Tournament Pressure

Filed in archive Golf Interviews on July 27, 2007

Courtesy: AP Photo

On Monday of Canadian Open week, Mark Greenwood entered the one day qualifying tournament for the Open at the 7 thousand yard Royal Ashburn Golf Club, home of the Canadian Tour Q School.

At stake were four "wild card" entries into the Open which is being held this week at Angus Glen North in Toronto.

Mark Greenwood is the Director of Swing Machine Golf Canada and he's also swing coach to me and my wife.

As regular readers of this blog will recall, Swing Machine Golf is a golf swing method based on Iron Byron and pioneered by Paul Wilson (the former Director of Golf at Angus Glen).

I've known Mark for several years now but I've never actually seen him hit more than a few 7 irons while instructing at the range.

I followed Mark during his round on Monday; he had some struggles off the tee and wrestled with the lightning fast greens. Consequently, he failed to make it, despite a string of birdies on the front nine.

We met up during first round action at the Canadian Open because I wanted to get his thoughts on his attempts to qualify for the third oldest golf tournament in the world.

Mark has played numerous tournaments on the Great Lakes Tour, a mini-tour in southern Ontario. He's not a newcomer to tournament pressure.

His comments about dealing with tension and expectations are as much a teaching lesson as his instruction on how to hold the club.

Our interview began just after lunch at the same time that the winds started to whip up at Angus Glen. There is some wind noise on the recording which was unavoidable.

The interview runs a little less than 10 minutes. Click below to listen and allow a couple of minutes for the download.

Greenwood.mp3