The Supplement Nobody Talks About Stocking
Walk into any supplement aisle and you’ll find rows of powders, capsules, and recovery drinks promising to sharpen your edge. What you won’t find is a bottle labeled “clear your off-course clutter.” Yet that’s precisely what Wyndham Clark credits for his second US Open title - won under sustained crowd hostility at Shinnecock Hills in June 2025, with his six-stroke lead bleeding down to one by the time he reached the 18th hole.
Mental training sits at an awkward intersection in the performance world. Athletes acknowledge its importance in interviews, then quietly skip it in favor of something measurable - another protein shake, another session in the cold plunge. Clark was no different until he wasn’t. His path to the 2025 US Open trophy runs straight through a coffee shop conversation he walked into with low expectations and nearly walked out of with nothing.
Sitting Down Skeptical at Starbucks
In 2022, Clark met sports psychologist Julie Elion for the first time over coffee. He arrived, by his own description, very skeptical. He’d already cycled through sports psychologists before and came away with the same well-worn phrases every time - “don’t let this shot affect the next one,” “stay in the present” - delivered without much that actually stuck. He told Elion as much. They struck a deal: six months, and if he saw no value in it, he wouldn’t pay and they’d part ways.
Elion has spent 25 years working with athletes on the PGA Tour. Her recently published book, Mastering Your Mental Game, outlines the approach Clark describes as categorically different from what he’d encountered before. Rather than narrowing the focus to on-course mechanics of thought, her method looks at the full picture of a person’s life. Relationships, finances, confidence, anything generating friction gets examined and addressed. The logic is that clutter off the course creates noise on it, and that noise is what collapses leads when hecklers get loud on the back nine.
Clark describes the principle plainly: “You face it head on and when you get that off your shoulders, the stress level just goes down.” It’s less about mantras and more about subtraction - removing the weight that mental load adds to every decision under pressure.
Almost exactly six months after that Starbucks meeting, Clark won his first US Open.
What Actually Changed
The early weeks didn’t feel like progress. Clark’s honest about that. The first month or two, he thought the whole thing was, in his words, “kind of silly.” People talk about the power of the mind in broad, vague terms, and when you’re standing over a five-foot putt on a Sunday, broad and vague don’t help much. He kept at it anyway.
The signal that something had shifted wasn’t dramatic. He noticed he wasn’t getting as angry. Negative thoughts arrived - they always do - but they stopped festering. That pattern, repeated enough times, began generating something that the supplement industry has tried to package in a dozen different forms: genuine confidence. Not the manufactured kind that comes from a pre-match hype playlist, but the kind that holds when a stranger in a gallery is actively trying to make you fail.
Shinnecock Hills, Final Round, Controlled Chaos
By the final round of the 2025 US Open at Shinnecock Hills, Clark had been dealing with heckling throughout the week. His lead, which had stretched to six strokes, had compressed to one by the time the closing holes arrived. On the 16th, he pulled his tee shot into thick fescue - the kind of miss that turns a manageable lead into a coin flip. What followed was a recovery shot precise enough to set up a putt of more than 20 feet for birdie. He made it. The lead went back to two.
That moment didn’t come from physical conditioning alone, though Clark trains at a high level. It came from having practiced a specific mental response to exactly that kind of situation. His instruction to himself that week was to “play cocky” - not as an attitude toward other people, but as a directive to stop shrinking. Any time he heard something negative from the crowd, he replaced it internally with something positive about his game. That’s not an accidental habit. It’s a practiced one.
He also set a deliberate intention to look up and smile at spectators, even those who weren’t rooting for him. Guided meditations were part of his preparation. These aren’t the kinds of inputs that show up on a supplement label, but in terms of performance output, Clark’s final-round execution under pressure made a case for treating them as seriously as anything else in a training protocol.
The Green Lights Exercise
One of the most transferable tools Clark describes requires nothing beyond a pen and something to write on. At the end of a day - any day, including bad ones - he writes down what went well. Not as a feel-good exercise, but as a calibration against the brain’s natural tendency to catalog failures and overlook wins.
He frames it this way: you can focus on red lights or green lights. If you fixate on red lights, your brain constructs a narrative that you hit all of them. If you redirect attention toward green lights, the red ones stop dominating. Applied to athletic performance - or any sustained effort requiring consistency - this is the kind of cognitive habit that compounds over time the way good training does.
In a supplement context, this is worth naming directly. Magnesium, ashwagandha, rhodiola, and a handful of other compounds have research behind their effects on stress response and cognitive performance under pressure. They work at a physiological level. What Clark’s work with Elion addresses is the psychological layer above that - the interpretive patterns that determine whether even a well-supplemented, well-rested athlete folds when the margin shrinks to one stroke and the gallery turns hostile.
Both layers matter. Neither replaces the other.
The Six-Month Agreement as a Model
Clark’s deal with Elion offers a useful framework for anyone skeptical of adding mental training to a performance routine. Six months. If it doesn’t work, walk away. The structure removes the open-ended commitment that makes people reluctant to start. It also creates enough time for the changes - which Clark says aren’t always visible to you at first - to become observable.
Elion’s book, Mastering Your Mental Game, is the formal record of the methodology she’s applied across 25 years on the PGA Tour. For anyone looking to understand the framework beyond Clark’s anecdotes, that’s the primary source. As of publication, her approach centers on life-wide friction reduction as the foundation for on-course performance - not a replacement for physical training or conventional nutrition, but a missing layer that most athletes postpone indefinitely.
Clark postponed it until 2022. The gap between that Starbucks meeting and his second major title is now three years - during which he also destroyed a locker room after the 2025 US Open and threw a driver at the PGA Championship, which suggests the process is ongoing rather than complete.
His 2025 US Open win came with 50 feet of par putts made in round three, a birdie from the fescue in round four, and a closing stretch played under crowd pressure that would have unraveled an earlier version of him.
The supplement industry prices stress-response support anywhere from $15 for a basic magnesium glycinate bottle to $80 or more for a multi-compound cognitive stack. Six months with Julie Elion runs at a different price point - one Clark found worth testing before he decided whether to pay it.
