever the wind direction is, whatever the lie is, however you’re feeling in that moment. You need to be present to that experience, not somewhere else, not thinking “I wish I hadn’t done that on 12” or “if I have a good score today, my handicap will come down”.

We’re very good at time-travelling. Ultimately we’re just trying to solve, as you say, each individual puzzle.

You mentioned your love of different sports. How do you think golf compares mentally to other individual and team sports?

Funnily enough, over the years I’ve worked with quite a few cricketers, because I think batting is similar to golf – you play a ball, then there’s an interval, then you’re at the other end not batting. Cricket can be crueller than golf in a sense – you come in as an opener, get one unplayable ball, and sit in the pavilion for two days, whereas in golf, if you knock it into the trees, you can at least attempt a recovery.

But in every sport there are similarities and differences, and it always comes down to where your attention is. You could look at it that way in life generally – how much you enjoy or don’t enjoy life is largely determined by what your attention is on, and we get very good at putting our attention in unproductive places.

If we went to a lovely restaurant here on the island and someone asked, “What’s wrong with this place?”, by asking that question, you’ll find an answer to it. I tell golfers, “if you’re looking for things on the course to make you feel miserable, you’ll find them every time”, because that’s where your attention has become used to going.

We’re here at the Performance Centre at La Grande Mare, the driving range. What do you make of the facilities?

Absolutely state of the art. What a place to practice. They’ve got all the tracking and facilities and everything, and I think it just shows the way the game is going now – so many more people are coming into golf, and this is a great entry point.

When you’re at a range like this, you can play golf courses at the range and play competitive games. It’s not just bashing balls out there. We’re doing a putting clinic this afternoon, and the whole putting area and short-game area look fantastic.

It’s a real destination for anybody serious about golf.