Staying Present
Written by Gary Blumberg
November 18, 2025
Staying Present:
Some Context
The interesting thing about “staying present” is that everyone talks about it like it’s something you can simply choose. A switch that you flick or a mantra you whisper, and suddenly your mind starts behaving. But in truth, the present moment is elusive. It doesn’t sit still just because you tell it to. And when the stakes rise, it becomes even more evasive — almost as if pressure itself is a gravitational pull dragging your attention toward what was, or what might be.
Rory admitted this outright: “My battle today was with myself… with my mind… staying in the present.”
And when you look at everything wrapped around this Masters — the decade-long weight, the ghosts of 2011, the career Grand Slam storylines, the comparisons, the predictions — it makes perfect sense. It wasn’t just golf. It was memory, expectation, and identity all converging on the most psychologically loaded golfing moment of his life.
And the body didn’t hide it. He described the nerves both metaphorically and literally:
A knot in the stomach.
Legs like jelly.
Appetite gone.
This is what presence feels like in the real world when we face challenging moments: not serene, not zen-like, not an Instagram quote.
It’s uncomfortable. It’s physical. It’s something you negotiate with, not something you master.
Which is why the double bogey on the first hole was so strangely grounding. He joked that it settled him — but that wasn’t a throwaway line. When the fear of messing up becomes the reality of messing up, the mind often snaps back to the moment. There’s clarity in chaos. The expectation dissolves. You’re no longer trying to avoid something uncertain; you’re responding to something real.
For Rory, the sense of being present didn’t arrive because conditions were perfect. It arrived because they weren’t.
He was 'bouncing back": It was Resilience meeting Presence
Staying Present:
Rory’s Message in a Nutshell
But presence isn’t something you hold continuously. It’s something you return to — over and over. Returning takes intention, a deliberate mindset.
One of the most revealing insights he shared was how he broke the round into small manageable chunks — three-hole stretches at a time.
Ten, eleven, twelve. Then thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. Then sixteen, seventeen, eighteen.
There were moments when his presence slipped, as it inevitably does — he said as much. On the back nine he wondered, “Have I let this slip again?” That’s not a man losing composure; that’s a man being honest about the noise inside his own head.
We often think presence isn’t tested on the easy holes — but it is. When we stay present, we can exploit them, turning “easy” into a truism informed by hindsight. And presence is certainly tested when your history taps you on the shoulder and whispers, “This is where you’ve fallen before.”
And you could see that return in the shots he highlighted: the bump-and-run on the 3rd, the iron into 15, the committed swing on 16. These weren’t just technical executions — they were psychological re-entries. Each one anchored him back into what was in front of him rather than what had trailed behind him for more than a decade.
After missing the putt on 18 — a moment where lesser minds would unravel — Harry, his caddy and friend, reminded him, “Pal, we would have taken this on Monday morning.”
A reframing so simple, so grounding, that it immediately pulled him out of the emotional fog and back into the opportunity.
Then came the playoff reset — the biggest of them all.
Not only because there was a natural transition — end of round to two-man playoff — but because it was right in front of him: the ‘here and now.’
Staying Present:
Our Best Practice’s Takeaways
When the future feels overwhelming, shrinking the horizon is an act of self-preservation. It’s a technique that lowers the cognitive load. It gives the mind a smaller room to operate in.
And for someone carrying the emotional luggage of that Masters week, this kind of containment was essential.
Presence isn’t about numbing yourself to the moment. It’s about being acutely aware, which enables you to use the techniques that are learned and practiced, thus allowing you to stay in the moment, focus on the task at hand, and lean into what you need to execute at that point in time.
And when the final putt dropped, the emotional release wasn’t about triumph. It was a poetic moment that Rory framed himself: it was relief. Pure, unfiltered, decade-old relief.
That outpouring was a moment in the present: it had waited until the work was done before he let everything flood out.
Staying Present:
What’s Next?
The lesson in all of this — for athletes, coaches, leaders, or anyone performing under pressure — is that staying present isn’t about perfection.
It’s not about shutting off nerves or silencing the mind or pretending the moment isn’t massive.
It’s about returning. Again and again. Even after the doubt. Even after the missteps. Even after the history tries to reclaim you.
Rory didn’t win because he stayed present flawlessly.
He won because he stayed present enough.
And sometimes, that’s the difference between spiraling out of the moment… and making history within it.
The next segment of Rory’s Masters Pieces will be available soon.
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