Our Town: Triumph of the Asian mindset in golf

Dr Tom Ferraro
The shy, humble, unassuming Japanese Hideki Matsuyama, golf's next super star

The winner of the 85th Masters Tournament, golf’s biggest major, is the mild-mannered, unassuming Japanese golfer Hideki Matsuyama.

This 29-year-old managed to fulfill the hopes and dreams of his golf-crazed nation to become the first Japanese man to win a major and by doing so it is estimated that this victory will be worth upwards of $1 billion to him in endorsements and appearance fees. Such is the love that Japan and the world has for golf.

So it is worth discussing exactly how any human being on Earth would be able to withstand the pressure felt at The Masters, the magnificent history of this event, competing with the world’s best, the problems presented by an immaculately groomed golf course that demands perfection from the golfer and the weight of an entire nation.

The look on his face after he managed to win this event and walked off the green was far from elation or joy. It was more a look of extreme exhaustion coupled with pain and anxiety.

Let us now talk a bit about the mindset of the Asian golfer. At the outset, we will mention that he is not the first player with Asian blood to rise to the top of the golf world.

Remember that the one and only Tiger Woods is half Asian with his mother, Kultide, being from Thailand. We also have Rickie Fowler, who is one-quarter Japanese; Jason Days’ mother is from the Philippines.

Last year Collin Morikawa, whose ethnicity is half Chinese and half Japanese, won the PGA Championship. And the LPGA has long been dominated by Asian women from South Korea, China and Japan.

But Hideki Matsuyama really does exemplify the prototypical Asian mindset.

His stoicism and placid demeanor were established early on. Researchers suggest that the Asian child is raised by the mother to have omoiyari, or heightened sensitivity and empathy for others.

The child is created to possess not a self but a we/self fully oriented to the group rather than to himself as American children are raised. They establish a highly developed super-ego and ego ideal and are expected to be perfectionistic, self-critical and socially shy.

They are also expected to have extreme self-restraint and all of these traits make them perfectly suited for the game of golf, which also demands self-restraint, subtly, self-control and perfectionism.

There is a price to be paid for all this restraint and perfectionism, however. It is well known in epidemiological research that the classic emotional issue in Asians is not anxiety or depression but rather psychosomatic problems. Their body is given the task of coping with all those repressed emotions like anger or anxiety.

There are a few American golfers who have this same kind of stoic fortitude, work ethic, perfectionism and composure under pressure. This is a very short list that includes Brooks Koepka, Patrick Reed and Gary Woodland, all tough guys who are able to remain self-contained and self-possessed no matter what goes on around them.

Golf demands aesthetic sense and self-control like no other sport and it is interesting to see the ascension of the Asian mindset on the green grasses of American golf. And now that Hideki Matsuyama becomes golf’s next superstar we shall see if his self-restraint, work ethic and social shyness will be able to withstand the weight of his new green jacket and the billion dollars that are stuffed in his pockets.

Only time will tell how the Americanization of him will make him vulnerable to the dangers of fame and fortune.

Way back in 1996, Gary Smith of Sports Illustrated wrote a piece entitled “The Chosen One,” which announced the arrival of the sport’s next superstar. It was the story of a young Tiger Woods and Smith’s prescient piece predicted that Tiger Woods’ only real foe would be fame itself and that it would be hard to predict who would win that fight.

Well, we all know what fame did to Tiger Woods, seeing the way it wreaked havoc on his personal life.

And now as the media announces the arrival of this next unassuming, shy, quiet, humble superstar my guess is that fame is carefully eyeing him with interest and plotting exactly how to take him down.

If Hideki thought he had to practice self-restraint on the fairways of Augusta National, he may be surprised to face the acute greed and never-ending demands that fame is about to put on his 5-foot-11 frame. I hope he has been weight-lifting for a while. For the weight of fame is said to be heavy indeed.

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