On Tuesday, Michael Breed welcomed 10-time LPGA Tour winner and major champion Paula Creamer to his show “A New Breed of Golf,” which airs on PGA Tour Radio on SiriusXM. Creamer opened up on a number of topics, including the housekeeping projects she has taken on during this period of lockdown, as well as what she does to remain active and fit while she waits out the coronavirus like everyone else.
“It’s hard not seeing your friends and family members,” Creamer told Breed. “I’ve been playing a lot with my dog. I’ve been working out a ton, doing a lot of rehab and therapy on my wrist and my hand. I think I’ve cleaned the kitchen 500 times and reorganized plates and my bathroom. I guess it all needed to be done and there’s really no reason now to not do it.
“My fiancé Shane and I are big proponents of just not sitting down. The body needs to move. We made a big conscious effort, even if we’re watching TV, to do some stretches or make some body movements. It’s easy, even if you’re reading a book, to just sit down, and it’s not healthy. Times like this make you a little lazier. So, I’ve really been trying to get more flexible, whether it’s just walking around or holding a stretch for two minutes. It’s kind of boring, but I realized I got tight in the last off season and realized that the turn in my golf swing needs to be bigger, so I’ve been trying to work hard on that.”
Creamer also had plenty of time to evaluate her last couple of seasons and she shared some interesting insights on how she will change her approach to practice and the mental game once play resumes.
“I definitely was not pleased with my year (last year),” she said. “I had a good four-month stretch in there where I put some good numbers and was in contention. But my consistency was not there.
“Rather than work so hard on my golf swing, I needed to get out and start playing and forget videotaping my swing. As golfers, we’re constantly trying to get better, to fix something. Sometimes you need to put all the tools away and just get out and play. When I played well, I noticed that that’s what I did.
But then sometimes when you start to play well, you overanalyze and want to see why you’re playing well. You get back into that old habit of looking at your swing again and saying, ‘how can I make it a little bit better?’ That’s why this game makes you so crazy but at the same time you love it because it makes you strive for that perfection.
“I know I need to get back to the grind of being more consistent and tightening up some mental errors and mistakes, but also get away from the whole videotape.”
On the mental game in general, Creamer said: “We all know how big the mental part plays in the game of golf. If you have a lot of things going on at home and you’ve still got to get out there play good golf and being able to forget things and multitask in your mind, that’s hard to do. Great players are so good being able to just focus on being out on the golf course.
“Sometimes when you’ve played a golf course so many times, you’ve seen great things happen and you’ve seen some bad things happen and that can creep into your mind. There are certain golf (holes) where you know you can’t hit it down the left side, so thinking that, you either block it right or hit it down the left side.
“I feel like you have to focus on your routine and focus on where you want to go rather than having those bad thoughts enter your mind. Really block those out and stay with the same pre-shot routine every time.”
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