Golf Ball Brain

Your body already knows how to play golf. Your brain is the one ruining it.

Every golfer has been there. The drive that flies out of bounds on a hole you've birdied a dozen times. The two-foot putt that somehow misses. The round that falls apart on the back nine for no reason you can explain when you get to the car park. You didn't forget how to swing. You forgot how to think.

Golf Ball Brain is a book about the six inches between your ears - the only part of your game that nobody ever really teaches you. Structured like an 18-hole round, each chapter is tied to a moment every golfer recognises: the first tee nerves, the bad shot that becomes a bad hole, the scorecard you can't stop doing maths on, the lead you don't know how to hold.

Along the way, you'll find the stories of the greatest players who ever played the game - and what happened when their minds let them down.

Tiger Woods, the greatest golfer of his generation, played the first hole at Augusta National 17 over par across his career. He was 101 under on the other seventeen combined. The first tee got him. Every time.

Greg Norman walked to the first tee of the final round of the 1996 Masters with a six-shot lead and shot 78. Nick Faldo shot 67. The lead was gone.

Jean van de Velde needed a double bogey on the last hole of the 1999 Open Championship to win. He made seven.

These are not stories about bad golfers. They are stories about what happens when the best golfers in the world stopped playing golf and started thinking about everything around it - the score, the outcome, the moment, the history. Their brains got in the way.

Yours does too. So does everyone's.

This is not a swing tip book. There are no drills. No seven-step mental frameworks to memorise before your next round. Just the honest, occasionally uncomfortable truth about what goes on inside a golfer's head - and how the players who score well have learned to quiet it.

Eighteen chapters. One round. One mind.