Scar Tissue
Rory McIlroy, one back at the beginning of the final round finished one back at the 2023 U. S. Open in second place, as he did the 2022 Open Championship and no major victories for nine years. World Number One Scotty Scheffler since winning the Masters in 2022 has been in the top ten with a chance to win in four of the last six major tournaments. Ricky Fowler, first alternate for the 2022 U. S. Open, who did not get to play, hasn’t won since 2019 and has many top fives in majors—that big win, a gaping hole on his resume. The final round had three of four players with major championship Sunday scar tissue. The tournament was won by Wyndham Clark, recent winner of the designated event at Quail Hollow who has virtually no history of contending at majors—thus no scar tissues, no pressure of expectations to win another major after nine years, win another major as number one player in the world, or fill in a missing, critical part, of one’s resume. He made mistakes; he made incredible up and downs and hit the best shot of the day on the par 5 14th giving him his final birdie and what turned out to be the margin of victory.
Wyndham Clark as a relative newcomer to the elite golf conversation (he is now 13 in OWGR), is free from external expectations from the press, broadcasters, and golf-crazed public. This has to be freeing in exactly the opposite way that expectations are imprisoning for the others. Phil Mickelson has gone his entire career without winning the U. S. Open, despite six runner up finishes. That is thick scar tissue.
The pressure on Rory is, likewise, thick. He burned the edge of every putt on Sunday with none falling in. One can only imagine there is a tightness, even if imperceptible, that contributes to the putts being just millimeters from their target. It is hard—nearly impossible—to eliminate all expectations, to take oneself out of context and just stay in the golfing moment. He has to talk with the media; he has to perform in front of tens of thousands of fans on camera in front of millions.
If these guys could—as Carlos Castaneda suggested—erase personal history or to play with Zen’s “beginner’s mind” then maybe the pressure would be lessened and they wouldn’t be impeded by scar tissue—for what is scar tissue other than the recollection of one’s past, the filtering of present experience through those memories? It’s a big ask to play without any sense of one’s history, including the real time forgetting of what just happened on the last shot or hole.
It’s a mighty task and one that continuing greatness requires. How does one pull it off? One favors a mindful embodied (ME) way of being in the world over narrative-driven identity (NDI). That is, the ME that is not the typical “me” with it's worries, stories, and scar tissue. The mind must be trained with persistence and effort to be able to 1) recognize that it is in NDI and 2) have the skill to move attention to the ME. Meditation practice furnishes that discipline where one can be a continuous moving wave of presentness even when the pressure of the world is bearing down upon you. Perhaps it was easier for Clark to be that rolling presence of now without having to work through the scar tissue. Now that he has won, expectations will inevitably follow.