Golf is a martial art

by Garry Callis Jr.

There’s a particular kind of quiet on an empty range at seven in the morning: no pro shop chatter, no car engines, no cell phones, no music. Just the sound of a ball leaving the clubface, birds chirping and the feel of pulling one more ball off the pile you’ve amassed and setting it on the turf, ready to be hit again.

I’ve spent thousands of hours watching that process happen: first as a Topgolf associate, watching people fall in love with the game for the first time or decide they wanted to make it more than a hobby; then fitting clubs on a launch monitor as a golf sales manager at Dick’s Sporting Goods; then building content for a golf company that wanted people to fall in love with secondhand clubs. Through it all, one thought kept coming back. Golf, in and of itself, is a martial art, and I mean that literally.

I’ve been a martial artist since I was seven or eight. I’ve watched more martial arts movies and anime than I could count- anything that made me think harder about the discipline behind it. Bruce Lee has been a massive influence on me, especially his interviews about being like water, shaping yourself to whatever situation you’re in. The essence of his art, Jeet Kune Do, is to take what works and discard what doesn’t. 

That idea applies to golf and to life in general

The original meaning of kung fu points to self-mastery. It’s the discipline behind any skill performed at its highest level. A craftsman who’s reached the top of their craft has kung fu. A musician locked into a flow state, hitting every note exactly the way they intend, has kung fu too. Every three-putt you’ve had to sit with usually says more about the system you built than about your talent as a golfer.

In traditional martial arts, kata is the form: a sequence of movements drilled so many times the body stops needing the brain’s permission to run it. If you play golf, you already know how that feels—the outswing and inswing you use to shape a shot. The practice swings you take before a 50-yard pitch: the alignment check and the breath before you take the club back.

Pre-shot routines show up in every sport, not just golf. A bowler has one. A basketball player dribbles the same number of times before a free throw. That’s a kata. That’s a form. It’s a way to root your body in the present moment right before you execute a movement, and you’ve probably drilled yours thousands of times until it became unconscious.

That’s what repetition does. Running the same routine enough times builds confidence you no longer have to think about. Confidence earned through reps is what makes a round feel effortless instead of like a fight against your own body.

Stand on a driving range before a round and watch. Most people are just hitting balls, not really thinking about what they’re doing. Then you’ll spot the one person who hits a shot, pauses, checks in with themselves and runs the same routine over and over. You practice the way you play. Practice sloppily, and you’ll play sloppily.

Martial artists don’t go from drilling forms straight into a real fight. There’s a step in between: sparring—real resistance, some genuine stakes, but not yet the full weight of competition.

Golf has its own version, and most golfers skip past it. It’s the practice round before a tournament. It’s the money game or skins game with your regular group. It’s the nine holes where you set a stipulation for yourself to see how you perform under something resembling real pressure: playing with only irons, going out with half your bag, or running a one-club challenge to force yourself to get creative.

These carry lower stakes than a tournament that actually matters, but higher stakes than the range, where a bad shot costs you nothing and gets replaced by the next ball in the pile. Put yourself in tournament mode on purpose, in genuinely high-pressure situations you choose for yourself, and you’ll find the best version of yourself as a golfer.

Kata alone is a choreographed set of moves. Bunkai is the practical application: you pressure-test the form against whatever stands in your way. A bad lie. A tucked pin. A shot you need to hit with your tournament life on the line. The course is where you apply your bunkai. It’s where the work you put in on the range meets a situation you don’t fully control, and you end up wrestling with the course and with yourself at the same time.

Golf has a funny way of exposing who people truly are. Do you cheat when no one’s watching? Are you honest with your own scorecard? Those moments reveal something real.

This is where golfers find out what they’ve actually drilled versus what they only thought they had. A pre-shot routine can look great on an empty range with no one around. It’s a different test when you lip out a three-footer you’ve been drilling for years and have to watch how your mental handles it. That’s exactly what pressure testing is supposed to reveal.

I believe in self-mastery the same way I believe in anything I’ve had to earn over time. Discipline doesn’t get built in comfort. It gets forged in the crucible of failure and self-awareness, in the rounds where nothing worked and you had to figure out why without anyone else doing it for you. The only way to find your real limits is to pressure-test yourself past what’s comfortable and pay attention to what happens next.

I compete in FlingGolf, a hybrid of lacrosse and golf, and I’m currently ranked 18th in the world. None of that ranking came from the good days. Most of it came from rounds where I thought I had everything figured out and then fell flat on my face, rounds that exposed exactly where my form and discipline hadn’t caught up yet. That’s usually when I’m the last one still on the range or the putting green while everyone else has already gone to relax. I stay to lock it in, partly to prove to myself that I belong and partly to prove that a good round wasn’t a fluke.

A bad tournament round is data. It tells you your kata, your pre-shot routine, and the thoughts and feelings you’ve built around it are still a theory that needs more pressure testing. That holds in golf. It holds in life too. Golf is an honest teacher because the ball ends up exactly where you put it, and you’re the only person to blame.

A real kata has small variations that matter more than people realize. Watch Heian Shodan performed in Shotokan, or any traditional form, and you’ll notice why competitions exist: judges can pick up subtle shifts in timing and feel that separate a good performance from a forgettable one. Sandra Sanchez, the karateka from Spain, is worth watching for exactly this reason. She’s drilled her movements so many times they’ve become pure instinct, and it shows in how clean and unforced everything looks.

That’s the standard for a pre-shot routine too. Think about your breathing. Think about your footwork. Visualize where the ball needs to end up before you ever pull the trigger. Total confidence in that process sometimes puts the ball in an even better spot than you intended. What matters most is consistency: show up to the routine the same way every time, and treat misses as information, not failure.

Imagine skipping everything I just described.

Now picture standing over a shot that matters with none of that infrastructure behind you. You fall apart. Your mental game will fail you at some point. It fails everyone eventually, and when it happens, you don’t get to think your way out of it in real time. You fall back on the systems, the discipline and the muscle memory you’ve already built. Skip building any of it, and when you go looking for it under pressure, you’ll find the house you should have built has already burned down.

That’s what a truly stress-free round is made of: a form drilled until it’s automatic, and a mind already pressure-tested enough to trust when things go sideways.

Think about Tiger Woods. His father, Earl, did everything he could to harden his son’s mind until Tiger became as imposing mentally as he was physically dominant on the course.

Go back to that empty range at seven in the morning. Picture the birds chirping. Nobody’s watching. There’s no scorecard, no group waiting on you to hit. It’s the least dramatic place in golf, and it’s exactly where you build the most important parts of your game. Every rep out there is a quiet deposit into a system you’ll eventually need to withdraw from, usually at the worst possible moment, on a shot you never saw coming. Put in enough, and when that moment arrives, you won’t be thinking about your swing. You’ll already know exactly what to do. That’s your discipline paying off.

Garry Callis Jr. has spent close to nine years in and around the golf industry, from Topgolf to Dick’s Sporting Goods, and even running product and content for a secondhand golf equipment company. He’s also a competitively ranked FlingGolf player and golf content creator. He founded True Path Golf, an AI Golf Fitter whose sole mission is to pair golfers with equipment, regardless of brand or budget. 

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