DURING THE MID-1980s when I was playing on the LPGA Tour, I reached a point where I knew I needed something besides continually working on my swing to improve my game. My friends and fellow pros Kelly Fuiks and Charlotte Montgomery suggested I look up a woman they knew named Dr. JoAnne Whitaker.
JoAnne was a pediatrician and a psychiatrist who was also an exceptional golfer. She’d played since she was a young girl, and had won the Florida Women’s Amateur Championship several times while she was in college. David Leadbetter (who is now married to Kelly) and Chuck Hogan would send players to JoAnne who needed non-technical help (that is, everything else!).
I drove up to see JoAnne at her home near Tampa, Florida. She told me about herself, and how she had completed fellowships in hematology, oncology, and nutrition. (She would later develop one of the first and most accurate tests for Lyme disease.) She had also spent a great deal of time in Asia, helping start a medical school and nutrition lab in Thailand, and developing research and training programs for Vietnamese physicians at the Children’s Hospital of Saigon. During the course of her experiences in Southeast Asia, JoAnne became deeply interested in Eastern philosophy, with its emphasis on the relationship between the mind and body.
The first thing JoAnne asked me to do when I met her was to take the Myers-Briggs personality test. Afterward she told me, “Pia, I think if you take this again in a couple of years, it’s going to come out very differently. I have a feeling you’re going to become more of who you are, not who you think you’re supposed to be.”
She was absolutely right. I’d always been the good girl who did what I thought others wanted me to do. I had tried to please my family, my teachers, and pretty much everyone in my life. JoAnne was the first person to urge me to focus on defining myself.
JoAnne also introduced me to meditation—which she called “learning to focus.” She lit a candle in her living room and said to me, “Pia, can you sit with this candle for five minutes and just look at the flame and the colors without thinking about anything?” I’d never tried it before, and I gave it my best effort. I started to see things I’d never seen in a flame: shapes, movements, and the smoke rising. The candle practice was one of the ways JoAnne taught players to focus on visual images for a long period of time, in order to access the sensory parts of their brains.
Along with Chuck Hogan, JoAnne was one of the first people in golf to think about “balance,” in terms of utilizing both sides of the brain to play good golf. I’m pretty sure she was the first person who told me to “let go” of technical thoughts when I stepped up to the ball, and to move my awareness to where I wanted the ball to go.
I still have one of JoAnne’s worksheets from 1984. On a piece of paper, she had sketched the two lobes of the brain with a line connecting them. She titled the left lobe “left/conscious,” and inside the lobe she wrote the words logical, analytical, parts, and verbal. Inside the other lobe, which she titled “right/subconscious,” she wrote the words intuitive, synthesis, and wholes. Above the line connecting the two lobes, she typed the instruction “Cross Over.” (JoAnne also used the words “ROBOT” and “GOSSAMER” to describe the left and right brains, proving she was as much a poet as a scientist.)
During her career, JoAnne authored many scientific studies. One was called “Breaking Records in Golf by Balancing the Autonomic Nervous System.” Her report looked at numerous holistic/alternative therapies, including meditation, Feldenkrais, Rolfing, reflexology, Reiki, and Healing Touch/Quigong, among others. She wrote, “Our brain must exercise whole brain thinking, using the right and left sides of the brain. If we think only with our right brain, and try to visualize the shot we want to hit, we will usually goof because the yardage is wrong, and the club selection is wrong. On the other hand, if we play golf using only the left analytic brain, we will make the proper club selection and have the yardage correct, but because we are unable to visualize, the process that communicates to the body exactly how to execute the shot will fail, and the result is a poor shot!” She went on, “Today, to break records in golf, it takes more than just being in the zone. Our whole body, mind, and spirit must be like a precise instrument.”
JoAnne was a “waker-upper.” She encouraged me to listen to myself, to be courageous, and to broaden my perspectives—to learn and grow. I wasn’t looking for the meaning of life when I met JoAnne—I was simply looking for practical ways to become a better golfer. She helped me understand the difference between thinking about being an athlete and being an athlete. JoAnne was “out there” in the best sense of the term. She was ahead of her time.