The Unstoppable Golfer: Trusting Your Mind & Your Short Game to Achieve Greatness

From the bestselling author of Golf Is Not a Game of Perfect and the preeminent golf psychologist to the game’s top players comes the defining guide to mastering the enormous challenges of chips, pitches, bunker shots, and putts.

Dr. Bob Rotella is the preeminent golf psychologist to the game’s top players—he has coached stars like Keegan Bradley, Padraig Harrington, and Darren Clarke—and he has offered his advice to golfers of all skill levels in his bestselling books, including Golf Is Not a Game of Perfect and Golf Is a Game of Confidence. Now, he tackles the mind’s role in the most difficult aspect of golfing—the short game.

It’s no secret that more than two-thirds of the shots a golfer makes are short ones: putts, chips, and pitches. Long drives may garner applause, but whether a golfer wants to win the Masters or just five bucks from a friend on Saturday morning, it’s the little shots that make the difference. Yet many players either fail to recognize or choose to ignore the importance of the short game. In The Unstoppable Golfer, Dr. Rotella applies the same wisdom and experience that have worked for clients like Davis Love III and Graeme McDowell to help every golfer master this special art of short shots and take all the frustration out of this increasingly challenging element of the game.

Requiring extraordinary levels of concentration, the short game is typically a source of fear for amateurs and pros alike. In this book, Dr. Rotella teaches readers how to overcome that fear by using their minds to achieve a state of calm in which the focus is on one thing alone: the hole. Rotella shares stories about professionals with whom he has worked who have mastered the psychological aspect of successful putting by adhering to simple—but hard-to-follow—rules and practices that will improve any golfer’s game: stay focused on your targets, visualize your shots, commit to your routine, and accept completely whatever happened to the golf ball.

On top of citing his experiences with golfers, Dr. Rotella also probes the science of memory and how knowledge of the brain’s workings—especially those areas that deal with physical tasks—can markedly improve a golf game, particularly when it comes to getting out of a bunker or taking the measure of a long putt. For casual and dedicated golfers alike, a better short game provides one of the ultimate pleasures of golf—a pleasure they will come to know by training their minds to allow them to become unstoppable golfers.

Since 1984, golfers coached by Dr. Bob Rotella have won a total of:

-74 major professional titles 2 Masters tournaments

-12 U.S. Opens

-12 British Opens

-11 PGA Championships

-4 U.S. Women’s Opens

-6 LPGA Championships

-5 Kraft-Nabisco Championships

-5 Tradition Championships

-7 Women’s British Opens

-2 Senior PGA Championships

-5 U.S. Senior Opens

-3 Senior Players Championships

Dr. Bob Rotella is the bestselling author of a dozen books, including Golf Is Not a Game of Perfect, The Unstoppable Golfer, and How Champions Think. He was the director of sport psychology for twenty years at the University of Virginia, where his reputation grew as the expert champions talked to him about the mental aspects of their game. Rotella was a consultant multiple times to the United States Ryder Cup Team. His golf client list includes Hall of Famers Pat Bradley, Tom Kite, Davis Love III, and Nick Price, as well as many of today’s stars, such as Justin Thomas, Darren Clarke, Jim Furyk, Padraig Harrington, Brad Faxon, and Rory McIlroy. A long-time consultant to Golf Digest, he lives in Virginia with his wife, Darlene.

Bob Cullen is the coauthor, with Dr. Bob Rotella, of Golf Is Not a Game of Perfect and other bestselling works on the mental game. A former contributing editor at Travel & Leisure Golf, he has reported on courses from datelines as diverse as Slovenia, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Iran.