Author: Francesca Dowd
Golf is a cyclical game. Many like to say 90% mental, 10% physical. Your mental game affects your golf, and your golf game affects your mental state. How can one be expected to control that?
The answer is a glittering vision of a trophy. This trophy has found its place in your hands, the hands that have just finished playing through the dirt and sweat of the final round. Your heartbeat is climbing down from its record high during your last putt’s approach to the hole. The slight shake of your wrists sends a signal to your psyche that you gave it your all.
For the first time in your life, you are able to see yourself. Not in a mirror, not in the roster headshot next to your scorecard of the day, not in the ‘I wish my mom didn’t still have that photo of me on her fridge’ way. You are able to be on the other side of the famous photo displaying the last hole of a prestigious course. You see you, and you see the trophy sitting in your hands.
Ben James, one of the most promising features of the young golf landscape, can control his mental game. He spends at least one day a week in a moment of isolation. He requires a bed to lie on, a room alone, relaxing music, and his mind. Inside the same mind, he sometimes needs all his strength to fight against, he finds a way to exercise tranquility.
“I imagine myself being successful at whatever I want to do for that week,” James said about his routine. “It might be golf – I might have a tournament coming up – so I’m imagining myself holding a trophy up at the end of the week. Or it might be a final. Or imagining myself having a good week in lifts. I try it on a Monday or Tuesday – put some headphones in and envision being successful in what I have going on that week.”
Within the first two minutes of our conversation, he had accomplished every professional athlete’s dream: remind and relay to the public that, contrary to popular knowledge, they too are humans. James has been in the international golf spotlight since his remarkable win at the U.S Kids World Championship at age 10, but that doesn’t exempt him from his history exam on Thursday.
At only 21 years old, he has already established himself as an incredibly accomplished athlete. Currently, he is ranked third among amateur golfers worldwide as a junior representing the University of Virginia.
In his freshman season, he set the school record high of five individual tournament wins, earning him the 2023 Phil Mickelson Outstanding Freshman Award, while becoming only the second Cavalier to receive the honor. He also became the first golfer in UVA history to earn First-Team All-American status as a freshman, a recognition he has now earned twice.
James just recently broke the all-time record for Career Top 10 Finishes at Virginia, with his 24th at the 2025 ACC Championship – a testament to both his consistency and dominance. Having had an incredible imprint on the golf world even prior to his collegiate career, he continues to shatter records at one of the most prestigious golf communities in college and is poised to make a significant impact in the professional realm.
Yet, as with many athletes who dedicate their lives to sport, James faced hardship following a run of victories.
The summer following his outstanding freshman season was objectively the lowest point of his career. He was underperforming and failing to make cuts, with looming pressures of the highly anticipated US Amateur tournament and the Walker Cup on his shoulders. His mental game was slipping. He knew there was a disconnect between the mind and the body when the strongest physical aspect of his game, his drive, was abnormally poor.
He would arrive at the tee box just as he had done for the majority of his life – but his mind would race with stress and discomposure, so his body would swing in an unfamiliar and uptight motion. The drive would land less than ideally. Through this style of play, his statistics began to drop, and his mental strength began to retreat.
James forced himself to isolate. He spent time in a quiet, calm cabin surrounded by people who would reinvigorate his love for the game. His focus was to get his mind off the world, and ironically, back into golf. This meant that he abandoned the thoughts of rankings, scores, competition, and wins. He let his mind wander instead to an informal place, a place that allowed him to play golf out of passion and thrill-seeking adventure. He was determined to improve his play in isolation because he genuinely sought the fun.
When speaking of this time with his high school coach, Keith Kaliszewski, he was reminded of an instance he realized James boasts a unique ability to detach from the competitive nature of golf. Kaliszewski had given the team the day off from practice. The weather wasn’t great, and he deemed it to be well-deserved. He felt it necessary to give his athletes a break in order to remind them, especially James, that off-days were a necessary condition of success in sport. Spring break was coming up, go see a movie he thought.
Kaliszewski was baffled to find out that James took this as an opportunity to do the unusual: play golf. He traded the normal practice facilities, including the country club, for the under-run and in dire need of better management public course down the road from school. James and some of his buddies – zero of whom were adept golfers – decided the best way to spend a less-than-lovely Tuesday afternoon was playing a round.
It’s inferred that this was a rather informal trip, as teenage boys piled into a car straight off the bell from European history does not necessarily entail them wearing polos and sponsor-laden visors. The banter, the company, and the objective allowed James to make a distinction between his enjoyment and his dedication to reaching professional-level sport.
Of course, this wasn’t able to limit his talent. In this one-off trip to the Sleeping Giant course, James accidentally shot the course record. His scorecard still hangs on the wall of the stained green carpeted clubhouse that smells of your grandfather’s old cigarettes. Seriously, my 88-year-old grandfather has been playing here with his high school buddies every sunny day since the 9th grade – they did not hold the previous club record.
James possesses an innate ability to enjoy the game. Within this lies the ability to recognize when he is not. The summer following his freshman year brought a shift in enjoyment, which contributed to the mental conflicts on the course. In his words, he just wasn’t having fun.
Of the group from Ben’s record round at Sleeping Giant, one seemingly unprofessional, collar-most-likely-unbuttoned-at-all-times friend, was able to offer James an escape. Vincent Landau and Ben James were classmates at Hamden Hall Country Day School. A year after graduation, perhaps a touch more mature, the pair met for another round of golf along the scenic coast of Connecticut.
The course was nestled in the quiet woods of Branford, with towering oaks framing each fairway. Encompassing the greenery was a strikingly blue horizon and bobbing sailboats glistening in the afternoon light. The sea breeze met the still air of the course, promising a calm and cool energy. This scene vastly contrasted that of the unkept, down-the-road-from-school course, as well as the expectation-fueled competitions James was most in tune with.
The two were lightheartedly “shooting-the-sh**t” when talks of the US Amateur Tournament came up. Unbeknownst to Landau, this was around the height of James’ upsetting summer season. In what was described as a joking manner around the tee box, the two settled on Landau caddying for James at the 123rd US AM at Cherry Hills Country Club in Colorado. Landau had never caddied before. James was aching to get his semi-professional heart back into the game. It was a recipe for, surprisingly, success.
The tournament went ecstatically well for golf’s new Beavis and Butt-Head. James rediscovered his center of gravity in the game, leading to his best finish at the tournament in his advancement to the semifinals. His mind and his body connected through the remarks, or lack thereof, of the caddy by his side. Landau, who came to be known as ‘Vinsanity’ by James’s family and friends that weekend, described his role as expectation-less.
“That’s the thing, he wasn’t looking for experience in the golf caddying area. He was looking for something to keep his mind off how serious it was. He was asking for a friend, not a colleague.”
Cherry Hills was littered with a frenzy of media, eager fans, and the top 312 amateur golfers. Yet the pair found a way to make it their own bubble. No conversations of substance, no conversations of pressure, no conversations of golf. Their laughter overcame the whispers of the tall grass around the course. That was until their steps reached the ball.
James would then flip his routine switch, while Landau became less of a caddy and more of a witness. He and the world watched as James’ shoulders rolled back, jaw set, and eyes calculated his line. His gaze would then lift to the sky for a brief, almost sacred, pause. It would return striking and deliberate, settling back on the green just before the stroke. He became almost meditative – his grip wasn’t tight, but focused. Then, he shot successfully. Multiple times. Landau deserves a sliver of professional credit as he was, in fact, responsible for cleaning the clubs.
With each immature joke, composed breath, and ritualistic practice, James rebuilt the unique confidence that had always set him apart. He brings an energy to the course that parallels the top professionals, exuberantly confident within the mind while externally unpretentious. Those who are lucky enough to play with him, from his lifelong coaches to some of his closest competitors, remark on his radiating confidence as wildly intimidating.
“As soon as you get paired with him, and you get out there, it’s like ‘uh oh, I’m in trouble,’” said Coach Kaliszewski. “He’ll hit his first shot, and then he just takes off walking, and you are staring at his back most of the round. It’s all subtle stuff. Absolutely none of it is rude, or unfair, or unsportsmanlike. He’s just confident. He is never slouching; he is never lagging behind. He is always just out there doing his thing – so good luck keeping up with him.
“This style of control is not talent alone, it is a mindset; it is a mantra. The difference in the level of play comes from the mental process within a shot, is your mind telling you don’t mess this up or I’ve got this shot? For James, it is always the latter. Tell yourself your beliefs 100 times when you are out there. Confidence over everything. If there’s a tight fairway – maybe around the 18th hole and it’s super important – I’m thinking I really need to get this in play, I’ll tell myself, ‘I am going to this fairway.‘ I’ll repeat that to myself about 10 times before I hit a shot, 9/10 times it goes the way I like.”
His positive accounts on the course, married with his dedication on off days, are guiding him toward mastery of his mental game. But James will always say there is room for improvement. This humility is stitched into the seams of his routine, keeping him grounded even as his performance soars.
He has experienced the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. He has felt the silencing pain of missed cuts, the mental cartwheels no one else was able to understand, the wins and his face plastered on NBC sports, the noise of expectations, the rush of a playoff-winning putt. It was within these moments that he gained Stoic skills. Moderation and Meditation are where his heart lies. His mental practice and his ability to find the balance between pure passion and professionalism will gain him far more life lessons than winning.
James has transformed the meaning of the mental game in golf by emphasizing the role of the heart. The heart that brings him to his history classes on Tuesday, the heart that envisions a trophy, not for the sake of vanity, but for the sake of grounding his guidance, the heart that yearns for a friendly face in the greens of Cherry Hills. The heart carries his belief that he has the merit to win every bit of success offered in the world.
Because on most days, he achieves it.
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