Virginia Golfer September / October 2014 | Page 36

The Virginia Golfer Conversation
many players discussed fear. Nicklaus and
Tom Watson were two others who come
to mind who were always honest and
forthright about it, but not many others.
What influenced you to write the book?
DR. VALIANTE: I wasn’t a practicing consultant
at the time. I was a truly an academic and
researcher. I was at Emory University, one
of the top academic researching universities
in the world. I wrote that book with real
academic rigor because the study itself had
a lot of academic rigor. That’s how you’re
trained at Emory. There’s a process for
research. What happened was that a lot of
golfers were talking about me in the media
and Golf Digest reached out to me and asked
whether I’d be interested in writing a book. I
said sure, so we had a meeting with Random
House and I actually had most of the book
written. I would write down every good idea
I had