Playing “lights out”

In bowling, it is a 300 game. In basketball, it is being in the zone. In golf, it is going low. In baseball, it is pitching a perfect game. In running, it might be the four-minute mile. In tennis, it is a 6-0, 6-0 win. In each case, you are inexplicably in a mysterious state of mind, one you had better enjoy while it lasts.

But can you somehow create this mindset intentionally, actually make it happen on this given day? Here’s one possible strategy:

Be a robot

Many sports have their robots, both figuratively and literally. Robots include using a ball machine in tennis or a pitching machine in baseball to deliver the ball to virtually the same spot every time.

Perhaps the most well-known of these robots is Iron Byron, the mechanical golfer that mimicked the swing of Byron Nelson and served to reliably test golf equipment for decades.

Lewine Mair (Global Golf Post, July 24, 2025) described a new apparatus named LDRIC (after Eldrick “Tiger” Woods). Mair reported that this robot was set up on the tee of the infamous 16th “stadium hole” at TPC Scottsdale, home of the Phoenix Open. It took the robot six shots to be calibrated correctly, but then it just automatically made a hole-in-one. The robot wasn’t plagued with thinking, “I can’t make a hole-in-one.” Au contraire, it certainly could, since it was calibrated and just going through the motions.

In the same article, Scottie Scheffler admitted to teasing his coach with the suggestion that he is trying to be a robot. “He is definitely robotic in the way he comes up with the same results over and over.”

Imagine that you are a tennis robot, set up by your coaches on the baseline, aligned to hit a perfect serve, and a trigger is engaged that starts your stroke. Then you are just as quickly transported and set up to receive the return shot.No thinking involved, just routinely going through the motions on each shot.

The advantages of a robot in sport

• Totally unemotional — never too high or too low, never even the least temperamental display.
• No memory of past mistakes — always in the present; it doesn’t matter what happened on the last play.
• Non-distractible — focused, makes no eye contact, in a cocoon.
• Doesn’t think ahead — just the play in front of it.
• No pressure — all shots are the same.
• Perfectly follows the game plan — however it has been programmed.

It might sound a bit mundane to be an unemotional, mechanical, robotic player. But golfers like Ben Hogan and Jack Nicklaus, as well as tennis players Bjorn Borg and Novak Djokovic, all performed pretty well with a robotic mindset. There is plenty of time for emotions and fun when the game is over. Also, getting into your cocoon, playing in the zone, and performing your best ever is rather fun, too.

Dr. Tom Dorsel is Professor Emeritus of Psychology and a clinical/sport psychologist on Hilton Head Island. His best-selling book is “GOLF: The Mental Game.” He can be reached on Facebook or tom@dorsel.com.