You can’t fight luck in sport, you just learn to control it

Bob Rotella has a business relationship with luck that flows one way. In the performance space, they have competing interests. Luck does what it likes and is accountable to nobody. Rotella, though, has clients who need reasons, explanations, solutions. Sometimes, Rotella says, they need to talk about luck.

He tells a story about Joe Daley, a journeyman pro golfer. Qualifying school used to be a gruelling, six-day marathon and in 2000 he came to the 107th hole of a 108-hole tournament with a PGA Tour card in his grasp. On that green, though, he took three putts, the second of which was a grotesque freak: the ball went into the hole, jumped out again and stayed on the lip.

Everybody was stunned. Daley dashed his baseball cap to the ground in a delirious funk. He shouted up to the TV commentary tower alongside the 17th green to ask if they had captured the poltergeist on film and then he called out for a rules official. Nothing could be done to extricate him from the barbed wire of his bad luck.

The steel cup in the hole had not been sitting properly, and Daley’s ball had met it at such an angle that it was fired back above ground. At one of the most critical moments in his career, he had been struck by lightning. Daley missed his tour card by one shot and in the seasons that followed he never made it back to the PGA Tour.

But was that the shot that cost him? The 17th was a par five and with a short iron in his hand Daley had pulled his approach into a greenside lake. That shot had nothing to do with luck. “It’s just a crime for him to miss this green to the left,” they said in the TV commentary before Daley took his first putt.

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