GOLF IS A TOUGH game any day. But when you’re Wyndham Clark on the 18th hole at Shinnecock Hills and your lead has shrunk from 6 strokes to 1 and hecklers have been trying to get you to choke the whole final round, you know a little bit about just how tough it can get. And you know a little bit about how to manage it to come back after bad shots all week, making some 50 feet of par putts in the third round alone, not to mention what happened on the 16th hole in the final round. His birdie came after an errant tee shot into the thick fescue, followed by an immaculate recovery shot that set him up for another putt over 20 fee for birdie. That extended his lead to two.
Until now, Clark hasn’t exactly been known for his mental management skills, especially when it came to anger (see: Post-2025-US Open-locker-destroying incident, PGA-Championship-driver-throwing incident). But putting the mental training he’s been working on with Julie Elion into play helped him earn his second career major win this year. He admits that when he sat down at Starbucks to talk with her for the first time in 2022, “I was very skeptical, because I’ve worked with sports psychologists and never really gotten anything out of it,” he says. He’d already heard plenty of “don’t let this shot affect the next one” and “stay in the present” axioms.
But he discovered that Elion, who’s spent 25 years working with athletes on the PGA Tour and has a brand new book about it—Mastering Your Mental Game—has a very different way of playing her game, too. “She has a holistic approach of getting everything off the course in order so that when you’re on the course, you can play free…When you combine those two worlds, there’s no clutter…when you have clutter in your life, it’s very hard to perform at the highest level,” he says. Clearing the clutter, he explains, means looking at anything in life that’s causing friction, be it relationships, finances, your confidence or anything else. “You face it head on and when you get that off your shoulders, the stress level just goes down,” he says.
Still skeptical, they made a deal that if he didn’t like it after six months, he didn’t have to pay her and they’d go their separate ways. “Basically six months later, almost to the day, I won my first US Open,” he says.
Not that clearing any of the clutter was easy. “The first month or two, I was like, ‘this is kind of silly.’ People talk about the power of the mind, but when you actually start seeing the results of that, it’s amazing,” he says. Sometimes, you don’t see changes yourself at first, he adds. But he started noticing he wasn’t getting as angry or as frustrated and negative thoughts weren’t festering. “That just breeds confidence which is obviously huge for the mental game,” he says.
What, exactly, did he do for the US Open last weekend?
Play “Cocky”
HECKLERS WERE AIMING to undermine Clark’s confidence, so he countered that by telling himself to “play cocky.” “Not that you want to be cocky, but it was more of a mentally of don’t shy away. Show them who you are and be confident in that,” he says. “Any time I heard anything negative or against me, I replaced it with something positive about myself or my game,” he says.
Reminding himself that he’s played well before and can do it again also helped him play his own game. It’s a tactic he hones repeatedly, often by writing down what about his play has gone well that day, even—and maybe especially—on days that don’t objectively go well. “You can have two perspectives. You can either think you’re hitting all the red lights and you forget that hey, you hit a few green lights. It’s all based on what you’re looking at. If you focus on the red lights, you’re going to think you hit all of them. But if you focus on the green ones, you won’t notice all the red lights you hit,” he says.
Look Up
CLARK SAYS HE also set an intention to look up and smile at people, even when spectators weren’t loving him. “I do a lot of guided meditations and one of them is actually a smiling one where you smile for an extended period of time. It’s very awkward, but it’s amazing what it does for your demeanor,” he says. “It changes the narrative a little bit mentally, and allows you to shine in moments where things seem kind of dark and gloomy.”
Be Intentional
CLARK SETS MENTAL goals for each day, and on Sunday, it was to focus on process. “Any time I focus on the end result, I don’t get the result I want,” he says. “But when I focus on the things I can control, which is my attitude, my mind, my thoughts, how I handle myself, and the process, you don’t judge yourself,” he says. Any falterings become information to act on next time. You can’t change the outcome but you can change your process.
Be Mad For a Minute
NOT EVERY SHOT is going to be a good one and frustration and anger is going to come up. Don’t pretend it’s not there. Take 10 seconds or 10 steps to live with it, Clark says. But don’t let it fester. Acknowledge it and move on.
“I obviously still struggle and work on it, but I’ve gotten better at it. When you get angry, you kind of look back and say, ‘why did that affect me so much?’” he says. “But if you ask yourself how you’re going to think about it in an hour or two weeks or a year from now, you’d realize maybe it wouldn’t be as big of a deal. So let’s not make it bigger than it needs to be,” he says.
Iron
SOME PLAYERS LIKE to be revved up, but Clark says he’s the type that likes to be calmed down to play well. The morning of the US Open was all about being present. “I know this sounds funny, but I always love to iron my clothes before I play, because it’s a simple way of being present,” he says. Then, he says, “I meditate anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes, and do some breathing and pray some.” He listens to calming music or a audiobook in the car on the way to the course, and sets his goals for what he’s going to mentally focus on that day. “Fortunately, I have a caddie with me who will also help remind me of those things.”
Commit to it
ATHLETE OR NOT, pretty much everyone has at least a little something going on in their minds that’s keeping them from doing what they really want to do. Sometimes it’s more than a little something, especially when it comes to anger, and it’s not unusual to avoid taking action on it. “If you’re struggling with it, and you’re skeptical about opening up and talking about it—which I was, and a lot of men are—it’s amazing when you do open up what you can do,” he says. “Give it a timeline. Give yourself six weeks or six months, or whatever it is, and say, OK, I’m going to go 100 percent on this. If after that time you don’t see anything, then yeah, maybe it’s not right. But you have to give it a try, because it can change your life, that’s for sure.”
Marty Munson, currently the health director of Men’s Health, has been a health editor at properties including Marie Claire, Prevention, Shape and RealAge. She’s also certified as a swim and triathlon coach.
