THE IRON WOMAN OF GOLF
 

Cal Ripken Jr. is considered the "Iron Man" of baseball, having been given that title when he surpassed Lou Gehrig's consecutive games played record. Ripken's record ended at 2632 consecutive games played. An amazing feat, which spanned 17 seasons.

The reason I bring this up is because I was recently looking through the Women's World Golf Rankings, and came across an interesting statistic. LPGA Tour player, Chie Arimura of Japan, who is currently 16^th in the rankings, has played in 70 recognized world golf events in the last two year ranking period. To me, that is just astonishing! That means she is living out of a suitcase all but about 17 weeks a year, probably more.

That got me thinking. Do you wonder why women's professional golf is dominated by Asians? Out of the top twenty in the world rankings, twelve are Asian. In the top fifty, there are twenty-nine Asian players. In the top twenty, with the exception of two, all of them played in excess of 50 world wide tournaments in the last two years. The only American who played in excess of 50 tournaments is Stacy Lewis (currently ranked 15^th in the world), she has played in 53 events.

It is no surprise to me that Stacy won the LPGA's first major of 2011, the Kraft-Nabisco tournament, a couple weeks ago. Based on her performance trend and apparent work ethic, I think Stacy Lewis is an American player to keep an eye on over the next few years. Check out her personal biography here, especially her comeback from scoliosis as a child.

So, it's not hard to see that the Asian women just have a different work ethic than the majority of American women players. They appear to understand that if you want to learn to play better in competition, you have to play in more competition.

If you play some competitive golf, no matter what level, you can apply the same principle to your own game. If you want to learn to feel more comfortable and perform better in competition, then you need to play in more competition. Look at each new event you enter as a learning opportunity.  The goal is not necessarily about winning the event, but to learn something new about your game and, more importantly, maybe about yourself.

Speaking of what it takes to get better

The next time you head out to the range for a little practice, do yourself a favor… don't pull out your favorite clubs to practice with. This is a pretty common scenario, based on conversations with students, when asked what clubs they use during practice.

If your going to get better you have to learn to be comfortable with the rest of those clubs you don't like to pull out of your bag. I know it probably won't be very pretty at the start, but trust me, it will pay large dividends in the long run. Either that, or I would suggest you take all those other clubs you don't like to hit out of your bag and play in a lot of 3 club events.

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